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For early stage Researchers and Journalists

The team of the Erasmus+ project Enhancing Research Understanding through Media (ERUM) has recently published guidelines, which should support students, young journalists and researchers in the development of their science communication skills and contribute to a better understanding of the role of media in communicating science to non-scientific audiences.

The Guidelines are based on prior research conducted in the project, a survey amongst journalists and media professionals, as well as a literature review. Especially the COVID-19 pandemic has proven that there is need for further guidance as far as the exchange between media and science is concerned. Journalists have to deal with scientific information, avoiding phenomena such as false balance, while at the same time, (young) scientists have to reflect upon the communication of their scientific findings to a broader audience. With the preparation of the guidelines, the ERUM team would like to offer a useful tool to both – (young) journalists and (future) researchers!

ERUM is a project carried out by university partners from Austria, Cyprus, France, Greece, Lithuania, Luxembourg and Spain and focuses on the question how universities and media professionals can work together and learn from each other to improve the quality of information amidst changing and dynamic flows of information. Within the project, various events bring together journalists, researchers and students. In addition, the team produces freely accessible materials such as reports, guidelines and open educational resources for higher education.

The guidelines are available for download here.

OBC Transeuropa kindly invites EJTA members to Data protection in journalism: practical tools, a webinar to be held on 2 March at 4 pm CET. The initiative comes as a contribution of the European Data Journalism Network to PANELFIT, the Horizon 2020 project I told you about some time ago focused on the impact of technology in research and innovation, with a particular focus on data protection.
 
During the webinar, the Practical Handbook for Journalists on Data Protection will be presented. In a spirit of participatory development, the webinar will include an open space for questions, from which we will take inspiration to expand the Handbook.
 
The event will be led by Iñigo De Miguel Beriain, senior researcher at the University of the Basque Country.

Starting from March 2021, Lomonosov Moscow State University's Faculty of Journalism will organize once a month an academic seminar featuring world renowned researchers, both Russian and international. Media scholars from across the world will be invited to share relevant theoretical and practical insights in their area of research. Discussion between international and Russian scholars will be organized as an important part of these events.

Click here for more info.

Three EJTA member universities, The Danish School of Media and Journalism (DMJX), Hochschule der Medien (HdM) and Windesheim University have come together for an EU Erasmus+ funded project, because they share an understanding of the current difficult state of journalism and ideas on how to improve the situation. 

DIALOGUE is designated to develop curricula for teaching constructive and dialogue-based journalism as well as audience development and engagement to students and professionals. It was launched in October 2019 and is led by DMJX. The three-year project has just finished the first year and the first interim report of the project. Read the whole report here

 

 

Our student-colleagues from FEJS inevitably had to cancel their Annual Congress in Ljubljana but they creatively and inventively organised an interactive online event instead on Instagram. They discussed ‘Covering the Coronavirus’ and interviewed journalists, learned about ways to de-stress during a pandemic and even got together during a small digital concert.

The EJTA General Assembly 2020 will be held online from 5 to 10 of November in St. Petersburg, discussing the interesting topic: digital inequality. Participating students are asked to keep all afternoons and evenings free.

The Institute of Communication Studies (ICS) is implementing the project “Connecting the Dots: Improved Policies through Civic Participation” in North Macedonia, supported by the British Embassy in Skopje. As a part of it, the platform HOME aims to create short environmental and educational videos, short nature and environment documentaries as well as short in – depth journalistic stories that point on specific environmental issues such as pollution, protected areas, endangered species, climate change and environmental education in the N. Macedonia and Balkan Region. The idea is not just to present the problem, or the area of interest, but also to give human aspects of the story and to send a call for action and change.

ICS seeks to engage two UK experts, preferably one experienced in pre-production (scriptwriting, research and planning) and the other experienced in the practical part of the production (shooting and directing on set, editing and mastering the material) of environment documentaries:

Project outline and  call to action document

Dataharvest - the European Investigative Journalism Conference is the annual meeting place of investigative, data, cross-border and entrepreneurial journalists in Europe. Due to the covid crisis, the conference is fully online with over 100 sessions and workshops spread over three months from 1st of September to the end of November. Each week there will be inspiration, training and networking.
This model allows also journalism educators to get a good impression of what is going on in investigative and data journalism, and the disentangled programme offers easy planning.

Link to the Programme and Registration webpages.

