Building collaborative networks for journalists in Europe

In conversation with Catalina Albeanu who has been a digital editor and editor with various publications in the UK and Europe and has spent the last year working with the European Excellence Exchange and Journalism project which is funded by the EU working for Free Press Unlimited, one of the consortium members on establishing a directory of European journalism networks as well as activities for the networks.

We learn more about how collaborative journalism networks in Europe operate, and how can they grow and help each other cover more ground. From obvious funding challenges to the power dynamics and the Western v/s Eastern European journalists and the networks thereby; this insightful chat sheds light on how cross-border journalism networks are an untapped tool in the media sphere.

Find the journalism network directory she is building here

Read the full transcript below:

Jakub: And this is another episode of the Story Mixer podcast. I'm very happy to have a good colleague joining us today, Catalina Albeanu. 

Catalina: Hello, hello. 

Jakub: It's been a while since I was trying to remember when we met, and I think it was at one of the JEN summits. And back then you were still with the Journalism Co, UK and then you went to Decât o Revistă.

Catalina: Yes. 

Jakub: And well, as we established just before the conversation, you are a very fresh former editor of the Directory of European Journalism Networks, now freelance and open to new adventures. 

Catalina: Yes. That's correct. I realized also that throughout a lot of this journey of different roles that I've undertaken, my job title has always been something like an editor or digital editor. It's one of those job titles that could mean almost anything in modern newsrooms. So yeah, I'm sure it might come up later on in the conversation. 

Jakub: Yeah. So you're aiming for something like a different title these days, maybe an unknown director or a manager or something like that? 

Catalina: No, I've never been very stuck on job titles. I don't know if that helped or hindered my progress, but, yeah, I've mostly focused on what the work entails the teams that I've been working with and what the results and potential impact of what we're doing are, rather than the job title. And I think that's also why I never really questioned the editor's label that much. 

Jakub: Okay. Well, you've spent last year investigating networks of journalists, for journalists in Europe. And that basically, prompted me to have this little conversation. So how was it? What was the idea behind starting it?

Catalina: All right. So investigating is a very big word to kind of back it up. 

Jakub: Sounds cool. 

Catalina: Yeah, it sounds cool. I have been working for the past year at the European Excellence Exchange in a journalism project, which is funded by the EU. It's one of those big consortium projects. I was working for Free Press Unlimited, one of the consortium members, on establishing a directory of European journalism networks, as well as some, activities for the networks. The online resource is designed as a database, where you can search and read through profiles and information about what some of the European journalism networks or collectives, are doing right now in Europe. And then our wider goal for the project was also to bring them together, to introduce some of them to each other if they don't already know, and to assess what could be done to better support their work in the future. A lot of these were like pilot activities, which is why right now, after the launch of the directory, after a network meeting with some of the networks, we're in this phase where we're analyzing what could happen next based on what we've heard from them. So that's very much the goal of the project. It's to build resources for collaborative cross-border journalism. The directory is an effort to understand how, widespread this kind of collaborative journalism is in Europe. What formats does it take? We use the word networks in the title, but we also include smaller collectives or smaller collaborations that are not (necessarily) formalized networks, that you might think of necessarily. So it's very much, a tool to understand a little bit more how collaborative journalism happens. The website, journalism directory.org right now features 50 profiles of networks, but also interviews with some of them where I dive deeper into the realities of the day-to-day work, of making collaborations work. I've interviewed network facilitators and investigative journalists. So it's quite a wide-ranging conversation and wide-ranging topics, but the focus is to understand a bit more how these collaborations look like in practice, what level of effort goes into doing this and how we could best support it in the future. 

Jakub: Well, so what have you found interesting or intriguing? Because, I mean, there's so much happening technically for journalists in Europe, you know, we are very privileged about it in the way we have, even after the pandemic, we still have a lot of events. Before the pandemic one could easily make a living by creating a fake startup and going from one conference to another without actually producing too much content, just saying. Not to mention bazillions of workshops or smaller events, but is there anything which you found intriguing during your investigation? 

