About Media Mapping
A map and directory of independent media and socially engaged creators across the Council of Europe, plus Kosovo and Belarus. An activity of the Sphera 5 programme: research and methodology by Krytyka Polityczna, design and engineering by Médianes.
This is a prototype
How an organisation gets in
Two levels. The first is eliminatory: an organisation must be editorially and economically independent, and must publish in the general interest. If either fails, publication is impossible — the database refuses it, not only the interface.
The second level is five families that are scored and never block anything: editorial quality, embodied narrative, representation of minoritised voices, narrative innovation, and democratic values. An automatic pre-check scores only what can be checked mechanically and says so for the rest; three of the five need a person, and the interface shows them as needing one rather than as scoring zero.
Eligibility differs by actor. A media organisation needs at least 1 year of activity; a creator needs an audience of at least 10,000.
Every record is reviewed by a person before it appears, including every proposed change. Nothing is published automatically, and a refusal always carries a reason.
The definitive criteria and the controlled vocabulary come from Krytyka Polityczna’s V2 methodology. Where this prototype anticipates them, the code is marked and the placeholder is visible rather than hidden.
Reusing the data
A publicly accessible, reproducible database is an objective of this project rather than a feature of it. Every published record is available in full, without a key:
- CSV export — the complete published set
- JSON API — paginated and filterable, with the same parameters as the directory
- GeoJSON — the map’s own source
The data licence is not settled
TODO: choose between CC BY-SA 4.0 and ODbL. The two differ in how a reuser must treat a derived database, which matters for a project whose point is to be reused, so it is a decision to make deliberately rather than by default.
Current status: To be confirmed — CC BY-SA 4.0 or ODbL.
The field-by-field contract is published as a JSON Schema, versioned, and is the same document used to validate every incoming record — including from partners.
Data protection
The directory holds two kinds of information. Everything shown publicly describes an organisation’s published work. Contact details, internal research notes, national press registration numbers and source references are held separately and are never exposed — not through the interface, not through the API, not in the exports.
Individual creators are never located more precisely than a city. The coordinates on the map are the city centroid with a small fixed offset so that several creators in one city remain distinguishable. No home address is collected, and the database rejects a more precise location for an individual.
To ask for a copy of what is held about you, to correct it, or to have it removed, write to the address in the footer. Removal takes the record out of the public directory and the exports immediately.
Joint controllership is intended, not yet settled
Map data
The basemap is built from OpenStreetMap data: © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL. The attribution is shown on the map at all times, as the Open Database Licence requires.
Vector tiles are served from an archive we host ourselves, so the map does not depend on a commercial tile provider. No Google service is used anywhere in this project — not for maps, not for fonts, not for analytics. Where analytics is enabled at all, it is Matomo and nothing else.