What I’ve been up to recently

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 my 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!

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.