16 May 2022. On 6 May 2022, the M100 Sanssouci Colloquium took part at the two-days St. Gallen Symposium at the University St. Gallen in Switzerland. Under the title “Media’s new power: More impact through collaborative journalism” three panelists, who are at the forefront of this innovative way of journalism, discussed following questions: Which technical, but also content-related reforms are necessary to strengthen independent, high-quality journalism in the long term? How can the financing of independent media and journalist networks be guaranteed? How do cross-border, cross-linguistic and cross-cultural collaborations work? What benefits do they get? What is the future of collaborative journalism and which problems can arise? What expectations do players have of politics to guarantee media diversity, independence and democracy in the future?
On the panel we welcomed:
Joanna Krawczyk, chairwoman of “Gazeta Wyborcza’s” partnerships. She leads the activities of the Leading European Newspaper Alliance – the largest media network in Europe in which “Die Welt” from Germany, “El País” from Spain, “La Repubblica” from Italy, “Le Figaro” from France, “Le Soir” from Belgium, the “Tages-Anzeiger” and the “Tribune de Genève” from Switzerland and the “Gazeta Wyborcza” from Poland have joined forces. The main objectives of LENA are to develop business models for the media in times of crisis and to combine editorial work on important publications from all over Europe with promoting high-quality journalism. The content of 7 LENA-affiliated newspapers published in six languages reaches 100 million readers in Europe and the world.
Mathias Müller von Blumencron, one of the leading journalists and digital media executives in Germany. Until July 2021 he worked as co-editor-in-chief at Berlins newspaper “Der Tagesspiegel”, being responsible for the digital transformation of the organization. From 2013 until 2017 he worked as editor-in-chief digital media for “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, implementing the successful digital strategy. Until 2013 he has worked for 20 years at the German newsmagazine “Der Spiegel” where he was as co-editor-in-chief responsible for the publication of the Wikileaks documents in cooperation with “The New York Time” and “The Guardian”. He serves currently on the board of the Swiss Media organization Tamedia and is member of the M100 Advisory board.
Paul Radu (@IDashboard) is a co-founder and co-executive director of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a co-creator of the Investigative Dashboard concept and a co-founder of RISE Project, a platform for investigative reporters and hackers in Romania. He has held a number of fellowships, including the Alfred Friendly Press Fellowship, the Milena Jesenska Press Fellowship, the Rosalyn Carter Fellowship, the Knight International Journalism fellowship as well as a Stanford Knight Journalism Fellowship. He is the recipient of numerous awards including in the Knight International Journalism Award and the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, the Global Shining Light Award, the Tom Renner Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, the Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting, the Sigma Award for Data Journalism, an IJ4EU Award, a European Press Prize and others. Paul is an Ashoka Global fellow and a board member with the Global Investigative Journalism Network gijn.org and other organizations. He is also a jury member with a few journalistic awards.
Paul was working the Panama and Pandora Papers, the Pegasus Project and the Russian, Azerbaijani and the Troika Laundromat (Money Laundering Machine of the respective Elites) and he coined the term “laundromat” to define TOR-like large scale money laundering operations.
The panel was knowledgeable moderated by Astrid Frohloff, well-known German television presenter, journalist, communications consultant and business coach and also a member of the M100 Advisory board. She focuses on solution-oriented television formats. Until recently, she hosted the investigative political magazine “Kontraste” (ARD). As a correspondent, she reported from various parts of the world – many years from the Middle East.
Joanna Krawczyk explained how the work with seven newspapers from different countries function and what benefits they have from the cooperation. The core of the work of the LENA network is publishing news and creating news on an editorial level. The members of LENA are exchanging texts they have published in their newspapers with the other members. The texts are offered by a daily newsletter and the members can select and reprint the ones which they find interesting for their own media products. “We are creating added value to our newspapers because we are showing different points of view from different newspapers and countries,” Joanna stretched. “This exchange is a great added value to our newspapers, because we differ in our approaches and attitudes, we have different opinions and it’s very important to show these different opinions from different parts of Europe in our newspapers.” But the work is not only exchanging, translating, and reprinting the texts, Joanna continued. “We have to contextualise them for our readers, to put them in the right context so that the readers get familiar with the circumstances of the written subject.” The network is also organising joint interviews with top notch persons to join forces and extend the reach.
