Freelance journalist in Copenhagen since 2008. One of my key tasks is developing Journalismfund.eu, a support structure for investigative journalism in Europe.

I lived in Brussels from 2004-2008 working as EU-correspondent for Danish daily Information.

I do journalistic research, develop research support structures and add a bit to the debate via my blogs – currently mostly about journalism in Europe and about transparency.

The Watchdog Blog at Euobserver.com About transparency and quality journalism in Europe /blogger

GrænseOverskridende at the Danish Journalism magazine. About crossborder- and European journalism, methods and funding / blogger

Stimulating European journalism www.journalismfund.eu /co-founder and director

Freedom of Information in Europe www.wobbing.eu /co-founder and co-editor

Funding investigative journalism in the Balkans, the Ukraine and the Caucasus www.i-scoop.org /co-founder in 2003 and Danish manager since 2008

Transparency on EU funds to farming www.farmsubsidy.org /co-founder

International Consortium for Investigative Journalists http://www.publicintegrity.org/icij// member

More detailed CV.

November 2011: Tangible impact of the story on Bluefin Tuna we did last year: The system to control the limits of the fisheries in order to protect the Bluefin Tuna changes from paper ages to digital administration. Read more about the impact we achieved here.

November 2011: For the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Kiev Nicky Hager and I developed a networking model to help journalists meet colleagues with the same interests and to help first time participants meet some of the experienced conference-goers. We got excellent evaluation – and were asked to take notes of how to do it. Recently we finalised the Conference Networking Cook Book part I. Following episodes will hopefully be written by coming conferences.

November 2011: Proud to present a new cross-border research supported by Journalismfund.eu about arms trade to the Yugoslav wars during the embargo – even before the trilogy of books is finished, the core team wins journalistic praise. Congratulations to the team in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia. The teams were supported by Journalismfund.eu and Scoop - in other words: My projects with research grants seem to work.

October 2011: An utterly busy month with the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Kiev, where Scoop was the organizer. Along with Nicky Hager from New Zealand I organised the networking part. Cook-book for conference networking 1st take will be online soon. Next version to be developed by whoever grabs the idea at their own conference. Evaluations were mostly enthusiastic! See the “Conference Networking Cook Book” on this blog.

September 2011: Another story I’m proud to present was done on a sham marriage scheme luring poor Baltic women into marrying non-EU males living in Ireland – until the men obtained EU residence permit. A legal loophole, that was unveiled by a team supported by Journalismfund. Now new legislation should be on the way in Ireland and Latvia.

May 2011: We have founded the European Datajournalism network. Fabulous and inspiring meeting in Brussels with datajournalists, CAR journalists, wobbers and programmers. Next meeting planned for early May 2012. Infrastructure is on the way, you can already join the mailinglist.

April 2011: Slow journalism is emerging in several countries at a time. In 2011 alone three new slow-journalism magazines were launched: Plot in Norway, Kontext in Germany and Delayed Gratification in the United Kingdom. Three years ago Filter opened in Sweden – and now Filter pays “a fine dividend” to its shareholders. I did a short radio piece on this new development, hear the last 10 minutes of DR P1 dokumentar.

April 2011: Wonderful appraisal of cross-border journalism: Looting the Seas wins two fine American awards. The IRE’s Tom Renner Award and the Overseas Press Club’s Whitman Bassow Award. Danish journalist magazine Journalisten sums up, and Danish Radio uses the research as example when it broadcast about cross-border journalism.

April 2011: The President, the most recent documentary by filmmaker Christoffer Guldbrandsen, has been shown in Denmark as the first country. It was a pleasure to be on Christoffer’s team for this film. His storytelling capacity is enriching and inspiring particularly when he turns to a subject like the European constitution.

March 2011: Relaunched http://www.wobbing.eu/, the website and meeting place for journalists, who use freedom of information acts in Europe. Wobbing Europe is a project I have run for the Belgian Pascal Decroos Fund since 2007.  Since the Winter 2010/11 I have found a great co-editor, Staffan Dahllöf, who is an experienced European journalist.

