Collaborative journalism projects – and notably cross-border journalism – have attracted a lot of attention recently. Outstanding examples such as the Panama Papers were widely noted by global audiences, but the audiences of national and local news organisations welcome the trend as well. In times of cost-cutting, joining forces across newsrooms and national borders is one way to enable high quality journalism. With regard to the fast-moving digitalisation, it seems indispensable for journalists to collaborate and search support – especially to be able to handle massive amounts of data.

The term collaborative journalism has no generally accepted definition yet, but it is clear that the trend to cooperate is challenging competitive thinking as the dominant mode of interaction in the field of the media. While the area is still evolving, there already seems to be a consensus on specific practices. One characteristic that certainly stands out is an ethos of mutually sharing resources and expertise, while pursuing the goal of enhancing the quality of journalistic research as well as audience reach.

Different types of collaboration can be distinguished along the features formal or informal, temporary or on-going, and in terms of the production of content by the collaborating partners in separate, co-creating or integrated working teams. This definition includes not only the cooperation between media organisations and single journalists, but also cross-disciplinary teamwork between journalists and engineers, or between media institutions and civil society organisations such as NGOs. Some media professionals and experts further include into their definition of collaborative journalism examples of journalists’ coordination of lawsuits to access information, shared trainings and mentoring programmes, or joint event hosting. There is no consensus yet in the profession about whether to understand the integration of the audience, also known as crowdsourcing, as a part of collaborative journalism.

Cross-border journalism is a new method of collaborative journalism. Journalists from several countries investigate jointly a topic that is of high relevance in all countries. They collect and share information that they mutually complement to impart the results to their regional, national and international audiences despite different languages and journalism cultures. Hence, a big advantage of teaming up with other reporters from abroad is that the story can be pitched to a broader range of media platforms and audiences. Additionally, being part of an international journalistic community might grant some degree of protection especially to journalists who work in an authoritarian environment.

In recent years, cross-border  journalism  projects     have   attracted  a  lot  of  attention. The Panama Papers, revealed in 2016, have been the journalistic scoop of this decade and a prime example for cross-border journalism. Journalists from the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung collaborated with the International Consortium for Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and analysed 2.6 terabyte of data exposing offshore companies linked to more than 140 politicians in more than 50 countries which they received from a whistleblower. More than 400 journalists  from nearly  80 countries, working in 25 languages, collaborated in the project.

Other well-known collaborative journalism projects are the Lux Leaks (2014), documenting the special tax deals granted by the government of Luxembourg to some of the world’s largest corporations, the Migrants’ Files (2015), showing how many refugees have really died on their route to Europe, and the Paradise Papers (2017), demonstrating how companies and individuals use tax havens to disguise their assets.

To be able to work in international teams, intercultural skills as well as mutual trust are important. Moreover, competitive thinking is inappropriate or even counterproductive for cross-border reporting.

Copyright is a legal right, existing in many countries, which grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights to determine whether, and under what conditions, the original work may be used by others. Usually copyright is only valid during a limited time. The exclusive rights are not absolute, because there might exist some limitations and exceptions, including fair use. Copyright is applicable to certain forms of creative work and frequently includes reproduction, control over derivative works, distribution, public performance, and moral rights such as attribution. Copyright might have different legal framing in different countries.

Creating a new project (or upgrading an existing one) can be made possible through an open call to a large group of people to contribute with small or larger sums of money to realise a specific project. Kickstarter, which has a journalism section, and Indiegogo are the two biggest crowdfunding platforms. One successfully Kickstarter-funded project has been for example Bellingcat, a British online investigations platform.

Data mining is the process of finding stories in large amounts of data. As in other types of journalistic practices in newsgathering, the process depends on the data source, on experts that can explain the data for journalists and their audiences, on the work hypotheses, and on the data interpretation by the journalist.

Large amounts of data, from public and private sources, are now available for journalists, as a result of freedom of information laws and of a generalized vision that public transparency and public access matters. A dataset is a collection of a set of information related to an environment or a process. A dataset is collected using a common structure and a common theme. It represents the raw, unanalysed data about a reality, such as how many people own a house in different European countries, or the gender of employed people in a given region. The information may be stored as numbers (such as the age of someone) or as labels (such as the gender of someone).