The LENA network was founded a few years ago when due to the decreasing advertising and subscription revenue newspapers decided to reduce the number of their foreign correspondents. When the war in Ukraine started, “Gazeta Wyborcza” had only one correspondent in Ukraine. The newspaper alliance started very quickly cooperations with Ukrainian media and journalists on the ground. The network members are also very often renting offices together, on the one hand for economic reasons, on the other hand to increase the quality of the work through the cooperation of journalists from different newspapers. This happens in Ukraine as well as in Russia. The LENA network was also one of the first organisations which established a fund to help Ukrainian journalists. The fund is currently paying salaries for 57 local outlets and over 160 journalists in Ukraine, which is also a journalistic collaboration. The cooperation doesn’t involve writing together or sharing articles, but it requires sharing sources. The aid also includes necessary working material, protected computers and even protective waistcoats.
Cooperation is also the heart of the investigative network OCCRP, but it works differently. The OCCRP is a non-profit platform for investigative reporting focused on organised crime and corruption worldwide. “We started very small in Eastern and Central Europe and grew organically with every investigation we made”, Paul Radu explained. “To investigate organised crime, you need a network to fight a network. Because when you investigate a corruption scandal in my home country Romania and find out that the trail leads to the Seychelles, you need someone in the Seychelles who is able to investigate the documents there. And so on and so on. We grew on the back of every story we made.” Paul and his co-founder Drew Sullivan started the network in 2007 as a cross-border project focused on electricity traders in the Balkans. The small team found out that this business was led by organised crime figures and corrupt politicians. Today, the OCCRP is the biggest investigative network worldwide with over 160 permanent employees and hundreds of freelance journalists working together. OCCRP is also organising security trainings and they ensure that their colleagues are insured when it comes to legal threats. They also pay special attention to the health of their employees; “This is very important to us,” Paul explained, “because without healthy journalists you can’t have a network that is able to create investigative reporting as a service to the public.” When they started the project, Paul continued, they were seen as “a kind of weird organisation, doing weird stuff”. Today, they are cooperating with huge media houses worldwide who benefit from the expertise and immense network of the organisation.
OCCRP is working with Ukrainian journalists since years. When the Russian invasion started, some of them had to leave the country, but some are still there. Through the OCCRP initiative “Russian Asset Tracker” and the collaboration of many international media organizations they created a large database which reveals all real estates, yachts, private airplanes etc. owned by Russian oligarchs and which is widely used by citizens, activists and law enforcement.
Mathias Müller von Blumencron emphasised that “collaborative journalism is one of the most important and powerful developments we had in journalism in the last 20 years. In early years, investigative stories started with a secret talk in a park or a secret document. The work was physical. Nowadays investigative journalists have to deal with a huge amount of data which must be analysed. Most of the data is only available in different formats and has international implications. Therefore, you need international partners and colleagues to decode and work with the material.” Normally, Müller von Blumencron said, there is a huge competition between newspapers and magazines, but when it comes to the chance to reveal huge criminal and/or corruption stories, media houses have realised that cooperation is better than competition.
Journalistic collaboration is the opposite of all the rumours and fake news on social media platforms. “It’s our task to fire the brains; to find the facts and describe the facts, also complicated facts”, Müller von Blumencron said. Compared to the past, “we are sliding into a different world in which we see more clearly the satisfaction of working together,” he continued. “If five organisations across Europe come up with a story like the Panama Papers or something similar, it’s a huge achievement for journalism. And it’s not only democracy under threat, also journalism is in many countries. So there is a certain pride and a certain ethos which is fostered by those stories. Perhaps it has to do with digitalisation. I work in the digital world since many years, and we always collaborated with our peers in other organisations because we didn’t know which software to use, which story works, how to earn money and how to establish a system of assembling subscribers. We are all in the same boat, we are all fighting with this immense change in our society and technological world. And we see that we can only learn from each other without compromising our own success, also the financial success. The collaborative approaches and the big stories have helped to gain more respect and more acceptance.”
Conclusion: The discussion has shown how different journalistic cooperations are, what their significance is and what advantages result from them without giving up journalistic autonomy. Cooperations, whether between editorial offices or as a cross-border network of (freelance) journalists, are an essential part of media freedom and democracy. They are indispensable for exposing abuse, crime and corruption and for presenting them in comprehensive way to the population. The three panelists demonstrated the different ways and advantages and the benefits for a functioning democracy impressively.
