On May 9-10th we attended the Dataharvest conference here in Brussels, an annual conference organised by Journalismfund.eu, that brought together just under 300 data coders and journalists (investigative or otherwise) and held 75 different workshops and talks.
The keynote speech by Marina Walker from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) reflected the overall slant of the 2 days with a strong focus on why cross-border journalism matters. Journalism is moving from the lone wolf approach to that of a team – working together in a cross-border journalism team amplifies and intensifies information gathering, analysis and dissemination.
The recent Luxleaks and Swissleaks stories by the ICIJ have highlighted how increasing globalization naturally requires a more globalized type of journalism and revealed how cross border journalism is an efficient and dynamic tool to reveal transnational stories. Beyond reporting on transnational stories the conference also looked at how journalists are important watchdogs when it comes to issues of anti-corruption.
Directly after the key note speech we had the opportunity to introduce the European Corruption Observatory (ECO) which marries these two key themes of cross-border cooperation and anti-corruption. Our database will gather EU media articles concerning corruption in a searchable database that categorises stories based on sectors, types of corruption and countries involved. Over the course of the conference we guided the attendees through the working method behind the system and the current challenges of optimizing the database while still in the beta phase of development.
Read more about Dataharvest.
