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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Political attention to Europe’s housing crisis

On January 27, the Greens / EFA group at the European Parliament released a report titled, My home is an asset class“. The Financialization of Housing in Europe, authored by researchers Daniela Gabor and Sebastian Kohl.

The report pays close attention to the role of institutional or corporate landlords – the subject for the large Arena-coordinated collaborative investigation Cities for Rent’. It quotes data and two articles from the investigation, from Der Tagesspiegel and the Dublin Inquirer respectively.

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Jelena Prtorić chosen as Bertha fellow

Our Arena Climate Network project director Jelena Prtorić is chosen as one of the Bertha Challenge fellows for 2022!

The Bertha Challenge is an opportunity for activists and investigative journalists “to spend a year focusing on one pressing social justice issue.” In 2022, the fellows will focus on the question of how the relationship between politics and profit is contributing to the degradation and loss of our freshwater and oceans, and what can be done to ensure equitable access and protection of those finite resources for people and planet?

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Get data help for your climate or energy story!

Are you struggling with a data problem in your reporting? Last hours left in our data mentorship programme! Sign up here for a free consultation from our data journalism trainers!

Are you interested in investigating stories related to the climate crisis, energy transition or environmental wrong-doing and you need some help in making sense of the datasets you’ve come across?

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Arena is partner in pioneering crossborder journalism education

Arena for Journalism in Europe is partner in a pioneering education for crossborder journalism with five European journalism schools, and the project has just received €340,000 in support from Erasmus+. A two-year pilot project will gather journalism master students from the University of Gothenburg, the Centre de Formation des Journalistes in Paris and the University … Read more

Kickstart your crossborder journalism

Apply to join the European Collaborative Journalism Programme (ECJP)

The Toepfer Foundation and Arena for Journalism in Europe have joined forces to support collaborative journalism among journalists from all over Europe and call for applications to participate in the European Collaborative Journalism Programme.

Digital transformation is putting the media system under pressure. This affects the quality and diversity of the media but also hampers more resource-demanding investigative journalism and in-depth research. At the same time, cross-border stories have become more prevalent such as in the fields of migration, organized crime, pollution or consumer protection. Collaborative journalism provides the means to maintain investigations despite declining resources. It allows to pool resources and expertise, to analyse facts and data jointly and to also publish in several media at the same time.

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Free training on climate and environment data and OSINT

(Photo: Mika Baumeister)

Call for applications: ‘Learning by doing’ training followed by an investigation into climate

Are you interested in topics such as climate change, energy supply or environmental wrongdoing? Have you already done some investigative work, but would like to upgrade your investigative and/or data skills? If the answer to both questions is ‘yes’, the training offered by Arena for Journalism in Europe, supported by the European Climate Foundation, might just be for you.

Over the course of six weeks, the participants will gain hands-on knowledge in how to set up and organise a cross-border investigation and research, where to look for data and how to work with it, gain OSINT skills (applied to environmental reporting) as will be able to attend topical sessions relevant to the climate issues we’ll explore.

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