Dataharvest 2025 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

Funding journalism is a recurring issue. In recent years, we’ve focused a lot on the ’how’: How to phrase an application, how to develop a realistic budget, how to reach out to potential funders. And we’ll continue with that, of course: but the question of how to fund public interest journalism has, if possible, become even more urgent. But we also need a deeper understanding, a shared terminology and fora to discuss these questions.
Brigitte Alfter will talk about the freshly released Arena Paper on fundraising. She is also the author of a GFMD paper on public funding to journalists and has been a speaker at ’Saving Journalism’ events at Columbia University, an annual conference on a wide variety of funding sources and funding models for journalism in our time.
The session will be followed by a fundraising café with advice on your project or for your organisation.

Solomon's investigation "Who Owns the media" mapped the media owned by the top oligarchs behind the biggest media conglomerates in Greece and, more importantly, the oligarchs' broader businesses. We identified 800 companies in sectors such as shipping, energy, sports, banking, and real estate, and searched business registries in more than 30 countries. The data were published in an interactive network diagram and a dedicated website.

This session will present the methodology for dealing with large amounts of data, finding companies of the same owner, and investigating registries that sometimes disclose ownership and others that do not. We will work on case studies of companies and deal with the possible obstacles and difficulties involved.

Most investigative journalists have by now become used to getting data and building up datasets and databases as part of their research. And that's also most often the case in cross-border collaborative investigations, where data is normally the common language of the journalists and media participating (as well as English).

What is less common is then publishing or making those databases accessible, and using them as part of the storytelling when presenting and disseminating our investigations. And that's a shame, because the databases behind our research can provide us with an opportunity to reach and engage our audiences in interesting and novel ways.

In this session, two [OR three] investigative journalists, from two very different contexts, Serbia and Switzerland, will present how they went about building up or compiling complex databases as part of their investigations, and then making those databases publicly available and accessible to their audiences, and using the databases as part of their storytelling.

Come to this session to get inspired and learn how you can compile and use databases, not only as part of your research, but also making them part of the story to increase the reach and engagement of your investigations.