Crossborder Journalism Campus
The Crossborder Journalism Campus or CJC is a pioneering journalism education model. With MIJ as a core partner, we allowed students from three journalism schools to collaborate across borders in the academic years 2022/23 and 2023/24. We thus simulated a real life crossborder investigative process from idea to publication, accompanied by experienced practitioners and journalism lecturers in the field. The goal for the students was to prepare an investigative journalism production ready for publication at the end of the programme.
Crossborder collaborative journalism is a new way for journalists from multiple countries to join forces. This way of working is now well beyond the experimental stage: The wider public knows about major publications such as the Panama Papers on tax avoidance, and media outlets begin to demand journalists with the necessary competences. Now the Department of Journalism, Media and Communication (JMG), along with five European partners, develops a networked education model to provide students with these competences.
Who were the partners?
The Crossborder Journalism Campus was a partnership of five universities and one journalism organisation. The CJC had three groups of partners:
Journalism educations bringing in students:
University (with journalism educations) bringing in academic expertise: OsloMet, professor Maria Konow-Lund
A sector organisation ensuring the connection to the professional community and contributing to the education
What did it mean for a student enrolled at MIJ?
The Crossborder Journalism Campus was integrated into the MIJ programme and allowed to practice the MIJ specialisation in a close-to-reality set-up when students from MIJ developed their collaborative investigative journalism production with students from Leipzig and Paris/Lyon. It was integrated into the Master Investigative Journalism 2023-24.
In the autumn of 2022 and again in 2023, 70+ students from the three journalism schools gathered in Brussels to visit the European institutions and – first and foremost – to meet each other and to shape work groups with students from all three countries.
During the week in Brussels students prepared the plan for the investigation that they then pursued over the coming months. They got excellent insights into working with European affairs – how the EU institutions and policy making work, but also the effect of EU laws in the member states. The results were classic investigative stories such as following money or document trails, open and hidden political influences and the like.
To make story selection easier, we focused on topics that were relevant EU-wide. The 2022/23 cohort reported and published about the European Green Deal, with publications in media such as Le Monde in France, MDR and ARD broadcasters in Germany and Göteborgs-Posten or Svenska Dagbladet in Sweden. The 2023/24 cohort focused on labour and migration and published in media such as Mediapart in France, the EUobserver in Belgium, MDR and Zeit in Germany.
Crossborder collaborative journalism being a rather new way of working, MIJ provided students with a unique chance to exercise crossborder collaborative journalism and to establish their first contacts to journalism colleagues in other countries.
Who payed?
The Crossborder Journalism Campus was a supplement to enrich the Master Investigative Journalism and the courses at the partner universities. It was supported by the EU’s Erasmus+ Programme. A large part of the funding covered the travel and accomodation for the students from three partner universities to meet. Further, the funding allowed the lecturers and partner academics to meet, plan, evaluate and develop the programme. Finally, the funding covered knowledge sharing in the journalism and media sector.
For the students this meant, that most costs for their trip to Brussels were covered, the Erasmus+ programme payed for travel, hotel and breakfast. Students had to consider costs to cover their other meals while travelling.
The educational and editorial decision making was not influenced by the funding, it was in the responsibility of the project partners entirely.
The overall purpose of the Crossborder Journalism Campus
The Master Investigative Journalism at Gothenburg University was among the first journalism educations to integrate not only investigative and data journalism but also the – more recently developed – competences of crossborder collaboration. But how do you teach remote collaboration to students sitting in one and the same classroom?
This led to setting up the Crossborder Journalism Campus starting in 2022. The Erasmus+ supported programme allowed us to develop a genuinely networked education programme with two pilot classes, one in 2022-23 and a second one in 2023-24.
During and after the pilot classes we evaluated, and carefully gathered feedback from the students. Teaching material, teaching results, lecturers’ competence sharing and other aspects are documented and shared online. The purpose is, of course, to inspire other journalism educations to learn and further develop the concept of networked, practice oriented journalism educations.
For any questions, please contact Crossborder Journalism Campus lead Brigitte Alfter.
The Crossborder Journalism Campus was a three year Erasmus+ project involving two pilot classes, the first in the academic year 2022/23, the second in the academic year 2023/24.
