Identifying media owners: choices and challenges of the EurOMo 2025 approach

The news media industry faces a deep structural crisis, and ownership transparency has been considered as a possible measure to avoid excessive private power and increase trust. In this sense, the European Union has funded the Euromedia Ownership Monitor (EurOMo, https://www.media-ownership.eu), which systematically tracks media ownership and control across all EU Member States. Coordinated by the University of Salzburg, the project relies on one research team per country, each gathering publicly available information and contributing to a harmonised, transnational dataset of relevant outlets and their owners. The dataset also records senior managing officials, persons with editorial responsibility, board members and chairs—especially in entities without clear shareholders—as well as organised actors such as political parties, churches, and interest groups that can exert informal influence. This information can be searched and visualised as a network with a proprietary search engine on the project’s website, but can also be downloaded as machine-readable data. This presentation will explain the conceptual and methodological choices behind the current iteration of the project as well as discuss challenges they entail, especially (1) the fragmented, incomplete, and contradictory nature of ownership information sources, (2) the rise of opaque legal forms of ownership, and (3) the difficulties of coding economic power, such as the role of investment funds, and informal influence.

Bio:
Tales Tomaz is an Assistant Professor of Media Policy and Media Economics at the University of Salzburg (Austria) and the coordinator of the Euromedia Ownership Monitor (EurOMo). He is also vice-chair of the ECREA Section Communication Law & Policy. His current research focuses on ownership structures in European media and the regulation of digital platforms.