Colombia. As a way to support the efforts of media affected by the pandemic crisis and that require strengthening their technological processes, the Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications, MinTIC, opened a call that will allocate 85,000 million Colombian pesos to support the digital transformation of the media.
This was announced by the ICT Minister, Karen Abudinen, who emphasized: "The ICT Ministry recognizes the vital role of the media in the democratic exercise and that is why this call will not define or affect the contents developed by each media."
He added: "Registrations are open until June 25 at 10:00 a.m. (...) What we seek is to contribute to the digital transformation of the media, so that they are more productive, have higher incomes and protect jobs in this sector of the country's economy."
Karen Abudinen also explained that this initiative is given in compliance with a mandate of the Congress of the Republic, in article 105 of Law 2063 of 2020 ("by which the budget of income and capital resources and appropriations law is decreed for the fiscal period from January 1 to December 31, 2021"), which says that the Single Fund for Information and Communications Technologies will be able to finance the implementation of plans, programs and projects to promote and support the digital transformation of the media at any stage of the business.
The official also pointed out that the budget of the call will be distributed in five categories, as follows:
Radio: 30,923,223,473 Colombian pesos.
Television: 11,232,002,803 Colombian pesos.
Newspapers: 28,004,630,096 Colombian pesos.
Magazines: 10,590,143,628 Colombian pesos.
Digital media: 4,250,000,000 Colombian pesos.
To present the projects, three strategic axes must be taken into account: transformation of the business mentality and culture, accompaniment in the transformation of business processes and development and implementation of technology for digital transformation.
In this sense, the head of the portfolio stressed that "the media interested in being part of this call must be duly constituted and functioning before March 11, 2020." The requirements are specific depending on each category.
The official pointed out that in order for this to be a project with different points of view, 725 observations or questions were received that strengthened the structuring of the call and its final documents.
"We identified digital transformation as one of the mechanisms for the media to be more competitive and that is our purpose. This call will not affect in any way the contents developed by each media," reiterated Minister Karen Abudinen.
Those interested in participating in this call can visit the microsite https://mintic.gov.co/transformaciondigitalmedios to learn more about it and present their projects there.
On this website, interested parties have a form for consultations, which has been arranged to receive the concerns of those interested in participating in the process.
