A newspaper may be entitled to a state subsidy of between €8,000 and €67,000 per annum over the next three years as part of the Press Support Scheme recently announced by the government, press and information office chief Sophie Michaelidou said on Wednesday.
Speaking to the Cyprus News Agency, Michaelidou explained that daily and weekly newspapers which “are distributed across the island; registered with the PIO; have at least five qualified journalists that are members of the Cyprus Journalists’ Union; feature original news reporting; and have invested in expanding their online presence” are eligible for the subsidy.
“Beyond registration and the nature of the newspaper, the PIO is not in a position to know which of the registered newspapers meet the rest of the criteria,” Michaelidou said.
“The applications will be reviewed by us and those that meet the required criteria will be approved.”
According to Michaelidou, the minimum an eligible newspaper could receive in any one of the programme’s three-year duration is €8,000 and the maximum €67,000.
Newspapers will be awarded €3,000 for each day of the week they are published, she noted.
“The annual subsidy will be calculated according to the number of days the newspaper is published in a week,” she explained.
“However, the annual subsidy is capped at €21,000. So, if a newspaper is published daily, throughout the week, it will be entitled to seven days’ worth of €3,000-per-day, or €21,000 per year.”
In addition, newspapers are entitled to “an annual €1,000 for each qualified journalist who is a member of the Cyprus Journalists’ Union, as a remuneration subsidy”.
Eligible journalists must have been employed for at least two years prior to the application date, and their gross monthly wages must be at least €1,000.
For this scheme, newspapers may be entitled to as much as €46,000 per year.
“Newspapers that meet these criteria will benefit from the above subsidies, irrespective of the publishing company’s size,” Michaelidou said.
Eligible companies, she added, will remain eligible the following year, as long as they haven’t reduced their staff by more than 15 per cent relative to the previous year and continues to meet all other criteria.
Applications for 2017 will be received by the PIO until September 11 and payment for the first year of the scheme is expected to be made by year-end.
Asked why the rest of the media, including online news portals, are not in scope for the scheme, Michaelidou replied that “this scheme has been created to support print media and aims to support traditional news outlets”.
“A scheme can’t cover all the needs of all the media in every category,” she said.
“A scheme like this is created to help address real needs in one category of businesses, where and when these needs are justified.”