Datasets are organised in databases, for which good examples are the European statistics presented by Eurostat or the Global Health Observatory (GHO) data of the World Health Organization. Databases may also include collections of texts, images, videos or sounds: parliamentary discourses, war photography, historical videos, or radio archives. For some of these audio-visual databases, specialists are in an active search of data mining tools so that they become easier to use and manage.

Databases become more and more accessible due to rapid developments in computer sciences and in database-related solutions and to the accompanying development of new tools for cleaning, comparing and finding patterns in large sets of data. Expert advice in this area may come from statisticians and computer science specialists interested in machine learning, data management, pattern recognition and the like. Databases may also be searched by journalists and the public, independently, with the help of tools such as Google Trends (that explores Google data on popular searches, by country and by time period) or Hoaxy (a tool that identifies the spread of false news online). Based on a work hypothesis, journalists and other interested parties may approach a large database to search and compare specific data: museum entries in a certain country over a period of time, public transportation facilities in a developing region, public spending on health and life expectancy at birth. As correlations does not equal causation (this is, more public spending on health is necessary, but not sufficient to increase life expectancy), an efficient usage of data mining results depend on good, reliable sources and on journalistic professionalism.

The last census of journalism education programmes by the World Journalism Education Council in 2013 counted almost 2,400 programmes worldwide. Despite this large number, studies show that journalists across the globe are being trained and educated in similar ways– although media systems and journalistic cultures, societies and political environments differ extensively. Communication scientist Philip Gaunt asserted in his International Handbook on Journalism Training (1992) that similar training patterns have often developed from the following shared communicators’ universal needs: an orientation/understanding of one’s workplace system and the specialised function of different mass communication fields; a liberal and sciences background to better understand how a wide variety of issues affect audiences; basic skills like language skills; technical skills; and the ability to upgrade skills and to learn new ones. Gaunt’s landmark work dates from 1992, but similar training needs and educational approaches remain relevant until today, increasingly challenged by the Internet and new technologies. In recent years, journalism educators have been particularly faced by the growing importance of technical competences, including data journalism, as well as new media business models.

The first school of journalism was founded at the University of Missouri in the United States of America in 1908, four years later the Pulitzer School of Journalism opened at Columbia University in the US. Both programs shaped curricula around the world, but they varied in their approach and objectives. While Columbia accentuated the intellectual development of a journalist, Missouri emphasized occupational training.

Since then, the theory-practice divide has been one of the prevailing issues regarding the content of journalism education. While employers and editors often have been opposed to journalism education at universities because they see it as too theoretical and believe that academic journalism educators do not know what the media industry needs, scholars emphasise how important it is to enshrine journalism education in academia. The latter assume students should not only get prepared for industry-related jobs but also should develop critical-thinking skills for changing society in positive ways.

The term open datarefersto freely available public and private data, that can be accessed, aggregated, and disseminated further by any citizen, provided that the user acknowledges the source of the data. Initially, open data offers were linked to data that was not private, confidential or classified as secret and was gathered, by public and private organisations, with public funds. The range of such data is very large, from weather, traffic, and scientific research, to statistics and election results. Freedom of Information Acts which have been enacted around the world opened public access to databases on public budgets and performance, on legal acts and on data gathered by public agencies on education, health, pollution or crime.

In addition, privately held organizations, like Trade Registers, offer access to lists of companies and their owners; stock exchanges store and make available free financial and business information on traded companies; privately owned companies share anonymised information online to help public organisations create better policies and plans of action. In the case of private companies, a commercial organization may decide to share online open data through a dedicated portal, such as Uber Movement, an Uber initiative to help urban planners. Data collaboratives are joined efforts by private companies, humanitarian organisations, and public sectors representatives to solve an issue, such as illegal fishing or an outburst of Ebola, based on available digital data.

Open data are valuable only if they can analysed and interpreted with relative ease and if the meta-data – author, publisher, timeliness – make the open data reliable. In the past, investigative journalists organized hackathons to gather programmers that are able to access public data on companies and make these data more easily searchable and readable. Today, there are public data portals available across Europe, and an European Data Portal that gathers not only datasets and data visualization portals, organised by categories and by country, but also lists of global re-users that make the data more accessible for the general public, through applications and platforms.

