What I’ve been up to recently

May 2018: Happy and proud to present the 8th European Investigative Journalism Conference & Dataharvest #EIJC18 where I am program end-responsible for the 8th time. This is the infrastructure of crossborder collaborative journalism in Europe with the latest developments and countless trainings in in-depth, independent journalism. Thanks to the many volunteer speakers and assistants in preparing the program, to my dear team at Journalismfund.eu Lisa, Trine, Linda and Ides, to our funders – and to all guests who travel from afar. 470 guests from 52 countries! Pleasant recap, growing number of useful handouts.

April 2018: Speaking about crossborder collaborative journalism at the Italian Journalism Festival in Perugia. A particularly enriching experience as academia and journalism practice met in an utterly constructive way on this panel.

March 2018: Speaking about crossborder journalism in Saarbrücken at German Reporterfabrik event – very interesting to hear about crossborder journalism on local/regional level embracing Germany, France and Luxembourg.

February 2018: Speaking to Danish freelance journalists’ seminar about crossborder journalism in Kobæk Strand.

January 2018: New anthology out on collaborative journalism. Global Teamwork, the rise of collaboration in investigative journalism, edited by Richard Sambrooke, published by the Reuters’ Institute for the Study of Journalism in Oxford. I contributed with a practice chapter on how to coordinate a crossborder team. Following up on an inspiring workshop at RISJ in December 2016.

January 2018: Speaking in Warsaw about crossborder collaborative journalism and about the opportunities for work grants by Journalismfund. Hosted by Fundacja Reporterow who do excellent – largely voluntary – work sharing, teaching, training, developing journalism methods.

January 2018: Necessary talks on how philanthropists can support journalism at the Journalism Funders Forum in Amsterdam. Questions like: How can journalists and funders MEET? And how should we EVALUATE? Practice in practice means, there is no one-size-fits-all solution or a solution, that lasts forever. These questions, we need to address and develop over and over again. Good to do it in interesting company.

December 2017: Presenting my handbook on crossborder journalism in German: Grenzüberschreitender Journalismus – Handbuch zum Cross-Border-Journalismus after great work with publishing house Herman von Halem in Cologne. Thanks to publisher Herbert von Halem for seeing the potential of a new and upcoming method at an early stage and his European vision and thanks to lector Imke Hirschmann for her patient and thorough work as well as to graphic designer Claudia Ott for visual ideas on the front page and inside the book! The book was presented in the series of Cologne Media Talks, Kölner Mediengespräche. I talked about crossborder journalism as one journalistic answer to the challenges of networked societies in a hyper connected digital world. Through collaboration our profession can strive to achieve the critical mass of good journalism to make the voice of the citizens heard and bring important topics back to the public sphere and political agenda. Speech/Vortrag (in German). Pictures.

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Interest in cross border journalism sends me on the road

Speaking about cross border journalism at universities and conferences this autumn brings a lot of travelling. And very interesting discussions. Can a journalistic, methodological approach developed to solve professional challenges contribute also to the scholarly debate? This may be a question for the spring. For now it’s lecturing:

Copenhagen University’s course on Film and Media. Freie Universität Berlin. The International Reporting Course at the Journalism School Thomas More in Mechelen in Belgium.

Also at journalism conferences the method of cross border journalism is presented at in-job-training level, for example at the upcoming Balkan Investigative Network Fellowship meeting in Belgrade.

So in the past ten years we’ve seen the mainstreaming of data journalism in media as well as journalism education and training. Wouldn’t it be great to see the mainstreaming of cross border journalism in the coming years!

Handbook on cross border journalism

These weeks I’m working over the manuscript for the Danish version of my Handbook on Cross Border Journalism to be published at Forlaget Ajour, specialised in books about Journalism and connected to the Danish School of Journalism.

The target group for the book are journalists and students of journalism. For a more scholarly audience I summarize the method in an article for Journal on Applied Journalism and Media Studies. The aim with this article is not only to present the journalistic methodology of cross border journalism, but also to invite for an interdisciplinary approach to developing it further.

Both article and book are planned for publication this autumn.

Off to Brussels for the Dataharvest conference

The Dataharvest+ Conference in Brussels is ready for more than 200 journalists and programmers from the 8th to the 11th of May. Growing again this year!

This is a working conference, where coders and journalists make fresh data available (this year EU-tenders, Farmsubsidy data, European Parliament data and a brand new data catalogue from the EU agencies) – and then cooperate on preparing journalistic stories – not least cross border stories.  We speak about upcoming EU-subjects with the EU-ombudslady Emily O’Reilly and the network of EU-agencies aswell as the officials behind the TED database will be in dialogue with journalists.

The Dataharvest also is an integrated part of my “EU journalism for pioneers” class at Nordic Journalism Centre.

 

 

We win the Leipzig Prize for the Freedom and future of the Media

Working on something as abstract as a European public sphere usually gives people a slightly sleepy expression around the eyes. But hey – now we got an award for doing exactly that!

We – Ides Debruyne and I – win the Leipzig Prize for the Freedom and future of the Media for having founded Journalismfund.eu. Journalismfund gives research grants to journalists, who have a story idea and with to do research to follow the story across national borders. Journalismfund then – after a competitive call – can help with the additional costs for travelling, translating and taking time to do good research.

The Media Foundation Leipzig has given this award to impressing journalists and journalist organisations. Previous laureates are Sey Hersh, Anna Politkovskaya, Hans-Martin Tillack, Roberto Saviano, Fabrizio Gatti and Netzwerk Recherche, the German association for investigative journalism. Now we are mentioned alongside these fabulous people.

