Journalists have an essential role in the new media landscape as a pillar of credible and contextualized information. Being in competition with several alternatives, non-professional or even deliberately manipulated news, professional journalism should be empowered by new competencies and skills. Among the opportunities enabled by digital technologies, processing, analysing and visualizing big amounts of data as well as the multi-sectoral and digital cross-border co-operations open new fields of journalistic activities, and new ways to speak about public issues. However, this environment also entails technical and economic risks, and it demands expertise in IT security as well as the development of business models and strategies from journalists and media companies. Journalists face several ethical challenges that should be handled to meet their social responsibilities. Fake news and hate speech have become a big issue in the public sphere, and so have whistleblowing and activism.

By improving skills of a new generation of European journalists, NEWSREEL will contribute to the strengthening of the common European democratic public sphere by improving the collaborative and cross-border journalism that is able to elaborate and make tangible the huge amount of available data, and that is based on a predictable business strategy and a firm ethical foundation.