This weekend, the 2025 Climate Arena Fellows met for the first time. By all accounts, the group has seen a fruitful start to their collaborative, cross-border climate and environmental investigations.
On 12-13 September, in Bratislava, Slovakia, our latest fellows cohort came together to get to know each other, receive an overview of cross-border, collaborative journalism practice from Arena’s expert trainers, and generate ideas for climate investigations which aim for multi-national impact.
The fellows will now co-design and produce these investigations together, receiving mentorship from the Arena team pre- and post-publication.
One of the fellows, French journalist Agatha Allain said she had “appreciated the collaborative aspect”. Arena’s Masterclass Coordinator, Jonathan Stoneman, noted that “the skill of collaborative journalistic work is often overlooked”.
The stereotypical investigative journalist is huddled over a desk alone, uncovering huge revelations through sheer force of will. But at Arena, we know that this Great Man Theory often obscures a great number of contributions by many people. So our fellows programme tries to make this invisible work visible, by illuminating and fostering a collaborative, cross-border approach from the outset.
The summit began with lightning talks about any story ideas the fellows had already been considering. Four fellows were invited to speak for up to five minutes, with no stopping to discuss in-depth other than some clarifying questions — collaboration, after all, requires efficiency. At the end of this first session, themes were drawn up to see where strong stories could be developed, and fellows could team-up to begin production.
At the following match-making session, some story ideas fell by the wayside as they were too country-specific and hard to convert into cross-border investigations.
We then added in talk of the tools needed for this kind of work. High-level, wide-ranging investigations into topics as critical as the environmental emergency require proportionate security tools to protect them. (Find out more about the tools Arena provides with the Collaborative Desk here.)
There was time dedicated also to the challenges of collaborative working. Group dynamics, cultural differences and human behaviour under stress cannot be ignored in collaborative settings, particularly. It’s too early to say how much they will need to consider each other’s working styles and cultural differences, but you can learn more about this aspect of cross border working in an episode of the Journalism Value Project’s podcast The Loop, with Arena director Brigitte Alfter.
Finally, the fellows brought all their learning together to draft work plans. So – after this summit, they’re well on their way to kicking off their investigations. We’re excited to see which teams can produce the next big revelations that help us understand what’s really going on in the struggle to make governments and corporations take the climate emergency seriously.
“I had a wonderful time meeting other kind and talented journalists to discuss how we can do some compelling climate reporting. We worked together, shared ideas, and came out of it feeling like we had an interesting climate investigative project that we could work towards — as well as some new friends.”
– Jonathan Moens, freelance Italian journalist
The second fellows meeting will be in October at the 2025 Climate Arena conference in Budapest.