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When Brigitte Alfter was the European Union correspondent in Brussels for a Danish newspaper a decade ago, the stories she covered were only relevant to her Danish audience. Her sources came primarily from Nordic countries. But to cover the EU from the viewpoint of one country or region often misses crucial context.

If you want to hold power accountable or to give the entire picture, then we have to go cross-border, says Alfter, a German-Danish investigative journalist who is writing a book on the topic.

She came to this realization in 2005, after a British reporter wanted to know how agricultural subsidies were spent across the EU and the information wasnt available centrally. He asked other journalists to gather data from their countries and pool resources. Thus was born the first big European cross-border journalism collaboration.

In the meantime, the EU makes its data more transparent, so now a fluid group of young journalists are taking continent-wide investigations one step furtherthey are cultivating partnerships, many of them data-based, to cover topics that cross borders, like climate change, security, migration, and corporate tax avoidance. Depending on the story, their network allows them to include reporters from relevant countries.

Cross-border projects are getting more attention and funding as the EU expands and big data becomes more important. The group journalismfund.eu, where Alfter is chairwoman, started funding cross-border investigations in 2008 and has so far sponsored 22 projects on topics as diverse as human trafficking to following the flow of Belarusian money through the continent.

Depending on the need for security, reporters from multiple nations can hold meetings in person if they are worried about surveillance, but usually they conference on Skype, divvying up tasks and setting deadlines. They also need to agree on which apps and forms of communication they want to work with. In many cases, they never meet in person. English tends to be their working language. And collaborations can include both institutional as well as freelance journalists.

Jacopo Ottaviani, an Italian data journalist, says he uses a project management tool called Trello to keep track of tasks. Frenchman Nicolas Kayser-Bril helped developed an app, called Detective.io, that stores very large chunks of data. The transnational team helps ensure the data is accurate.

It usually requires some sort of effort to check data and double check records, so if you are a team the work can be easily distributed. The team can also brainstorm the kind of research questions you want answered, says Ottaviani.

European countries vary dramatically on Freedom of Information and privacy laws. Some countries, like Austria, have official secrecy written into their constitutions, making government data is hard to obtain. So cross-border collaborators depend on locally based members to work their reporting networks and secure the information via other channels and on member journalists from countries with more liberal FOIA laws, like Nordic states, the UK, or the Netherlands, where EU-wide information not available in other lands is often obtainable. Alfter was part of a group that erected a website, wobbing.eu, to help journalists get information through FOIA laws. Wobbing is Dutch journalism slang for getting information through FOI requests.

Still, obstacles remain even after data is compiled. European countries keep their own statistics in their own unique way and in their own language, and countries also may define categories differently. For instance, one may record daily tobacco use while another tracks daily cigarette use.

Excerpt from:
European Union journalists cross borders for story collaboration