Talking about impact

Journalists love to do research. They are happy and proud, when the story comes out. And then they move on to the next story. In other words: We rarely check the impact. Did our reporting actually lead to change?

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.

Conference networking cook book

At the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Kiev in October 2011, more than 500 journalists from all over the world gathered. This was the 7th conference of its kind, and the overall idea is, of course, to find colleagues for cross-border inspiration and possibly cooperation.

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.

These days’ favourites

Danish daily newspaper Politiken today started a series on fisheries.

First article “Fiskeristøtte går til stenrige fiskere” tells, that Denmark from 2004-2010 paid € 50.8 million to Danish fishermen, however only 20 large companies received 57 percent of the aid. The story used FOI as a method.