Challenging old habits through open access collaborative journalism: the case of housing

From the climate crisis, to migration to the rise of the platform economy to many other topics, stories and relevant issues are more and more transnational in nature, and journalists need to and do collaborate across borders to research and report on them. In the last few years, cross-border journalistic collaborations have made major headlines particularly in investigative networks. But what if we were able to harness this new methodology and practice to develop more open and flexible collaborative networks?

Since mid-2019, Arena for Journalism in Europe has been building the Arena Housing Project: an open collaborative network for journalists and researchers on a widespread and constantly worsening housing crisis in Europe. Arena is developing the online infrastructure, working routines and guidelines to allow for collaborative investigations and other projects to be swiftly launched and coordinated so that more journalists can work together and share knowledge across borders.

Speakers at the panel will share experiences on building transnational journalism infrastructures in Europe, on how the Arena Housing Project was built from scratch, and why and how journalists use the network to connect by topic across European borders. This allows for classic oversight over political developments, information-sharing across borders about the many parallel developments in affordable housing, cities and their battle against short-rental platforms on a national as well as on a European level and many other topics. And indeed, such a network can manage to compile feedback to Brussels decision-makers about the effect of regulation throughout Europe – in the public interest.