December 2020: So it’s out – the big #moneytoburn collaboration. It’s the sad tale on how the rush towards green energy fuelled a European market for wood pellets to a level that threatens Estonian forrests. I feel a particular veneration for this team of 16 journalists from 8 newsrooms in 8 countries because I was there from the meeting where they first discussed the story idea and composed the team in February – kindly invited by the Töpfer Foundation. Arena provided a digital working environment to the cross-border team and I had the pleasure of being entrusted a mentoring role to the editorial coordinator, the competent Hazel Sheffield. UPDATE January 2021: Now also published in the Guardian and out there on Twitter where Greta Thunberg commented. Thanks to Hazel for crediting my role as mentor – it was a pleasure.
December 2020: Spoke at the national conference for Ukrainian Investigative Journalism #IJC20.
November 2020: Was Dataharvest Digital 2020 the longest investigative journalism conference ever? Definitely feels like it – after 149 sessions spread over 13 weeks! But participants liked it and kept registring until the last month. Also, the team gained loads of experience and is developing exciting new models of meeting and knowledge sharing in the investigative, collaborative, data, entrepreneurial journalism crowd. Do register for the newsletter to be posted.
November 2020: Spoke at a seminar of the EBU Academy on cross-border collaborative journalism. There I also learnt about the internal network to connect EBU members wishing to do collaborative investigative journalism with other EBU broadcasters. So obvious – a great pleasure to see it happen.
October 2020: 37 students from 21 countries – more than ever before – have joined the Master Investigative Journalism at the University of Gothenburg for a year of work on investigative, data and cross-border journalism. I have the pleasure of being on the teacher’s team and what a great crowd of students! We use cross-border collaboration competences proactively in times of hybrid-teaching with about 3/4 of the class on campus and 1/4 online, so they train project coordination and remote team work as they study (and as we all through the corona-time). In this article by Journalism Institute, we’re doing a first status.
September 2020: 1st of September, we started the Dataharvest Digital and participation is extremely encouraging! The coronavirus prevented us from the annual in-person gathering over 3½ days in Mechelen in May. Instead, we chose to spread the 120+ sessions over three months to avoid parallel sessions. A weekly focus on a topic or a research method makes it easier to navigate the programme. Our first rough stats confirm that this works well: the average of participants per session is significantly higher online (with no parallel sessions) than in Mechelen (with competing sessions in the same time slots). Also, the geographic spread of our participants is much wider, which we’re very happy about: We need all of Europe! At the end of September, we have 447 registered participants, close to the target of 450 we set for the entire online experiment. The other day, we even managed to laugh together online – a challenge highlighted by many journalism trainers teaching online this year! Further, we see local initiatives to gather the Dataharvest Community on local level (Berlin in late September, Amsterdam in early October) – and this is the essence of cross-border collaborative journalism: Being well-rooted at home but thinking across borders! Many lessons learnt to supplement the in-person conferences in the future.
August 2020: Preparing for 13 weeks of online gatherings at Dataharvest Digital. This gives interesting opportunities for digital meeting formats – endlessly curious how it will go! Also preparing for a new group of students from all over the world starting at the Master for Investigative Journalism at Gothenburg University.
June 2020: Dataharvest – the European Investigative Journalism Conference goes fully digital for 2020 due to the health situation. Instead of blocking people’s weekends in front of a screen, we spread our sessions over three months from September to November.
May 2020: A fresh review of my book on cross-border collaborative journalism has been published by Swedish scholar Urban Larssen from Södertörn/Sweden at Nordicom Review. He categorises the book among those working on the future of “journalistic authority” by “rethinking journalism beyond the regular newsroom and beyond national and disciplinary borders”. That’s very precise and very encouraging. Nothing against the “regular newsroom” – on the contrary! But we need to think freely and very precisely about how we work with knowledge sharing and critical thinking in our societies in order to strengthen journalism in this era of liquid media.
April 2020: First online-teaching in times of corona: My usual spring-class with the international journalism course at the Thomas More in Mechelen/Belgium. I keep believing in real life as the best way of teaching and working – but we are journalists and we’ll do our best to surmount difficulties.
February 2020: German Alfred-Töpfer-Foundation in its new European Journalism Programme offered a four day seminar for cross-border journalism in a seminar centre near the Baltic Sea. 15 junior and mid-career journalists from all over Europe gathered, because they want to collaborate across borders. And they do that already – I know, because I’m in their shared chat group. They’ll all meet again for Dataharvest – the European Investigative Journalism Conference in May in Mechelen. Read the rest of this entry »
