We just got €324.000 for the next two years of work with several of our European journalism projects! What great news!
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.
Brigitte Alfter 