Cross-Border Collaborative Journalism

A Step-By-Step Guide

Brigitte Alfter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429875526
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

Cross-Border Collaborative Journalism is a detailed guide to transnational reporting, a cutting-edge journalistic strategy. In the twenty-first century, the most pressing political and social issues, such as financial crises, wealth inequality, migration flows and environmental collapse, transcend national borders. In reaction, journalists are increasingly collaborating across the globe to produce impactful and in-depth reporting. Recent agenda-setting cross-border collaborations include LuxLeaks, Panama Papers and Football Leaks.

Brigitte Alfter takes the reader, step-by-step, through the history of cross-border collaborative journalism and the current working practices behind it. The book draws from the author's own experience, as well as exclusive interviews with other pioneers of cross-border journalism, and notable case studies are integrated throughout.

Chapters cover:

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• Managing intercultural communication

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• Effectively utilising a network of sources

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• Choosing the initial story idea

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• Fact-checking for cross-border publication

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• Adapting the findings to different audiences and to different types of media

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• Legal and security considerations for a cross-border team.

By providing the essential practical skills for transnational reporting, Cross-Border Collaborative Journalism encourages students of journalism and practitioners to undertake their own collaborative projects. It highlights the importance of this exciting new journalistic form to answering the defining questions of our time.

PART I

Cross-border journalism

Context and definition

1

WHY EMBARK ON CROSS-BORDER JOURNALISM?

History, context and pioneers

We want to enlighten. Our task, our purpose with all big investigations is that. We want to get closer to the truth, as close as we can get.

(Rafael Buschmann and Michael Wulzinger, 2017, p. 266)

In 2015 the two sports journalists obtained 18.6 million documents from a source with information about alleged tax avoidance taking place all over the world of professional football. They decided that the most professional way of achieving their purpose was to work with an international team. The two, who were staffers at German news magazine Der Spiegel, collaborated via European Investigative Collaborations (EIC), a network of 11 media and investigative journalism centres throughout Europe.

The professional logic was identical when a data trove of 11.5 million documents exposing offshore holdings was leaked to journalists at German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. From the outset, the source indicated a wish to get the material out in large English language media “such as The New York Times”. Süddeutsche could not offer that. But via a network they could offer partners such as the Washington Post and the Guardian (Obermayer & Obermaier, 2016, p. 15). Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier of Süddeutsche Zeitung had conducted several investigations with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), a Washington-based US non-profit, which had been specialising in cross-border collaborative journalism since 1997. Now that they had acquired a big data set they sought that collaboration again for several reasons. International publication was demanded by the source and thus part of the conditions for supplying the data. The data set was enormous and needed data experts such as those on the ICIJ team. Furthermore, the journalists had a genuine wish for their work to lead to change, to political reaction and reform of international tax rules. They felt that cross-border journalism would increase the “public pressure” on the EU, the UN and other bodies who can act on behalf of citizens (Obermayer & Obermaier, 2016, p. 318).

Journalists choose the methods that work best for their specific task at hand. Approaches are selected and developed out of journalistic necessity – be that analytical reading of complex texts, interview technique, the use of new skills such as data journalism – or in this case, the practice of cross-border journalism.

Cross-border work may sometimes be cumbersome and time consuming. But the logic of cross-border collaboration is that it meets a journalistic professional need. The EIC members formally describe in their founding documents the advantages they see in “joint reporting and publishing”: “Greater human resources mean better reporting in both quantity and quality . . ., more contacts, more expertise,” according to the media partners’ Letter of Understanding. They also cite a need for division of labour in an era that is producing great quantities of digital data, and the hope that “joint publishing increases the impact of the issues covered and magnifies the attention received” (EIC, 2017).

In short the advantages listed are:

• improved quality of the journalism thanks to more human resources

• division of labour in large research projects

• greater public impact.

The highly prominent publication of some big cross-border collaborative exposures has brought about public knowledge of this new approach. But cross-border journalism is about much more than big stories. First of all, it is an overall journalistic method that can be understood, learnt and replicated. Junior as well as senior journalism professionals can use it as one of the multiple methods at their disposal, and cross-border journalism can be carried out on both small and large projects.

