Billions of public funds for big business – the Farmsubsidy database relaunched

The EU hands out more than €50 bn of public funds to the agricultural sector every year. The political side claims to support sustainable farming and family businesses, but the figures show otherwise. The big agricultural sector industries, corporations, the Catholic church and others are among the major beneficiaries, according to a series of fresh investigations published today.

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Next generation of cross-border journalists on the way

72 students of journalism from three journalism educations in Germany, France and Sweden gathered in Brussels in late October to get to know each other, set up teams and prepare collaborative investigations across borders. They are the first of two pilot classes to develop a networked cross-border journalism education under the headline Crossborder Journalism Campus.

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Arena for Journalism in Europe partners with IJ4EU: Cross-Border Masterclasses & Dataharvest 2023 fellowships

Arena is happy to announce a partnership with the IJ4EU consortium for 2022/23. For this partnership, Arena will provide master class trainings on crafting a cross-border collaborative journalism work plan – obviously also with the purpose of preparing an application for an IJ4EU grant, if that’s what the team needs. In 2023, the partnership allows to bring in a number of IJ4EU grantees to present their work at Dataharvest – the European Investigative Journalism Conference and further a number of grantees to join as participants. We are much looking forward to this cooperation, as the Dataharvest community is the obvious network to be in for IJ4EU grantees, and the Arena team has highly specialised competences in the field of facilitating and training collaborative journalism projects.

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Journalism educations go cross-border with Arena as partner

Ready to go: The meeting in Paris was between Edouard Perrin (CFJ, Paaris), Felix Irmer (IfKMW, Leipzig), Ulla Sätereie (JMG, Gothenburg), Stéphanie Lebrun (CFJ, Paris), Brigitte Alfter (Arena for Journalism in Europe), Sandra Foresti (JMG, Gothenburg), Helena Löfving (JMG, Gothenburg), Maria Hendrischke (IfKMW, Leipzig) und Uwe Krüger (IfKMW, Leipzig). Photo: CFJ

Five European journalism educations and Arena for Journalism in Europe are ready to begin work with the very first Cross-border Journalism Campus with the aim of integrating the cross-border method in journalism from the very beginning. Representatives of the schools met recently in Paris to launch to first phase of the project.

The five journalism educations are Gothenburg University (Sweden), Universität Leipzig (Germany), Universiteit van Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Oslomet – Storbyuniversitetet (Norway) and Centre de Formation des

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Network on the way: Labour is a cross-border issue

Companies go across borders, and labour conditions is a European and global issue. Arena is in the early stages of developing a collaborative network of journalists working on or interested in labour topics: the Arena Labour Network.

For the last months, and thanks to the support of the Otto Brenner Foundation, Arena has been researching how mainstream media cover issues related to labour around Europe, and how much the international dimension is included. The first goal is

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Arena launches Food & Water Network – join in!

At the European Investigative Journalism Conference – Dataharvest in May 2022 we jointly launched the Food & Water Network. On a sunny Saturday afternoon in Mechelen, 50 journalists, civil society representatives and academics came together at the conference’s Food & Water Roundtable to discuss key issues and necessary research around food and water across Europe.

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“Cities for Rent” receives the European Press Prize for Innovation

The Arena-coordinated cross-border investigation “Cities for Rent” won the European Press Prize for Innovation, when the prizes were announced on June 2nd.

Cities for Rent is a cross-border investigation into the phenomenon of corporate landlords: private companies that have been acquiring more and more homes for profit across European cities. It has grown out of the Arena Housing Network, a collaborative network of journalists interested in housing launched by Arena at Dataharvest 2019,

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Arena gets new managing director

Sanne Schim van der Loeff joins the management of Arena for Journalism in Europe.

Sanne Schim van der Loeff (Photo: Marlene Fröhlich)

We are very happy to present the new managing director for Arena for Journalism in Europe: Sanne Schim van der Loeff will join the team from April 1 (full time from May 1) and constitute the management team together with our current director Brigitte Alfter. Brigitte will in the future concentrate on the editorial and journalistic development of Arena, while Sanne will focus on the organizational and financial sides of development.

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Independent media self-organise

Being the head of an independent public interest medium can be quite lonely. Especially when it comes to handling managerial issues in the organisation. At the same time, more and more of these independent outlets have been established throughout Europe in the past years. In order to solve organisational problems that nobody can solve alone, eighteen European independent media have decided to join forces in the self-organised exchange network Reference, the European Independent Media Circle.

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