Time for community media in Central and Eastern Europe

While the community media sector may be reported as established and well developed in Western Europe, it has grown considerably more slowly in almost all countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Th e literature on community media in Europe is also Western oriented — most of the publications about this sector centre on countries which were located on “the better side” of the Iron Curtain and have been written by Western authors. Th is paper is the fi rst attempt to look at the problem of community media in Central and Eastern Europe in general and present the specifi c problems of community media development in this region from an Eastern perspective. According to the Mapping Project of Community Media completed by the Community Media Forum Europe in 2012, the community media sector is legally recognized in only four countries from this region.