A recent example: two journalism students were appalled to learn of the working conditions of carers for the elderly in privately run homes in their native Belgium and the Netherlands. The carers were employed by Bulgarian companies. Following on from the final project they carried out for their journalism course, the Dutch and Belgian journalists teamed up with a Bulgarian colleague. They jointly traced slave-like working conditions, threats against the carers by their Bulgarian employers, and a “company graveyard” of bankrupt companies disguising the scheme. Less than a year after finishing their journalism studies, publication by the youthful team led to a parliamentary debate in Belgium about working conditions in elderly care (Brugnera & Merrigan, 2018). And there are many more such ad-hoc or single-topic cross-border investigations being carried out by both freelance and staff journalists.

Cross-border journalism has developed over a couple of decades predominantly within a circle of investigative reporters, but it has now been adopted by other groups of journalists too. For when you cover a certain topic, your most useful colleague may not sit next to you in the newsroom – they have their own separate interests – but in another newsroom in another country. Cross-border collaboration makes it possible to achieve a high level of specialisation, working with colleagues following the same news beat in a different country. You are not in competition, because you publish in different languages.

Initial academic research in the field opens further interesting aspects. Cross-pollination with cultural studies, for example, reveals some qualitative insights into the way cross-border journalism helps the journalists within a given team to overcome their individual and national bias (Grzeszyk, 2019). This, too, can improve the quality of their work.

Cross-border journalism as described here springs from the mindset of reporters who want to get to the bottom of their subject regardless of geographical borders: it is a method developed by professional journalists to translate into practice a fundamentally global outlook. It may help at this point to provide a short introduction to the journalistic fields where these methods first originated, in order to see why reporters first sought to expand the scope of their profession in this way.

1.1 Cross-border journalism and its background within the journalism community

An iconic event in the 1970s is today considered to have brought about the birth of the US movement for investigative journalism. This movement played an important role in developing journalistic methodologies and significantly contributed to what is today an international network of investigative journalism.

It was a late morning in June 1976 in Phoenix, the capital of the US state of Arizona. Journalist Don Bolles from the local newspaper Arizona Republic drove to a hotel, for an appointment with a source. A caller had indicated that he wanted to give Bolles information about a politician or politicians involved in fraud over sales of land. This was not Bolles’ field anymore: he had left the demanding investigative beat to return to day-to-day news and thus rescue his family life. But this tip was tempting, so he went. No informant turned up in the hotel lobby, and after a while he went out to his car to drive back to the newspaper. That was the moment when the bomb exploded, injuring the reporter so badly that he died a few days later. “They finally got me”, he murmured and managed to utter a name.

The murder of Bolles ignited the Arizona Project, in which journalists and editors from all over the US gathered to carry on his work. The year before, a group of journalists had already founded Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE). Coordinating the Arizona Project was an exceptional moment where journalists adhered “to the virtues of their practice” and by doing that were able to “transform personal vengeance into public and professional good” (Aucoin, 1992). They were successful. The account by one of the participants, Michael F. Wendland, reads like a crime story and describes how the journalists contributed their time and skills, some taking leave, some being posted by their editors (Wendland, 1977). Less than a year after the murder, a series of articles were published widely. Seventeen months after the death of Don Bolles, two men were convicted of murder and complicity in murder. “Never before had reporters from different news organizations worked together in a non-competitive situation to produce a single report” (Aucoin, 2005, p. 149).

In everyday work journalists tend to be relentless competitors. Media employers demand investigations, but they want to have them for publication exclusively and before others. Competitiveness has been wired into the journalistic mentality for generations. But even within a competitive mindset, it makes sense to share experiences and to develop research methods. This was the mantra of the IRE. Since the 1970s the group has organised conferences, seminars and workshops. The legendary NICAR mailing list for computer assisted reporting started in August 1995, and is a daily treasure trove: it is a meeting place where questions on practical data journalism are answered within a short time frame by a competent network willing to assist with good advice and suggested solutions.