Catalina: I think what's intriguing and it's not necessarily new to me because I resonated with it from my previous work at a nonprofit media organization in Romania is that a lot of the networks, even the bigger ones, are so dependent on project-based funding. So, that's also the project I was part of. It also had funding for a finite period. So now there's this question mark about how can we move it forward. But also a lot of the work of the other networks is very much dependent on that. And in some cases, you also have Networks that are run by a core group of people who are also running an editorial publication alongside that. So there's very much this issue of how much work you could put into both of them. How much time can you dedicate to raising this core funding for the operational side of the collaborative network, and project management of cross border investigation side, whilst you're also running a publication and whilst you know that you have to work on projects to be able to fund it and these projects that are currently available or those calls open for funding may or may not match your core mission. So there is still this idea that I was surprised by. Maybe it's not the biggest word, but I was surprised. It's still this, idea about lack of core funding, lack of capacity, and lack of, sufficient operational staff in these kinds of management roles. Even in the more established networks or the ones you from the outside look like, they're very well organized and, you know, it looks like everything's fine, but it's very much everybody's still looking at this timeline. 

Jakub: Can you give us names? 

Catalina: Sure. They've all spoken quite openly for the interviews. So I know, for example, with the European Data Journalism Network. I've had this conversation. They're funded through one of these, I believe, European funds as well. And they still have funding for another couple of years, but they're very much thinking about what's happening next. I know also, for example, that Hostwriter is also running alongside their collaborations part, the unbiased news publishing newsroom, which is a great global effort to bring journalists to the global scale. So pretty much created this more borderless, idea that journalists from other countries who are as relevant as journalists from big organizations parachute themselves into those countries. So it's very much about connecting and bringing journalists having access to a platform that they may not have otherwise. But they're also talking about this, capacity effort. They are the ones who, in my first conversation with Hostwriter, they were the ones who said that they would want to be involved in the project, but they also asked me how much time it takes, because they know that they're very much pressed for time when they assess the different collaborations that they could be a part of. So, I could name further names, but the idea is that for every, newsroom or network that I've been speaking to, this does come up, but in different ways. So what might be a split between editorial and operational for some, like Hostwriter's case may be, based on funding and like seeing a deadline coming up in other cases? 

Jakub: Are there any differences when it comes to, for example, geography or the impact they're trying to make? I'm asking because the more let's say east we go in Europe, the more crazy it can get. And the differences between the countries are very visible– Romania, and Poland. But then there is Ukraine and Romania, Moldova, two bordering countries, but different situations in every aspect. So that's what I'm curious about because I still think we talk a lot about European, European, European, but a lot of initiatives are targeting, primarily Western, countries. At the same time, there are a lot of initiatives which target Central and Eastern Europe but we use the same word to describe these groups of countries, but the situation in them has rapidly changed in the past decade. So what's there? 

Catalina: One thing that I noticed, because we set out to identify these, you know, European journalism networks. We also, wondered what kind of geography are we looking at. We're also partly limited based on our funding. So because we were funded through Creative Europe for some of the activities that we had, which involved, travel costs or any kind of costs for the project, especially like training or travel to the event, we also were limited in terms of geography, from what the EU can include as part of the Creative Europe strands. So if you know, that's a separate conversation, but that's where, for example, you would have Romania or Moldova, they would be in different situations even though we are in yeah, very similar situations in other terms. But what I found was that a lot of the networks that would be European or that would actively work in Europe are also global or striving to go global because it feels like some of them are thinking less about the cross-border impact of journalism and more about the international links between different regions as well. So, that was one thing that surprised me. I don't know if that answers your question necessarily. But it was kind of a different side to the coin. I thought things would be much more localized and we would find, more collectives working in particular regions, which we did. We have found national networks that are helping out, for example, freelancers in Italy. There's a great group called Vardar Collective that works primarily for Italian journalists, but they also have their members sometimes working in different countries because they're freelancers covering global issues. So instead of finding things that were, very coagulated in a particular region, I was surprised to see that these things are much more global than I had initially thought. 

