February 2023: Massive contamination with the health threatening “forever chemicals” PFAS unveiled today: The Forever Pollution Project publishes its findings across Europe. This investigation was developed for more than a year in a massive cross-border journalism effort. Arena for Journalism in Europe in the autumn of 2022 stepped in to help scale the team from five to 13 countries. Proud and humbled to have been part of this amazing team. Data and data gathering methodology are public, including the methodology of the crossborder collaboration.
November 2022: Retreat with some top-level Danish colleagues from the Cavling Committe, the jury behind the finest Danish journalism award. More than 40 submissions, brilliant examples of Danish journalism in the past year. Material is so good, it’s a painful process to select only a handful nominees – lengthy discussions: tough, interesting, professionally rewarding. Award will be handed out in January 2023.
October 2022: Four days with 72 students in Brussels, they shaped 9 teams to do crossborder investigations over the coming months as part of their journalism education. A major step in crossborder collaborative journalism: This way of working has now come so far that we can develop journalism educations for the next generation. First cohort of crossborder journalism students get a chance to collaborate in a network of three journalism educations from France, Sweden and Germany.
October 2022: Speaking at the Saving Journalism 2 seminar at Columbia University’s SIPA, part of a series of seminars on funding journalism. With practitioners and academics from around the world, initiated and organised by Anya Schiffrin, director of the Technology, Media, and Communications at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
June 2022: Arena’s Cities For Rent investigation into corporate landlords across Europe wins the European Press Prize. The herculean task of coordinating the 25+ journalists team was carried out by Arena’s Jose Miguel Calatayud, data work was done by our Adriana Homolova and the super innovative visualisation back office by Tagesspiegel Berlin’s Hendrik Lehmann. Have a look at the data and the methodology – who are the big landlords in your city?
May 2022: Dataharvest – the European Investigative Journalism Conference 2022 held in the charming town of Mechelen. 550 journalists from all over Europe and beyond. Incredible to think back to the first years in 2009, 2010, when some 20-30 journalists from across the continent met to harvest data about EU subsidies … and now this full-fledged, major conference.
May 2022: Five of our students published their exam project on May 2nd in the morning Philippine time with the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism and with Rappler. The publication went viral immediately. They are taking a closer look at what the Marcos supporters frame as “Golden Age” of the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos, thus neglecting the suffering under his brutal dictatorship. The students Wanna Ver, Atmi Pertiwi, Adolfo Canales, Jody Fish and Leonardo Taddei tell the story through Wanna Ver’s own history. Her father, General Fabian Ver, was Marcos’ right-hand man during Martial Law, where he oversaw the military responsible for committing numerous human rights violations. In a Washington Post op-ed, Wanna Ver explains why she had to step out into the public now. The fight about the history of the country is prominent in the present fight about power. This is an exam project at the Master Investigative Journalism at the University of Gothenburg.
April 2022: Arena is only three years old, yet our Cities For Rent team has gotten this wonderful recognition of being nominated for the European Press Prize!
April 2022: Four of my precious students Camille Schyns, Greta Rosén Fondahn, Alina Yanchur and Sarah Pilz are nominated for one of the finest Swedish journalism awards, the Golden Spade for their eminent work on lobbying by BigTech in Brussels on AI injustice and ethics. They studied at the Master Investigative Journalism in Gothenburg, and I had the pleasure to be their supervisor.
April 2022: Speaking at not less than four panels at the International Journalism Festival in beautiful Perugia. In short from all these panels: We’re now at a level of digital development where we are ready to genuinely focus on new, much more interactive and inclusive ways of doing journalism than we were in the ‘paper ages’ with the one-way communication via newspapers and broadcasts.
March 2022: Reference – the European Independent Media Circle is online! Prepared over some years, launched in November 2021, this is a new group that I’m really proud to have co-founded. The circle brings together the growth layer of innovative journalism outlets. In it, we’ll support each other on the non-editorial tasks, sharing experiences and solving things together across Europe.
February 2022: So happy and proud to see our students at the Master Investigative Journalism in Gothenburg shape their own way over their year of studies. This month with impressive student initiatives inviting external speakers, Sheila Coronel from Columbia University and Harald Schumann from Investigate Europe.
December 2021: Happy and grateful to be mentioned as a mentor for some of the most interesting experiments with innovation of journalism in the field of collaboration and intercultural understanding: Hostwriter and Unbias the News. A companion in the field of crossborder journalism and organisation development, Tabea Grzeszyk and I had and have fabulous talks on how to take the best and merge crossborder collaborative (investigative) journalism with culture studies.
December 2021: Dataharvest has been written into one of the histories of data journalism. Interesting times.
December 2021: Speaking at the European News Media Forum in Brussels on Industrial Innovation.
November 2021: Educating the next generation of journalists is humbling. It’s also enriching – wonderful talks with these young colleagues! And now it’s going to be exciting: We obtained an Erasmus+ grant to develop a genuinely networked journalism education bringing together journalism educations from the University of Gothenburg, Leipzig University, Centre de Formation des Journalists in Paris as well as great academics from the University of Amsterdam and OsloMet. Follow the Crossborder Journalism Campus!
Brigitte Alfter 