March 2011: Published an article about networking journalism in Europe in the spring edition of the Nieman Report at Harvard. Two other Danes contributed too and several precious colleagues from Southeastern and Eastern Europe, read more in Danish at Journalisten’s blog.

February 2011: Been interviewed twice by P1 on Danish public Radio DR. Last week about our cross-border research on the black market in Bluefin Tuna. And in November about the current debate among EU ministers on who should enjoy  farmsubsidies in the coming years.

January 2011: Interest for networking journalism is growing – that’s so encouraging! Good start of new year. Now a German magazine interviewed me about networking for the story on the black market in Bluefin Tuna.

December 2010: The EU is still working its way towards public-service journalism. On the 13th of December the European Parliament’s attempt to install public-service research grants was postponed for a year.

November 2010: Global threat, global research: After months of research in a 12 journo team and further weeks and weeks of editing and cross-checking, the global ICIJ research about the black market of bluefin tuna has now been published. Story went out in the BBC, the EUobserver.com and numerous others.

October 2010: The emancipated journalist! A provocative and important thought about journalists’ role in the future, written by a precious colleague, Ides Debruyne. Read about it in English and in Danish.

October 2010: I was asked to join the jury of the Waaris.eu/Where is the EU-project and watched more than 50 videos trying to describe the EU in 60 seconds. The winner will be revealed on the 19th of October during the International Film Festival in Gent. Tell the EU in 60 seconds… quite a task! Some of them were absolutely excellent, so it is possible!

September 2010: Research grants to individual journalists appear to be very fruitful to stimulate quality journalism. I was speaking in Brussels at the 1st anniversary of the Belgian Fonds Pour Le Journalisme, they could show off interesting results. Journalists emancipate themselves and start fundraising for the stories, they think are important. Journalismfund.eu has an overview over such grants.

September 2010: Danish Radio  carries an inspiring weekly program P1 Dokumentar with investigative stories, but also with reports about how investigative stories are done. This week I had the pleasure to contribute with a short report about a story done by German colleagues for Der Spiegel about trade with tissue of deceased human beings – this time from the Ukraine via Germany to the US.

June 2010: Huge interest in research grants from Journalismfund.eu. Good! (But a lot of work).

May 2010: I’ve had some of the most inspring days in Amsterdam! First I attended a conference about the future of journalism organised by Dutch TV’s NPOX and XMediaLab. Though the subjects sounds impossible, it was a bunch of truly inspiring people. After that I attended another, smaller conference, Hackdeoverheid, where programmers, journalists and public officials met to improve the public access to public data. I almost feel like when I was a kid and just learnt to read.

May 2010: It is amazing to see, how c0mparatively easy European journalism can be supported. Take 15-20 competent and committed journalists and programmers from various European countries, lock them up in one room for two days with free internet, coffee, sandwiches, give them a pile of fresh data – and stories will come rolling. Just look at the bottom of this blog.  Our invitation from Farmsubsidy.org resulted in stories about farmsubsidies to the weapon industry (in Germany) or an accordeon club (in Sweden). A young “farmer” age 14 was traced in Sweden, and some rather old “farmers” age 98 and 100 too. In Bulgaria not only the daughter of a minister but als0 his wife appear among beneficiaries. In England a recipient of 0,1 penny caused a £1.700 administrative cost, and in Slovenia various church- and charity organisations got farmsubsidies. The EU will decide about farmsubsidies the coming years. Let’s help the public to an informed debate.

April 2010: Participated in the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Geneva, where a lot of great journalists from all over the world met. A team of journalists from Moldova, Romania and the Ukraine won the Global Shining Light Award. Interesting for me: They worked with the help of a research grant from Scoop. This is the second time, Scoop-colleagues win the Global Shining. Looks like the grantgiving does help do good journalism.

March 2010: Spoke at a panel of the European Ombudsman in Brussels.