Jakub: And in you're thinking about networks, is it primarily organizations which support journalists or have you taken some, for example, Perugia (IJF) would you think of them as a network or something like a festival in a way, because it allows the proper networking?

Catalina: They could be a network. We had, in the end, a pretty wide definition of what is a network and what is the purpose of that particular network. We focused on groups of journalists that are active in Europe or focus on Europe. They could be formal, formalized as a network, whether they're registered as a legal entity or not. Or they could also be just a group of journalists who get together regularly to exchange knowledge about something. I think one thing that, for me, made a difference for this directory was that you would be able to pinpoint a contact person who could then introduce you to the rest of the network. So in that respect, the International Journalism Festival could be a network. It's a bit more kind of zoomed out than what we have been focusing on in this particular, initial phase of onboarding networks. But I guess if a conference, if a journalism conference or a journalism festival had a community that was coagulated, that they knew they would be getting together often, that it would also perhaps have occasional meetups outside of that or a way of communicating with some of the people involved, then that would also be a network. We did have these conversations about what is a network, and what is not a network. But, I think what would sum it up is a community of journalists who are passionate about collaborative journalism, who are involved in international collaborations, or European in this case, and who have one facilitator that could help you access the wider network if you wanted to get in touch. 

Jakub: So besides the financial aspect is there, what else is wrong? 

Catalina: What else is wrong? That's a good question, I think. So go back to what you said about, maybe networks or projects focusing more on Western Europe. I think that's not so much the case necessarily right now, but it depends on the outreach that you could do for projects. Just to kind of, close that bracket, because in our project, I'm from Romania, I'm currently in Romania. One of my colleagues had a lot of other contacts in Eastern Europe, so we were able to also access the different communities, that maybe don't get represented that much in the Western, Europe-centered projects. And we had the opposite problem, where we had sometimes had no, contacts or no active applications to activities from the western side of Europe. So it's very much a reflection of who is in the project. And that's what we've seen. I think some other wrong things and it's I don't know if wrong is the word, but it came up in conversations at our network meeting. In February in The Hague, we had quite a few conversations about, working together in collaborations and what kind of power dynamics, are present, especially in cases like, let's say you are a media organization working in Italy on stories about the migrant crisis, and you collaborate with a local journalist, but in the kind of, general current understanding, you are a journalist looking for a fixer to help you organize something. It's not so much, sort of as an equal collaboration between a Western European journalist and an Italian journalist. There are some power dynamics at play. So some of these topics that came up in our events, in conversations as potential issues and problems that we could address and, work together on and that, cross-border collaborations or working more as journalism networks, could be a solution for so that we remove some of these power dynamics that are at play between the Western Europe, big media organizations with brands behind them, and the local journalists who are just as equipped and have the same skills to be able to work on equal footing. 

Jakub:  I'm just trying to think moving forward how do you see this going? Because you've tracked quite a few, actually, those different networks. I thought I knew, most of them, but, in your directory, I have found some which I was not aware existed. Europe especially when you go into subregions, like the Balkans, or even southern Europe or northern Europe, the events I attend have little or no journalists from Scandinavia. When you change the centre of gratitude and you go to some Mediterranean country, then people show up from, continental Africa, and so on, because this is very natural for them that they are somehow doing their work or their countries are somehow influenced, and as such they might incorporate in more. So, if you were to select a couple of networks you find interesting for people to follow and discover who would that be?