Journalistic skills are professional abilities that help a journalist fulfil a professional role set by peers and society.

Landmark studies on how journalists view their role in society, such as the longitudinal research on U.S. journalists by Weaver and Wilhoit, identify at least four roles for journalists: informative disseminator, interpreter, adversary role and populist mobiliser. In the eyes of Western journalists and their audiences, the first two roles are the most legitimate ones.

In their role as an informative disseminator, journalists have to be able to provide factual information quickly to a large audience. They need to acquire the cognitive and technical skills to gather and verify information from different sources, to present clear, coherent information in words, image/illustration, sound and video and to overcome their own biases and accept their own mistakes in public. Other skills required for this role refer to working in large, collaborative teams and being able to find and interview sources with different backgrounds.

The interpretative / investigative role refers to providing analyses of complex issues, including national and international policies, and investigating claims of people and organisations in power. In this case, the cognitive skills required refer to an appreciation of public interest issues and the ability to search for competent sources, which are able to explain complicated problems in the language of the layperson. Further, journalists can use a large array of technical and digital tools to make content and data easier to access and understand by their public. 

The adversarial journalist confronts government and big business and is actively interested in setting the public agenda. The journalistic skills required are related to gathering and verifying data from different sources, to mastering rhetoric and narrative but also to finding equilibrium and neutrality. More often than not, adversarial journalism may end up being accused of bias and attention-seeking, in order to monetize audience interests for hard news.

The populist mobiliser is linked to a more recent trend in journalism interested in motivating people to get involved and to express themselves, in pointing to possible solutions and in developing intellectual and cultural interests. Here, investigative and interpretative reporting is done alongside opinion writing and social media promotion of journalistic campaigns for public causes.

There is no generally accepted definition for the term ’fake news’, but experts and researchers agree that it is news that is fabricated deliberately to deceive people. However, not everyone who spreads false information does so on purpose, but rather because s/he did not recognise it as false or misleading.

The European Union suggests using the term 'disinformation' instead of 'fake news’. One of the main reasons for this is that the phenomenon is more complicated than just the dissemination of untrue statements. The other reason is that politicians started to use the term 'fake news' to stigmatise those media outlets that are critical against them. According to the High Level Group on Fake News and Online Disinformation of the EU, disinformation is every information that is false, inaccurate or misleading, and that is fabricated and published to cause public harm or to gain profit.

Melissa Zimdars, assistant professor of communication and media at Merrimack College, Massachusetts, has put together a list containing „false, misleading, clickbait-y, and/or satirical ’news’ sources” to show that fake news are only one part of the desinformation problem. According to her, „click-bait and ’truthiness’ are just as bad”. She has developed a grading system to be able to identify more quickly the following news types: fake news (in the strict sense), satires (the use of humour, irony, exaggeration and false information), extreme biased news (may rely on propaganda or decontextualised information), conspiracies (promoters of conspiracy theories), rumour mills (gossips and innuendos), state news (repressive governmental news), junk science (untested or unproven theories presented as scientific facts), hate news (promotes any kind of discrimination), click baits (usually credible content used in an exaggerated or misleading way), proceed with caution contents (sources whose contents require further verification), political news (provide generally verifiable information in support of a specific political side).

Fact checking is the process of identifying whether the facts in a non-fictional text (news article, public speech video) are true or not. Fact checking is a verification technique and can enhance transparency in journalism.

There are two essential forms of fact checking: ante hoc fact checking, i.e. checking a text before publishing it, and post hoc fact checking, which means that fact checking takes place after the text was made public. Currently, with disinformation spreading faster than ever online, post hoc fact checking has become a common journalistic practice.

There are many possibilities of fact checking: e.g. contacting the person who made the statement, doing a google search for other articles on the topic, looking for experts with a different point of view, checking books and other relevant literature. Some organisations are specialised in developing tools for fact checking. It is highly recommended to use some of these tools while verifying the truth of facts in a text.