SoJo Europe to Promote Solutions Journalism Across Europe

2024-02-02

BRUSSELS/PRAGUE - Four European organisations joined together to start SoJo Europe, a new and innovative approach to strengthen cross-border, solutions-oriented, and investigative reporting across Europe.

With the financial support from the European Commission (Creative Europe), the four organisations led by Transitions (Czech Republic) in collaboration with Journalismfund Europe (Belgium), the Constructive Institute (Denmark), and The South East European Network for Professionalization of Media (Albania), will undertake a two-year, multifaceted, 1.6-million-euro programme that will focus on solutions journalism and make a huge impact on the journalism profession across the continent.

What is it?

Given increasing levels of news avoidance and decreasing levels of trust in the media, the industry needs to find another way of doing business. The watchdog function of journalism remains essential and the breaking news model of holding others to account are not enough. A question needs to be asked, “What Now?”

The programme will consist of:

a training, grant, and mentoring programme to stimulate more solutions/constructive journalism, especially for the climate change beat;
a training, grant, and mentoring programme to stimulate more connected investigative and solutions reporting;
a study tour/exchange programme, grant programme, and international conference to foster greater collaboration among newsrooms across Europe;
a training and mentoring programme to spur increased revenue through solutions journalism; and
a wide dissemination of the supported stories among the European public, and of the learnings and resources among the journalistic community across Europe.

For whom

This project will target news outlets from all Creative Europe participating countries: EU27, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Norway, Serbia, and Ukraine.
SoJo Europe is looking for 18 European newsrooms to collaborate, train and mentor them in solutions journalism with a climate focus and combining investigative and solutions journalism.

Budget

The total budget of this two-year project is 1.6 million euro with 80% supported by the EU under the Creative Europe Programme (CREA). Philanthropic organisations will cover the remainder of the budget.