BRUSSELS - The European Investigative Journalism Conference & Dataharvest is today an independent gathering, incubated for a decade by Journalismfund Europe before it stood on its own. It is a place for people to meet, exchange skills and ideas and, ideally, collaborate on stories.

Dataharvest 25 May 2018
© Journalismfund Europe

Formally founded in 2011, the EIJC & Dataharvest merged three networks: journalists, coders and FOI-specialists. This event was organised by Journalismfund Europe, Wobbing.eu and Farmsubsidy.org to create an opportunity to learn from each other, share and develop best practices, make contacts and develop stories together.

The roots, however, run deeper. To understand the conference, one has to start with Farmsubsidy.org.

The origins in Farmsubsidy.org

In 2004, Danish journalists Nils Mulvad and Kjeld Hansen obtained data on all Danish recipients of EU agricultural subsidies. The following year, British journalist Jack Thurston succeeded in obtaining the same for the UK. Together they founded Farmsubsidy.org with the aim of getting agricultural subsidy data released across all EU member states through collaboration between journalists and organisations in each country. Danish journalist Brigitte Alfter joined shortly after to coordinate the work in other countries.

Farmsubsidy was not a purely journalistic network. It was a coalition of different actors held together by a shared aim: to get data released and published. The network included individual journalists, media outlets, a scientific institute in France, non-profit organisations in the Netherlands and DICAR in Denmark. The idea was simple. Pool the effort of getting the data out into the open, publish it, and let each participant build their own stories and analyses on top.

The EU Social Fund financed the central work up to the end of 2006 through DICAR. The Open Society Foundation paid for the first Farmsubsidy conference in Budapest in 2007. From then on, the Hewlett Foundation funded the work for several years. During this period, the network met once a year, first in London and later in Brussels, to extract, clean and process data from the EU member states. The gatherings brought together journalists, activists and IT people.

Along the way came recognition. In 2006, Nils Mulvad was named European Journalist of the Year by European Voice, owned by the Economist Group, for the work on getting agricultural subsidy data published across Europe. At the IRE conference in June 2007, Jack Thurston, Brigitte Alfter and Nils Mulvad received the IRE Freedom of Information Award for the breakthrough in transparency around agricultural subsidies, which at that time made up about half of the EU's total budget.

When the Hewlett Foundation ended its support, Farmsubsidy.org moved under the wings of the Pascal Decroos Fund, later Journalismfund Europe. Journalismfund's own account of the transition is here.

Dataharvest becomes a European conference

The May 2012 gathering was the first held under the wings of Journalismfund. The idea of bringing journalists, activists, coders and others together around obtaining, structuring, analysing and publishing data continued, but the scope broadened quickly. The event was no longer only about agricultural subsidies. It became a meeting place for all forms of investigative journalism.

A parallel network, Wobbing.eu, had emerged from a January 2007 gathering of journalists specialised in freedom of information legislation. They worked on shared considerations such as access to data, obstacles in access to information and privacy.

From the last get-together under the support of Hewlett Foundation in May 2011 in Brussels, 35 founding participants laid the ground for the future of the conference, adopting the name of the Farmsubsidy.org network's own gatherings: Dataharvest. Since then, the conference has gradually grown in focus and size. It went beyond farm subsidy data and FOI legislation, offering lectures and workshops on online and database searching, data analysis and data visualisation. FOI experts were invited to share their experience and best practices. Brainstorms were organised to generate new story ideas. Coders and data journalists exchanged methods. Cross-border investigative stories were shared.

By 2015, the features of a genuine European Investigative Journalism Conference were clear, with a strong focus on all aspects of data journalism, networked collaborative journalism and entrepreneurial journalism.

And the approach of the conference worked: several stories, projects and networks in Europe have come to life at one of these editions of the EIJC & Dataharvest and we hope there are many more to come. Here's an overview.

subsidystories.eu

Anna Alberts: "Our project subsidystories.eu has brought together all regional and national beneficiaries lists of the ERDF, CF and ESF, the most important funds of the European Structural Investment Funds. On the website subsidystories, this data can be downloaded, visualised and analysed."

"When we came to Dataharvest, we had the start of a list of regional and national data portals for the different funds.

