In the Arena Food & Water Network we come together to discuss how to investigate issues around food and water in Europe. Together with experts from journalism, academia, civil society and economy we look at data sources, reasearch and journalistic projects that can inspire further investigations and cross-border collaborations.
60 per cent of Europe’s surface water (lakes, rivers etc.) are not in a good chemical or ecological status, and more than a quarter of the ground water is in the same state, with agriculture remaining one of the main pressures on our water bodies. These numbers are probably underestimated, due to insufficient data and the current testing practices.
These are some of the conclusions highlighted in “Troubled Waters”, a new research project by Jelena Prtorić from Arena for Journalism in Europe and Luisa Izuzquiza from the German NGO FragDenStaat. The two have researched the status of Europe’s waterways, the severe impact of agricultural practices on water quality, and how the effort to curb and halt water pollution, at both European and national level, achieves “too little, too late”.
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.
A new Dutch language handbook on investigative journalism methods includes a chapter on crossborder collaborative journalism by Arena editorial director Brigitte Alfter and data journalist Adriana Homolova and a contribution by Dataharvest project coordinator Ruben Brugnera.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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,