Developing a new education practice
The Crossborder Journalism Campus project set out to develop a networked model for practice oriented education in the field of cross-border collaborative journalism.
After obtaining Erasmus+ funding, CJC in 2022–2024 offered two cohorts of students from the three participating journalism educations to meet in Brussels. For several days in the autumn of 2022 and again in 2023, students met to set up cross-border research teams and develop work plans. In the time after the in-person meeting they collaborated remotely on their research and ultimately published to each their target group.
The Crossborder Journalism Campus thus offers a plug-in model to connect and enrich existing journalism educations without having to make major changes to curricula.
New journalism practice needs a new journalism education
Crossborder collaborative journalism is applied more and more widely in the media, as journalists address global challenges in networked societies. The move towards collaborative journalism is used in globally known investigations such as the Panama Papers on tax avoidance schemes and in local and regional collaborations focusing on topics of immediate importance for the citizens such as affordable housing, reliable health care or work conditions just to mention a few examples. But also in other fields of journalism the need for collaboration as a competence becomes more obvious, for example in large collaborations between journalists and scientists such as the Forever Pollution project. Collaborative journalism is a competence that journalism educations need to provide their students with, in order to meet demand in the industry. So why not collaborate among journalism educations, too. Here is how we did it.