March 2010: Good news about awards and nominations! The Climate Change Lobby, a research where I contributed the European part this past autumn, coordinated by the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, is among the finalists for an IRE Award this year. The Investigative Reporters and Editors Award is among the most prominent awards for investigative journalism in the US. So that’s good news.  More good news is, that another story also is among the finalists, that is the story how the previous Moldovan president’s family got fabulously reach during the time of the regime. That one I am proud of too. The story was done by competent and courageous colleagues from Moldova, Romania and the Ukraine. However the reporters got a research grant from the Danish  Scoop project, of which I am a co-founder and current manager. Apparently it works!

February 2010: Dutch TV RTL asked a simple question to the European Commission: How much did you spend on travelling, representation and gifts. Find the link to the story on www.wobbing.eu – which we, by the way, currently are finetuning, so the site becomes an even better tool for journalists, who want to know more.

January 2010: I followed a class about cultural theory at Århus University. Interesting and highly inspiring for me as journalistic crafts person to get an insight into this example of a debate in the academic world.

January 2010: I have the pleasure to present the first articles, that were done thanks to the support from Journalismfund.eu. An important story about slave labour in today’s Europe. Great to know, that the model with the research grants works! Read the story about the story and my comment on Euobserver.com.

January 2010: Blogging again on EUobserver.com before the hearing of the new European Commisson. About transparency, of course. And to show off the new short film about the work of the farmsubsidy team.

December 2009: Climate is a global subject, so one of the US’ oldest centers for investigative reporting got a global team asking into climate and lobbyism in each their part of the world. See the Center for Public Integrity’s research here.  I did the European stories, and they were quoted amongst other places in Danish daily Information (Coal industry watered down European climate package, You pay your own lobbyists and the front page story EU ministers block for ambitious climate deal).

November 2009: Eurowobbers meeting in Utrecht. 20 of Europe’s most experienced journalists in the field of freedom of information from those countries, where it makes sense to use freedom of information laws to actually get information out, met in the charming and historic Dutch town of Utrecht to exchange experiences. Encouraging! Se more on Wobbing.

November 2009: Nordic Investigative Journalism Conference in Copenhagen. I was asked to talk about cross-border reporting and about freedom of information in the EU. I suggested Danish journalist Tom Heinemann and Norwegian journalist Erling Borgen for the Danish FUJ award – and they won!

The Open Society Foundation decided to give the money to several projects:

The largest and most important is Journalismfund.eu, where we give research grants to cross-border and European journalism. This project was initiated by Ides Debruyne and myself in the autumn of 2008  and I have spent quite a bit of my time building it up and developing it.

The second is Wobbing.eu, a network of journalists who use freedom of information legislation as a method to obtain good quality information for our reporting. The project was initiated by Ides Debruyne and I have built it up since 2007.  Since 2010 Staffan Dahllöf has joined as co- and more and more as key-editor.

The third project supported by this grant is Farmsubsidy.org. The past years the farmsubsidy network has been supported by the Hewlett Foundation, however now this flagship of European wob- and datajournalism was threatened, as it simply costs money to obtain and process the data, so they are accessible to the public in spite of all the obstacles. Really great news, that we got this! Farmsubsidy was founded in 2005 by a network of journalists and researchers and has been run by a core team consisting of Nils Mulvad, Jack Thurston and myself.

Furthermore one project will be supported to gather investigative stories and make the accessible across borders.

All projects are under the Belgian Pascal Decroos Fund founded in 1998 to commemorate the visionary Belgian journalist Pascal Decroos, who was killed in a car accident in 1997.

Last year I was part of a team by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists looking into the black market in bluefin tuna – in Europe and globally. Story was quoted widely – a selection gathered at my Danish Crossborder blog at the magazine Journalisten.

One of the key findings at the time was, that yes, governments and whoever responsible had a lot of nice promises for systems to control the greedy tuna industry – but they didn’t work. One of the problems was an archaic control system.

This past weekend the fishing nations behind the agreement changed their mind – and the system!

Read more in the sum up on impact by the leading reporters of last year’s team, Kate Willson and Marina Walker.

Some of the stories I wrote for Danish daily Information are  here, some of the stories and quotes on Danmarks Radio are here.

