Crossing the borders: Experiencing collaborations first-hand

What happens when students from Hungary, Portugal, Romania and Germany join forces to investigate the challenges of environmental protection across Europe? We wanted to find out and dove into the subjects of veganism, youth activism, climate change deniers and sustainable shopping. During the process, we experienced frustration, revelations, and unexpected success.

When we – the German students – first started the seminar in October 2019, only few of us knew what collaborating as a journalist means, let alone what a cross-border collaboration is. To say that we had little experience with the topic would have been an understatement. Of course, we had all worked with other journalists before, but usually not on a bigger scale than one writing the article and the other one taking the pictures. Hence the wild guessing in our first session: am I already working collaboratively when I get information from a correspondent? And aren’t we all collaborating constantly when working in a newsroom?

Changing this state of confusion and experiencing a journalistic collaboration first-hand was therefore something we were all excited for: This was our chance to try a completely new form of journalism that challenged all the old believes and strategies about how to survive in the strongly competitive media markets. It even contradicted with what we were told in other classes at university or in trainee- and internships.

As if wanting to prove to us that this relatively uncommon practice can actually work, our lecturers provided us with several different examples of successful projects, for example “The Reentry Project” from Chicago or the international collaboration on the “Panama Papers”. These examples not only helped us to develop a better understanding of the possibilities of journalistic collaborations, they also gave us the confidence and motivation that we might be able to succeed as well with our own project. Furthermore, they showed us that there isn’t one perfect way to collaborate, but a broad range of approaches.

Additionally, within the framework of the conference of the European Journalism Training Association (EJTA), we were able to listen to a keynote given by Brigitte Alfter, one of the – if not the – leading researchers in the field of collaborative journalism. During the course we were given a variety of different reading materials which included her work. Hearing her talk about her research with a strong passion was nonetheless even more convincing. Another speaker that day was Tabea Grzeszyk, freelance journalist and CEO of Hostwriter, an open network that helps journalists to easily collaborate across borders. Among other things, Grzeszyk stressed the importance of all collaborating partners benefiting from the project equally and pointed out that one must keep the different journalistic cultures as well as possible restrictions and dangers for the partners in mind when working cross-border. Even though we would exclusively partner up with students from EU states, this was an important point considering the different degrees of the freedom of the press in the respective countries. We also discussed the differences and similarities in the journalistic cultures in Romania, Hungary, Portugal and Germany during another session later on.

Since we were complete novices, we needed some help to start our collaboration: usually, you would either have an idea that needs to be worked on collaboratively or be part of an international journalism consortium or network that comes up with a new topic together. We on the other hand approached the collaboration slightly unconventional: We already knew who we would collaborate with, then we came up with an overall topic and in the last step we set up the final groups according to our own interests. In these final groups we also defined the topic. Our main topic was ”Youth and Environment”, the subcategories we came up with were “veganism and vegetarianism”, “climate change deniers”, the “Fridays for Future movement” and “different approaches to protect the environment”. The students from each country were then asked to join one of the four groups and discuss the topic further.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t as easy as it sounds: even though we are all journalism or media science students, communication became our biggest obstacle. As we never met our fellow students from the other European countries in person, we had to rely on electronic communication channels such as Slack. For some reason or another, some partners didn’t register themselves or weren’t using it frequently – and therefore missed crucial parts of the conversations.

Nevertheless, all teams managed to narrow down their topics and prepare a pitch for a meeting of the German team members with a group of journalists experienced with collaborative journalism, Dóra Diseri from Reporters in the Field, Tabea Grzeszyk from Hostwriter, Harald Schumann from Investigate Europe and freelance journalist Andrea Hansen. The pitch included the presentation of the overall topic and research questions, potential sources, the schedule and deadlines, the planned workflow, the communication channels, ideas for the publication and the problems the groups were facing. The experts then gave their feedback and helpful advice in plenary. For some groups they suggested another focus, for others they pointed out too high ambitions. Furthermore, they shared their own experiences and their contacts. After that, the groups had the opportunity to talk to the experts individually and ask further questions. This session led to some changes in the subcategories: the veganism and vegetarianism group focused on sustainable livestock farming, the group dealing with different approaches to protect the environment on sustainable consumption.

For a lot of groups, this session kick-started the cooperation. Once the main research questions were set, tasks could be assigned to the team members. Also – as suggested by the experts – a lot of groups switched from Slack to other communication platforms like Signal. During the research phase, most groups managed to establish a somewhat frequent communication with all team members which made planning a lot easier. Step by step, the groups were able to collect data, gather information and conduct interviews.

But still, not all issues were resolved. One problem was the language barrier: none of us is a native speaker and communicating in English was therefore challenging. Some feared to come across as rude, others couldn’t assess the language skills of their team members and weren’t sure whether everyone was on the same page. Additionally, there was some confusion about different cultural practices: How much small talk is necessary? How can you ask someone to do something without nagging? Other groups struggled with people not wanting to talk to journalists and therefore getting stuck in their research. In addition to that, the project partly overlapped with exam weeks, holidays and challenging internships.

Even though these problems were kind of irritating and led to some inefficiency, they also made the whole experience realistic. If we had only read about these struggles, we wouldn’t have been forced to come up with solutions that might help us in future collaborations. Even if we never work in a cross-border project again, we can all take away useful experiences for any teamwork. Also, we were never on our own: the German partners could discuss every issue they faced with their lecturers. The results of the collaborations aren’t in yet. Some groups might publish their work, others might not finish their research. But whatever the result will be: when we stark our next cross-border cooperation, we will be prepared.

This blog post was written by Jana-Sophie Brüntjen, a student of TU Dortmund.
The photos were taken at the meeting with collaborative journalists at the Erich Brost Institute of TU Dortmund.