At Dataharvest we completed this list, found a developer willing to work with us and ran the first scrapers and analysis. We gathered hunches from journalists and found that so many journalists were interested."

"In the next months we met several times, the Follow the Money team continued to work on their idea of an app and what stories or analytics could be generated whereas the OKI/OKFDE team secured funding from Adessium. This process of gathering the data, scraping, cleaning validating it, and getting it into one standard took over 6 months. Together with the help of volunteers and journalists, we launched the website OKFDE and OKI subsidystories.eu in March 2017."

"We just started a research project on municipal level data with a grant from the Aaron Swartz fellowship. The research is titled: "The locally funded Europe: analyzing the composition and grant-effectiveness of EU subsidies on a municipality level”. OKFDE and OKI are looking for ways to update the data automatically, and the first cross-border collaborations are set up with journalists from around Europe.

For the future, we hope to extend this work, add different data-sources around European Money flows. But most importantly, we hope that the data gets turned into cross-border projects and investigations and good stories."

Security for Sale

The group met during the previous conference to discuss their hypotheses. The conference proved to be a good central gathering point.

They found that the European Union has deep pockets when it comes to security. Major defence contractors and tech giants compete for generous subsidies, to better protect us from crime and terrorism. At least that’s the idea. But who really benefits? The public or the security industry itself? Over the past year, they’ve worked with more than twenty journalists in eleven European countries to investigate this burgeoning sector. They quickly discovered that the European security industry is primarily taking good care of itself – often at the expense of the public.

Through the investigative project ‘Security for Sale’ (supported by Journalismfund's ECB-grant programme), they bring you up to speed on EU policymakers and industry big shots who’ve asserted themselves as “managers of unease,” on the lobbies representing major defence companies, on the billions spent on security research, and on the many ethical issues surrounding the European security industry.

The group still needs to publish some stories. However, they are open to publishing more if new information comes in. They have established good relationships with their partners.

EIC network, a collaborative network of European media

When the team attended a previous edition of the EIJC and Dataharvest conference, they had just received access to some crucial data and a brief summary. It was the largest leak in the history of sports - the data included 18.6 million documents, including original contracts with secret subsidiary agreements, emails, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and photos. The data set extended into the year 2016.

EIC partners published some of their findings at the end of 2016, allowing for an unprecedented look into the gloomy depths of the modern football industry.

See what was published here. Also, read about how this project shaped their network.

The network is developing several new investigative projects in parallel, partnering on in-depth reporting at source and with a focus on European leads that could expose how power structures affect European communities. Follow @EICnetwork to read their last stories and stay tuned for what's coming.

Medicamentalia is a project about access to vaccines, the relation between pharma companies and countries.

Eva Belmonte: ‘For us, the contacts were key for the projects we were working on. New ideas and projects began after the last conference (EIJC16). We presented the first version of Medicamentalia in the last EIJC16 & Dataharvest and met a lot of people working on access to medicines in the conference during the round table sessions. Later, we worked with some of them for the second phase of Medicamentalia, focused on vaccines. We even presented proposals together, for example, to the European Commission. And we plan to continue doing it.’

Eva Belmonte: ‘For a medium non-profit newsroom as we are, having such a list of contacts of people in other countries with similar interests is key to reach more audiences and apply for funding.’

‘Currently, we’re investigating other issues on the same field: access to health and relations between pharma companies, doctors, and associations. Specific sectors: women’s health, HIV, etc. So we will continue looking for people working in this area in the next Dataharvest & EIJC.’

The MEPs Project

A group of 29 journalists took the European Parliament to court over denied FOI requests.

Story: I "lupi d'Europa" e i legami calabresi

The 'Fri Adgang' series, which even won an award


The number of participants of the EIJC & Dataharvest increased every year. From 35 founding participants in 2011, over nearly a hundred in 2012, 150 in 2013, 200 in 2014 and 270 in 2015, to 320 for the 2016 edition. The 2017 edition, EIJC/ Dataharvest saw some 382 people from 52 different countries attend. The last Dataharvest organised by Journalismfund Europe (in 2018) counted 470 participants from 52 countries.

On 10 September 2018, the board of Journalismfund has decided to make The European Investigative Journalism Conference (EIJC) & Dataharvest a stand-alone venture in its own right, fully independent from Journalismfund.

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