Catalina: Well, I may have to choose favourites now, but. I think what I would suggest is to keep an eye on your Reference-- independent Media Circle, their network that's currently incubated by Arena for journalism in Europe and their network of European independent media. They're also publishing their podcast. They're doing research. So they'll have some, materials coming out in the next year. What they're doing is focusing on this operational side of journalism. So supporting independent media beyond editorial issues, more about sustainability, resilience, and making it work. So  I feel like that's very relatable to a lot of organizations in one format or other. And there will be resources available online, and they're focusing very much on finding some, solutions. I know that there's no, one solution that works for all in this case, but, they're working towards addressing this issue of sustainability from a non-editorial perspective and independent media. So they're definitely an interesting one to follow. I think another one that would also be very exciting to see where they go next is the European Data Journalism Network. They've grown quite a lot even since I started, this project, working on this project and first being in touch with them. They have been involved from the very beginning. They helped us also build the directory in a way, because when we first started, we wanted to showcase what we were working on to some of the networks in the early design stages to be able to also have their feedback, to be able to see what they think they would be the primary users. So it would be helpful to see how they find it, and what improvements we could make. And they were very helpful from the very beginning. So they were one of the first few networks who submit the registration on the directory website. Each network is voluntarily submitting a registration. So it's not me adding these pieces of information based on what I'm googling. It's networks themselves registering. So they submitted their profile very early on I think pretty much in the last summer. And then by the time we officially launched the directory online, I think they grew by ten members. So, their activity is very exciting to follow. They're also, thinking about sustainability from a network perspective. In terms of, where they could go next after their current funding goes. And, it's also something that it's the inside they're discussing openly with their members. So that would be something for you to follow up on as well as a potentially interesting podcast guest in the future. But yeah, they're the ones to watch. And they also, work in a very. I guess opens the way in terms of collaborations. That's a good word to use. So definitely watch them. And also I'm interested in following up, especially with the Environmental Investigations Forum. Because they're very much focused on environmental investigations. And one of the things that they highlighted in our conversations is the idea that funders tend to separate climate journalism and investigative journalism and tend to be funded separately through different tracks of funding. And they're very much, working towards promoting this crossover of environmental investigations and how important it is to see it as a valuable thing in itself and not, something just straddling two different types of journalism. 

Jakub: And, I just want to take a slightly different approach. Was there any specific effect of the war in Ukraine on all the networks, for example, when it comes to receiving funding in Europe, it has rapidly changed that, especially here in Central Eastern Europe. So are there any other effects in this regard that you may or may not have found? 

Catalina: I think we operated a little bit away from that. Of course, there are networks of, journalists or Ukrainian journalists who are currently in Europe. Different other networks of exile media from Belarus or Russia. But I think the main way that this translated into our project was more thinking about how we could safely include them in our work because our directory is public, a lot of this information is public. So our question was, to what extent can we involve, a lot of the journalists who have been impacted by the war in our work in a way that makes sense, considering all of the information that we are gathering is designed to be made public? So that was something that came up a lot in our project. We didn't focus directly on, Ukraine and the impact of the war on networks as part of our project. But, there is a sister project-related right now that Free Press Unlimited is working on. That is also actively looking at this connection between, the Ukrainian media and the rest of Europe and actively funding and supporting in that direction, as well as a lot of the activities of Free Press for Eastern Europe, which is also a sister organization of a few. So we try to also figure out how we could collaborate with them while keeping in mind that what we are doing may not be very kind of. You know. Yeah. The best kind of way to feature them in plaster all over the internet is if they're working in potentially sensitive environments. 

Jakub: Cool. Thank you very much, Catalina, for sharing your experience from the last year. I know that you and I spent some time thinking about and relaxing about the future, so fingers crossed for this. It was a pleasure to have you with us. Thank you for agreeing. 

Catalina: Thanks for having me. And I hope if you're listening to this, you check out the directory website, look through all of the different network listings, search for potential partners if that's what you're looking for, or just explore and get to know the work that the journalists are doing because it's, amazing to see the extent of the dedication that everybody puts into this collaborative work. And yeah, just enjoy reading it. Even if you're just curious, that's fine. It's also a site for just curious people. 

Jakub: And the link to the directory. You can also find it in the description of this podcast just to make it easy. Thank you very much for today. We are coming back with another episode very soon. 

Catalina: Thank you.