Yet as the years go it can be difficult for newcomers to get in and actually find the contacts, we all are looking for. After observing this at previous conferences, Nicky Hager from New Zealand and I tried to develop a model for the Kiev conference, to facilitate contacts – breaking up country groups, allowing space and time to talk about certain subjects and so forth.

We had many good reactions and several participants mentioned, they wanted to include systematic networking into their conferences.

So we prepared a “GIJC Conference networking cook book – by Brigitte Alfter and Nicky Hager” – a practical check list of what we did this time. But our networking was only a first go at this. We hope this inspires organisors at other conferences to develop it much, much further.

We also added all network related comments from the evaluation, and some of these comments may be helpful, for further development.

Reading the list of content of the Nieman Reports spring issue was like meeting a group of long year friends: Stefan Candea, Stanimir Vaglenov, Vlad Lavrov, Allain Lallemand, Henrik Kaufholz, Nils Mulvad…

Of “our” projects Nils was asked to write about Farmsubsidy.org, Henrik about Scoop and I about cross-border reporting in Europe and Journalismfund.eu.

The Challenge of Cross-Border Reporting in Europe

‘Through networking, journalists contribute their part in shaping this European public sphere by investigating and illuminating its common issues.’

By Brigitte Alfter

They are poor women who come mostly from Latvia, a country on the easternmost border of the European Union. What they hope to find in Ireland is a better life for themselves and their families. Instead, they experience abuse and threats, and soon they are powerless and trapped. The assaults against them are committed by members of organized crime groups who lured the women—with the promise of $1,300 to $2,600—into sham marriages to obtain E.U. residence permits for men, many of whom are from the Indian subcontinent. The rules and loopholes that enable the women to be brought here were decided in Dublin, the capital of Ireland, and Brussels, the headquarters of the E.U.

Aleksandra Jolkina, a young and committed Latvian journalist, had been researching this topic in Latvia since 2007 when she worked for the daily newspaper Diena (“The Day”). Likewise, Jamie Smyth, a social affairs reporter who is the former European correspondent for the Dublin-based Irish Times, had been working on the same story. Last summer, with assistance from the European Fund for Investigative Journalism, Smyth and Jolkina joined forces to stitch together the beguiling chain of supply and demand. “Working together enabled both of us to identify contacts in each other’s countries that would have been difficult or impossible to source while working on our own,” Smyth has observed.

In October after Smyth travelled to Latvia for Jolkina’s assistance with reporting, The Irish Times published a series of three stories about sham marriages. In turn, Jolkina went to Ireland to report on the story from angles she hadn’t been able to cover from Latvia. By working together to connect the two ends of the Latvian women’s journey, Jolkina and Smyth produced stories that made big headlines in Ireland and were noticed throughout Europe. Early this year, Jolkina’s book on the subject was published in Latvia.

The Need to Cooperate

Resources for Investigative ReportersThe chain of human trafficking involved two countries on opposite sides of the E.U.; yet the enabling legislation, decided at the E.U. level, affected all E.U. countries. This circumstance is quite typical today when it comes to stories about social affairs and public policy in Europe. As such, networking among journalists is essential to fulfilling their role as watchdogs. Yet, especially when travel, multiple languages, and various administrative entities are involved, working as a team can mean additional costs. Jolkina and Smyth managed to cover travel and other costs through the grant they received from the European Fund for Investigative Journalism.

This is a project I’ve been building up since 2008 with assistance from the Belgian journalism foundation, the Pascal Decroos Fund. It has provided research grants to journalists in Belgium for more than a decade.

I learned of the Decroos fund when I worked in Brussels as a European affairs correspondent for a Danish newspaper. In Brussels, many of the journalists who comprise the world’s second largest corps of correspondents (the largest is in Washington, D.C.) spent much of their time focused on agendas related to their native countries, even though the E.U. has developed into a quasi-federal body. I came to believe that if reporters want to play an effective watchdog role in overseeing what happens in Brussels then we need to produce better journalism. And to do this requires finding ways to cooperate with journalists from other countries on reporting important cross-border stories.