It has been claimed that journalists do apply specific methodologies: they are just unaware of it. This may have been the case in the pre-IRE years, but it certainly is not so any more. All over the world journalists gather to share experiences and to develop themselves and their work, thus adding elements of practical reason, or phronesis in the Aristotelian sense, to the profession of journalism. The IRE movement reached Europe around the time of the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, with IRE-inspired membership-based organisations of professional journalists in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland. Competitors in their everyday jobs, they would nevertheless meet as professional colleagues and share experiences with the aim of improving their work in evening gatherings, seminars or conferences. The annual conference – a shared feature of several of the membership organisations in the investigative community – brought together the year’s most important investigations, with their challenges and solutions. Methods developed or learnt from colleagues abroad were shared with peers. All participants found inspiration for their own work; improved their own methods; and sometimes discovered a fresh story idea to work with, returning to their newsrooms the following day with more enthusiasm and with strengthened bonds to peers.

The decades that followed were years of crisis and change. Western economies wavered as the dotcom and housing bubbles collapsed. From one day to the next, media owners would close entire newspapers. Nowadays, the previously stable business model of “legacy media” – typically a mix of subscription, sales and advertising –is threatened by a globalisation of the advertising market and the new digital media habits of audiences. But this is also the era of new media and journalistic opportunities. Journalists – not least independent journalists – are experimenting with new media and funding models, with journalism centres and media cooperatives, as well as with new journalistic methods (Journalismfund.eu, 2018; GIJN.org, 2018).

In this journalistic laboratory, new terminologies and techniques are being conceived. Some manage to establish themselves, others disappear or may yet disappear into oblivion. Data journalism with all its subcategories, video journalism, citizen journalism, science journalism, crowd-sourced journalism – these are but a few of the trends being tested in this era of speedy, almost playful, development. The multiplicity of new research and story-telling methods may appear unmanageable at first sight; the fact that journalists, activists, special-interest organisations and business intelligence are all trying out similar methods does not make things easier.

The difference between journalists and others applying similar methods turns on the particular nature of the journalistic task. However, which actual role journalists carry out in a given society – ideally and in practice – varies from country to country, region to region. A progressive homogenisation of journalism – partially due to the wide use of the English language – may currently be reducing the diversity of journalistic models and thus threatening their democratic character. However, in their study of media systems, researchers Hallin and Mancini still identify significant differences in the media in different parts of the world (Hallin & Mancini, 2004). Similarly the role of journalists in society shows significant differences; for example, between the Anglo-Saxon tradition of the “reporter” and the European continental tradition of the “publicist” (Meyer & Brink Lund, 2008). In practice, these differences are likely to affect even the selection of which topic to cover and in which way (Meyer, 2019.

This leads us to the general question of purpose. What is the role of journalists and what is the purpose of journalism in a given society? Attempts at an answer have previously involved a straightforward line of thought. But new schemes for international journalistic collaboration make the questions more tricky. Can journalists from different traditions agree on their role and purpose to a level where they can collaborate?

In their pursuit of these issues, Danish researchers Gitte Meyer and Anker Brink Lund employ the classic terminology of “practical reason”. They suggest defining journalism as “a profession of public, practical reasoning, with the task of facilitating civil discussion in a public and political life of uncertainty, disagreement and diversity” – thus creating an open definition that demands and ought to demand “constant new interpretation and discussion” (Meyer & Brink Lund, 2006, p. 19). Such an approach provides an important framework for cross-border journalism, in that it not only allows, but even requires a constant adjustment of journalism practice to a given situation.

Dutch journalist Dick van Eijk also struggles with overall definitions of journalism, as he seeks common ground in a world of diverse traditions. In one of the most thorough comparative works on investigative journalism in Europe, he ponders empirical, normative and analytical approaches. He eventually defines journalism as “truth-seeking storytelling primarily serving citizens without a legal foundation” (van Eijk, 2005, p. 3), and he points to the normative approach of two US journalists turned scholars, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel.

The ten elements of journalism establish...