As some of you know, in the framework of the Erasmus+ programme "Newsreel – New skills for the next generation of journalists" the Erich Brost Institute for international journalism (EBI) has developed a seminar to teach journalism students of TU Dortmund cross-border collaborative journalism. As we are currently in the process of writing chapter about our experiences - together with Tabea Grzeszyk, herself founder of the network Hostwriter.org, journalist and journalism teacher - we would like to include an overview of other seminars and workshops on this evolving trend.


More information about NEWSREEL can be found here.
More information about Hostwriter are available here.

We understand collaborative cross-border journalism along the criteria set by Brigitte Alfter consisting of:
1) journalists from different countries;
2) collaborating on a topic or case;
3) sharing their findings;
4) publishing to each their audience.

In our understanding, teaching collaborative journalism means teaching the basics of teamwork and intercultural sensibility, as well as investigative journalism and project management skills in theory and practice.
We would like to learn more about courses, workshops or programmes that were developed by you and your colleagues with the aim to prepare your students for creating work environments that encourage collaboration against competition - and as such for changing traditional mindsets and practices in journalism.

Therefore, we have prepared a very short questionnaire, which we ask you to answer until July, 15th. You find it here.

For any questions, please mail to

 

European project aims to foster fact-based public debate

Over 100 fact checks, and counting, are available on the eufactcheck.eu website. That is a pan-European fact-checking project involving 33 journalism schools from 24 countries. After a successful 2019 edition, the site tripled the number of visitors this spring.
The theme of the 2020 edition is ‘European politics, policies and contexts’. This is broader than the specific EU theme in the period before the Parliamentary Elections in 2019. The project doesn’t focus on national themes or contexts but students check claims or statements that have cross-national, pan-European impact.

New insights
The project is an ongoing success. The site has a run rate of 200 visitors per day. In the last three months, the number of visitors has tripled up to 58 000.
Also the students of the participating schools are enthusiastic and gather new insights in their future job. “In times of information overload, it is good to learn how to select what is important and what is correct”, says one student. “It is interesting to see how some politicians construct a false reality out of correct bits of information”, adds another one.


Monitoring media
EUfactcheck takes another course during the corona crisis because the participating schools want to safeguard the journalistic and methodological quality of the published fact checks. Times are strange and unpredictable now, with governmental regulations straining the work of journalists, with media dealing with changing truths from one hour to the next, with the undefeatable speed of social media countering false claims and statements, with difficulties for students of journalism to contact experts.
The educational core of the project and the intensive coaching of students are also influenced by the closure of universities all over Europe and restrictions on information.
That’s why the journalism students will not focus specifically on debunking claims on corona. They will publish blog posts about the media approaches and monitor how journalism is handling this changed reality in Europe and beyond. If the circumstances allow it, students can choose to check news on corona.


Handbook
Coordinator Nadia Vissers and the steering committee of the project published a handbook. “We wanted to tell the story of the project”, says project coordinator Nadia Vissers. “And we want to share our lessons learned with everyone who has plans to set up a multinational project. Moreover, it helps educators who want to include a module on fact checking in their curriculum.”


From Finland to Italy, from Spain to Russia
The participating schools come from Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Italy, The Netherlands, Russia, Spain and Sweden. And the EUfactcheck project welcomes new participants from Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Georgia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Romenia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Ukraine.  All journalism schools publishing on the site are member of the European Journalism Training Association (EJTA), that groups about eighty journalism centres, schools and universities from about thirty countries across Europe. With the project EJTA wants the journalism students to grow a deeper insight and interest in democratic processes by enhancing their media literacy and as such developing both critical understanding of the media and active participation in the media. In this way the quality of journalism and journalism education will be improved and at the same time EUfactcheck contributes to a better fact-based public debate.
EJTA members work together to improve journalism education in Europe, enabling members to collaborate on exchanges and teaching and research projects, and meet regularly to exchange ideas and information.

Project website
Instagram: eufactcheck
Twitter: @EUfactcheckEU
Facebook: eufactcheck.eu
Downloadlink handbook

For more information:
Nadia Vissers
EJTA Board member
Overall coordinator EUFACTCHECK

+ 32 485 31.83.57

A free online course by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin, in partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNESCO, with support from the Knight Foundation and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

This massive open online course (MOOC) is offered simultaneously in four languages: English, French, Portuguese and Spanish. The course has been planned to benefit journalists covering the pandemic, but it can benefit also journalism professors and students and it is open to anyone interested in the topic.

Click on this link for more information.

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