The fact that E.U. countries have 23 official languages and several non-official languages can appear to present obstacles. Yet the many languages and media cultures enable journalists to draw on their research competencies, joining together in cooperative, not competitive, ways. Knowledge about common issues can be compared and contrasted as a way to move forward with a vexing topic. No new networks of sources have to be created; reporters can share resources to mutual benefit. Through such partnerships journalists can obtain high-level research that they can shape into stories told in their native languages and fit into their media tradition.

By investigating and illuminating issues common to E.U. countries, these journalists do their part in creating a vital and vibrant European public sphere, which is something politicians, philosophers, political analysts, and media commentators have said for decades is lacking. Through networking, journalists contribute their part in shaping this European public sphere by investigating and illuminating its common issues.

When journalists have cooperated on stories, the impact of their work has been strong. One of the more significant projects that I have been involved with was Farmsubsidy.org. Each year the E.U. distributes more than $70 billion to subsidize farmers. Inspired by the success in 2004 of two Danish colleagues who made freedom of information requests about subsidies in Denmark, I asked that the European Commission provide me with information about all of those who benefited from the E.U.’s farm subsidy program. Only with that material in hand could we make a thorough analysis. My request was denied.

The German magazine Stern (“Star”) reported on how wealthy Europeans received farm subsidies, and it used a headline that translates as “He who has, will be given.”

A year later I co-founded Farmsubsidy.org with the following plan in mind: We would work on this country by country. European journalists in as many countries as possible would file applications through their country’s freedom of information system to request information. Once they had the information and published stories in their native press, they would upload their data onto the common website. This way we would be able to see a wider European pattern evolve. This revealed that the usual political narrative that had these funds assisting small and poor farmers was wrong. Instead, we’d found that old European nobility and international corporations were among the program’s largest beneficiaries. Interestingly, these stories strongly influenced public opinion; people started to talk in everyday conversations about farmers and their subsidies.

Given how well this networking approach worked, I decided to try using it to examine other cross-border issues. Since then I have been involved in several such investigations. There was the story about trafficked women; in others we were able to reveal side effects of pharmaceuticals and examine the ways in which lobbyists influence climate change policy. Another collaborative effort focused on illegal fisheries. Each story had European aspects to it, and in all cases stories were published in several countries to strengthen the impact. For several of these projects we received support from nonprofits to cover the additional costs for travel and translations.

Fundraising story by story is cumbersome, as anyone who has done it will attest. To keep these efforts going, we needed a support structure. From my involvement in 2003 with the creation of Scoop—initiated by the Danish Association for Investigative Journalism and the Danish nonprofit International Media Support to offer support for journalists in the Balkans and Eastern Europe—I learned the value-added efficiency of creating a pool of resources and expertise to assist individual journalists or small teams of reporters in investigations. Comparably low levels of support were found to result in strong investigative pieces ranging from local corruption to regional war crimes to international trafficking.

With the Pascal Decroos Fund’s visionary director, Ides Debruyne, I co-founded Journalismfund.eu in 2008 with the aim of expanding the reach and breadth of grants available to European teams of investigative journalists. While fundraising continues to be a challenge, we persist because we know this model works and provides value in the stories that emerge. In Europe, there exists a longstanding tradition of public monies being used to support media, along with safeguards for editorial independence; many European foundations and donors have slowly begun to carve out a role for themselves in this realm.

The needs we identify are specific. We do not want to support media institutions; we want to directly support journalists in their pursuit of investigative stories. Because of the difficult times in the media business, internal funding for investigative projects can be tough to get. Thus, important stories go untold. And as political and policy issues cut across borders—and reporters want to follow the money or compare and contrast circumstances—money isn’t easily available to enable them to do this. We believe the changing European structures, combined with new media possibilities, provide good opportunities for quality journalism. Our goal is thus to channel money in support of research and networked reporting on specific stories.

Scoop and the Pascal Decroos Fund receive most of their funding from governments that respect their editorial independence. Recently we’ve had to halt our attempt to obtain E.U. grants because of a struggle about retaining journalistic independence. Our primary task is to develop support structures in Europe to facilitate cross-border, networked journalism. So part of our effort is to raise awareness among potential donors—and journalists—about the necessity of this model.