About CJC

Crossborder Journalism Campus is a pilot program dedicated to teaching crossborder journalism skills to the next generation of investigative journalists. CJC is a cooperation partnership in higher education with participating organizations from France, Germany, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands.

The European Union is supporting the pilot program from 2022 to 2024 via its Erasmus+ program, key action for cooperation among organisations and institutions.

Journalism Education Partners

Journalism Research Partners

NGO Partner

The Dutch NGO is dedicated to supporting collaborative journalism – journalists working together across geographical borders, and journalists working across professional borders with scholars, scientists, and with civil society. For CJC, Arena is contributing technical infrastructure and expert knowledge on data journalism.

European Union Support

Teaching Crossborder Journalism

But how to teach remote journalism practice and collaboration across cultures while sitting in the same classroom with a homogenous group of students? In one classroom we can teach about cross-border collaborative journalism, we can talk about the definition being that the work is carried out by a team of journalists from different countries, working on a shared topic with coordinated research and publications to the respective target groups. The obvious next step is to move from talking about collaborative journalism to actually doing it.

The Crossborder Journalism Campus brings students together for 4–5 intense working days in the beginning of their academic year to meet in person and agree on story ideas; they then return to their respective universities and remotely collaborate with their peers in the partner universities. At the end of the academic year, they prepare publications for their respective audiences.

In Europe, collaborative education programs in the field of journalism and media are not widespread yet. In 2017, the Newsreel 1 project in a four-country study observed that “none of the educational institutions, we analysed, teaches courses on collaborative journalism” though “some discuss best-practice examples of collaborative journalism”. This was confirmed in a paper presented at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference. Here, the authors suggested to integrate professional practice and academic analysis to surmount previous schisms, and to particularly address three dimensions—namely how networked journalism is imbedded in networked societies, the cross-border journalism concept, and the notion of nation and culture including journalism cultures and roles.

By 2023, we are aware of three levels of crossborder collaborative journalism education, they include:

1. Teaching about collaborative journalism in one class room
2. Connecting two or more classes of journalism students together remotely, teaching them together but without in-person meetings
3. Bringing two or more classes of journalism students together for an in-person meeting before working remotely.

The three models are – obviously – different when it comes to the level of intensity in the collaborative practice. Also, there are very different demands in terms of coordination and logistics. We locate the Crossborder Journalism Campus in the 3rd level of intensity, where we allow students to meet before they embark on a shared research project.