This year we are laureates alongside Indian Tongam Rina and German Jörg Armbruster and Martin Durm.

Though Ides and I get the award, our thanks go to a lot of other people too. Cross-border reporting in its character is based upon cooperation with others.

Here we have to say thank you to the family of Pascal Decroos and the board of the Journalismfund/Pascal Decroos Foundation, who supported the idea for Journalismfund.eu since 2008.

And we say thank you to Journalismfund.eu’s advisory board with representatives from the investigative journalism communities around Europe and our peer review jury. And we say thank you to all the journalists, who are ready  to do their bright and brave work.

Right now Ides and I enjoy this honour intensely and are grateful to the Leipzig Media Foundation for this encouragement. And the next step we will do our best to further develop the idea of cross-border reporting and support to all the great journalists, who with their comitment and courage are developing quality journalism in Europe these years.

Reactions – Germany and Belgium – Europe

Suggestion: Crossborder reporting for future EU journalism

I was invited to speak at the annual media fair Medienforum in Köln in Germany on June 7th 2013 – on the future of EU journalism: Wege aus der Öffentlichkeitskrise: Europa und die Medien. The moderator noted that there was no question mark at the end of the headline of the debate – so we had to offer solutions!

Suggested crossborder reporting as carried out by ICIJ in the Offshore Leaks stories and as supported by Journalismfund.eu and others and presented at places like the Dataharvest Conference or the Global Investigative Journalism Conference.

Crossborder reporting? Nobody knew. Steueroasen? Of course! In other words, our method is gaining ground. And yes, I do believe that quality journalism is a way out of the crisis. The EU appears to be growing up, now journalism about it has to grow up too. And is well on the way, if I look at all the important stories carried out by Journalismfund.eu grantees.

Other speakers on the panel were Georgios Pappas, a Greek correspondent in Berlin, Mayte Peters, chairperson at Publixphere, Jörg  Schönenborn, editor-in-chief, WDR, Cologn, Rainer Wieland, vice-president European Parliament, moderated by Knut Pries, Brussels correspondent at Funke Media Group.

Next Dataharvest planned for May 2014

The 2013 Dataharvest Conference for investigative and datajournalism in Europe this year had 156 journalists and programmers from all over Europe participating. Catch up with who was there on the 2013 programme.

If you missed it, read the wrap up and find presentations here.

If you want to stay in touch and keep colleagues posted about your work, join the FB Dataharvest group – that’s the meeting place for the time being.

#DataHarvest14 scheduled for May 9-10 2014 in Brussels. Stay in touch via the FB group or the Journalismfund.eu mailinglist for precise date, program, etc.

And thanks once again to everyone all who participated and contributed!

#Dataharvest13 upcoming! Join us

Journos:

Want to meet the director of the European Ombudsman (half of the cases there concern transparency) – and want to meet two lawyers, who are among those who win cases for more transparency at the European Court of Justice?

Then come to Brussels to the Dataharvest.

Of course you can also meet investigative journalisms grand old in Europe, David Leigh, investigative editor at the Guardian. He recently got an –  indirect – award for his work: The OECD experts praised his and his colleagues’ work in their big report about tax evasion Adressing Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (page 13).

And then there will be lots of fresh data and good coders to help you make stories out of them. For example the award winning journalist Nils Mulvad @nmulvad (European journalist of the year 2006) will help with fresh Farmsubsidy data, and Friedrich Lindenberg from the Open Knowledge Foundation/Der Spiegel @pudo.

Interested in research in social media? Meet Paul Myers, researcher at the BBC and excellent speaker and trainer @researchclinik. Interested in combining a lot of new research methods? Meet Paul Bradshaw from Birmingham University @paulbradshaw. Meet Per Anders Johansen from Norway, who makes a living on wobbing for excellent stories.

And many, many others! Have a look at the program (as of today – to be updated further).

There will be four tracks:

• Farmsubsidy – EU spending on agricultural policy @farmsubsidy
• Crossborder – reporting following the story, not the national borders
• Wobbing – using freedom of information legislation to get good, original information for journalistic work  @wobbing_europe
• Data – cooperating with coders to make better journalism

Much looking forward to seeing you there!

The next generation

I have the honour of passing on our craft to the next generation of journalists as a teacher at Roskilde University.

The Department of Journalism and the Centre for News Research are part of CBIT, the Institute for Communication, Business and Information Technology.

Follow our day-to-day work on Twitter @RUCjournalistik.

Good news today – just to mention an example: All students of RUC have gotten a training-job, which is an integrated part of their studies. However every year there is a panic to get one of the coveted traing-jobs. Congrats!

Money for journalistic research

Journalismfund.eu supports teams of journalists who follow a story across borders. Journalismfund.eu now has its 6th call for application open.

Traffickers from the Ukraine, slave labour from Romania, working in the Czech Republic for a Dutch company? Obvious for journalists to build a team to get the right competences and languages! Or one piece of EU law governing the conditions for citizens in all EU and EEA countries? Again an obvious method to pool research competence and time in a team and then to publish for the various target groups. Or a company acting – possibly in breach of EU law – in several European countries?

This kind of ideas is supported by Journalismfund.eu. If you have an obvious idea, have a good team almost ready to start researching, if just you had this bit of extra money and time – do have a look at the latest call for applications and see, whether the rules for applications and the criteria fit your project.