2011-12-12
BRUSSELS - The Open Society Foundations has granted € 324,000 to Journalismfund.eu and its sister projects under the Belgian Pascal Decroos Fund for the coming two years.
Journalismfund.eu is pleased to announce that the Open Society Foundation Media Program has granted € 324,000 to Journalismfund.eu from now and until the autumn of 2013.
”We are happy to see that the Pascal Decroos Funds initiative to stimulate European journalism is so highly respected,” says Ides Debruyne, director of the Pascal Decroos Fund and responsible for the Journalismfund.eu project. ”We are grateful for the trust the Open Society Foundation Media Program has in our work, and now we are looking forward to see these projects evolve.”
The new grant supports several projects all focused on European and cross-border investigative journalism and networking among journalists.
The first and largest is Journalismfund.eu, that gives grants to small teams of journalists, who have a European or a cross-border investigative journalistic story, they want to research. Journalismfund.eu was setup in 2008 by the Pascal Decroos Fund and with seed funding from the Norwegian Free Speech Foundation. Journalismfund.eu has supported 17 cross border researches, of which several are still ongoing. Some of those researches already concluded have unveiled trafficking of labour, whitewashing of money and a fake marriage scheme abusing a loop whole in EU legislation. Several of the investigations lead to change in legislation or fed information into court cases. A new call for applications is open and the deadline is January 10th.
With the new grant the prestigious journalistic project Farmsubsidy.org will ”move” to Journalismfund.eu. This marks a new phase for farmsubsidy.org. The core team of Nils Mulvad, Jack Thurston and Brigitte Alfter and a wider a network of journalists, data activists and analysts will remain in place and focus on the main access-to-data data and journalism work that have been at the core of the project since it began in 2005. The online database of payments under the common agricultural policy will continue to be available as a free service, and the 'farm subsidy data harvest' will be held also in the coming years. The project will continue to provide journalists with advice and support in their work on accessing, analysing and making sense of the data. Following the setback of an adverse ruling by European Court of Justice on the current legal framework for transparency in farm subsidies, now is a critical time for civil society to secure better access to data on public expenditure. In this new phase, Brigitte Alfter, of the European Fund for Investigative Journalism will take on the role of lead spokesperson and contact point for the farmsubsidy.org project.
Wobbing.eu is a network by and for journalists who use freedom of information legislation as a journalistic tool. Sharing experiences and developing this particular research method even better in order to get hard facts for stories is the overall aim of the network.
So – remember the deadline for applications in January. And if you are in Brussels on December 15th do come along to the Pascal Decroos Fund event, where the first jury member of Journalismfund.eu will be unveiled along with two jury members of the Pascal Decroos Fund.
