WAN-IFRA Partners with Taktak to Develop Innovative Donation Solution for News Media

WAN-IFRA’s Global Alliance for Media Innovation teamed up with seven organisations in the media industry to launch Taktak, a donation solution for the news media, a project supported by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.

The project has been launched as a response to the news industry’s ongoing challenge to find new economic models for quality journalism. The Taktak partners, who account for circa 4.7 million monthly UVs across Europe, are convinced that a key to finding financial sustainability is to maximize the opportunities for cooperation.

The partnership includes five digital media, on different geographic scales, covering individual cities (Mensagem de Lisboa, Portugal, Pod Tepeto in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, countries (La Marea, Spain, Livy Bereg, Ukraine) and an international media (Wolrdcrunch). It also includes two major global organisations: WAN-IFRA and Transitions and a technological company, the Athens Technology Center to develop the tool.

A new solution for media and journalists:

Taktak’s main objective is to create a new revenue stream for European news media and independent journalists through an innovative mechanism to trigger reader donations on a per-article basis, based on collaboration between actors to share revenue, via easy-to-use technological and marketing tools.

The objective of the Taktak solution is to increase revenue and promote quality journalism by fusing three key realities in the current economic context of the industry:

• the collaborative relationship between media and freelance journalists, who hold an increasingly important place in the news ecosystem as staff positions are reduced;
• the untapped opportunities of media working together on joint reporting efforts, and across languages;
• the growth in direct reader revenue, in particular in the form of donations.

Thanks to a new revenue stream and a direct connection with readers through donation features, the Taktak project will also encourage the production of more quality journalism, collaboration between different actors, a diversity of voices and plurality of media, increase engagement with readers, foster resilience and share best practices across project partners and the sector.

By combining donation on a per-article basis with revenue share between parties, Taktak will encourage both journalists and media to commit to producing the kind of high-quality and diverse coverage that has proven to trigger more donation revenue.

Do you want to be involved?

The partners launched a survey for journalists, available in 13 languages, to learn more about the working life of journalists in Europe. Journalists are also encouraged to share their insights on the kind of tool that they would like to use. The answers will be gathered and analysed to design an easy to use and efficient tool. You can respond to the survey until 28 June.

Learn more at https://taktak.media/