Video for newspaper journalists

Maastricht - March 6, 2008

The diet of news consumers has changed. Readers have turned online, away from broadsheets. Content providers are rapidly integrating video coverage into their daily offerings.

Too many times, though, a newsroom’s multimedia strategy consists of tossing hand-held cameras or mobile phones to reporters and telling them, “Go get video.”

To help newsrooms become “video literate”, the European Journalism Centre now offers video training courses for newspaper journalists.

These seminars target both field reporters and editors who want to learn what it takes to produce professional video with the latest generation of cameras and editing equipment. By the end of the course, participants will have a basic understanding of video as the language of the 21st century.

Course dates: 21-25 April / 16-20 June / September, TBA

Raymond Frenken, the founder and chief editor of EUX.TV, will lead these “Video literacy” training sessions. Prior to EUX.TV, Frenken worked for the Dow Jones, Bloomberg and Financial Times news services as well as broadcaster CNBC Europe.

A course overview:

* Monday afternoon: Introduction to convergence and new media storytelling. Introduction to terminology and tools. Introduction to workflow. Analysis of best-practice examples.

* Tuesday: Hands-on equipment session. Story development for the web: concrete learning from best-practice examples and preparation of Wednesday’s production.

* Wednesday: Shooting video, editing new and “repurposed content.”

* Thursday: Post production. Distribution platforms and delivery systems. Legal and copyright issues.

* Friday morning: Lessons learned. The big picture – where from here?

The five-day course will be held at the head office of the EJC in Maastricht, the Netherlands. The course fee is €1,200, with a 10 percent discount for each employee from the same media outlet. The course is offered in English, Dutch and German. It begins midday Monday and ends midday Friday. The EJC will supply all equipment, two lunches and a dinner. For more information, please contact the European Journalism Centre at .

Posted on March 6, 2008 by EJC
Filed under announcements.

Central European NGOs to raise awareness about development cooperation

Maastricht - March 5, 2008

Prague, 10 March, 2008 – The European Journalism Centre is cooperating with the Czech nonprofit People in Need, as well as four other organisations from new EU member states, to launch a three-year project which will strengthen the role of Central European countries within the context of European development aid and international politics.

A primary goal of the project is to engage the public with issues about the developing world and stimulate debate on development cooperation.

The program will focus primarily on politicians, university students, and journalists.

“One of the reasons why the developing world is not more visible in the Czech, Slovakian, Polish and Hungarian media is the lack of personal experience with developing countries, lack of information and insufficient budgets for traveling available to most of the media. We want to change this situation and make the coverage of these topics more similar to the way they are covered by European and American media where the developing world has more space available,” Blanka Medková of People in Need said. People in Need is the international coordinator of the project.

Reporters from Central Europe will be invited to take part in seminars led by experienced journalists who have worked for Reuters, participate in study trips and have an opportunity to exchange ideas and strengthen contacts with their counterparts in developing countries.

The subsequently improved media coverage is expected to have a positive impact on political decisions regarding the form and amount of foreign aid that Central European countries offer.

“The role media can play in bringing visibility to development issues is vital: decision-makers, society’s agents of change and the public at large, can be strongly influenced and pressured by hard-hitting, factual reporting and well-worded commentaries,” Josh LaPorte of the European Journalism Centre said. The EJC is the biggest European organisation specialising in education of journalism professionals.

The project will also directly ask the Central European politicians to participate in study trips to developing countries, attend seminars with development experts and take part in international conferences.

“Most politicians from this region have never had an opportunity to see extreme poverty in developing countries with their own eyes or to visit a development project. People are likely to decide differently about the budget for development cooperation if they have this kind of direct experience,” Medková said.

Additionally, experts from all four countries will prepare an analysis that will compare the development aid policies of their countries, which share similar historical backgrounds. This analysis will create a framework for sharing successful policies and models of development cooperation within the Central European context.

“Development cooperation should not only be about numbers and statistics. Improving the mechanisms and structures through which development aid is channeled is vital for ensuring a real positive impact on the lives of poor people in developing countries,” project organisers say.

Another important aspect of this three year program is raising awareness among university students who are not regularly confronted with these topics in their everyday curricula.
“It is important to approach this age group because it is today’s young people who will be steering the development politics in the future. They have one advantage compared to the older generation - many of them have had a chance to experience the developing world firsthand on their travels or volunteer trips,” Medková said.

The project is funded by the European Commission. It will be run by four organisations from new member states: Czech People in Need, Slovakian Partners for Democratic Change and Slovak NGDOs Platform (P MVRO), Polish Humanitarian Organisation Foundation and the Hungarian Foundation for Development of Democratic Rights. The media aspect will be implemented in cooperation with the European Journalism Centre from the Netherlands.

Posted on March 5, 2008 by EJC
Filed under news, development.

Feeding you the news

Maastricht - January 10, 2008

The EJC is pleased to offer a hearty portion of European news with the beta version of eufeeds.eu, a continuously updated news site that serves up 300 direct news feeds, taken from newspapers situated in the 27 European Union countries.

Few news sites encompass publications from so many countries. And the EJC plans to keep eufeeds.eu an evolving feast, adding feeds from relevant newsmagazines or television sites.

eufeeds.eu promises to be a useful tool for anyone who wishes to stay up-to-date on European news - or examine the differences in European news judgment or journalistic style on a country-by-country basis. This news tool, which gathers news updates as often as every 20 minutes from all major online European newspapers that use RSS (Really Simple Syndication), can be beneficial to anyone who wants to optimize their news consumption.

eufeeds.eu is continuously updated with content spiders digging up and spooling out a regularly updated stream of news.

This RSS system is now used by the most important newspapers online that have discovered the possibility to attract more audience sending the news through feeds.

The phenomenon is, of course, connected to the multiplication, in the last years, of personal webpages. With the RSS system, every person is able to add and to visualize the contained web as he prefers, within his own space online.

In addition to utilising RSS, Eufeeds catalogues each nation’s newspapers in relation to its relevance. It also furnishes readers with important information: the paper’s coverage area, its address or years of foundation. 

The website is in ‘beta’ for the moment, and the EJC will continue to develop to add features to eufeeds.eu in the coming weeks and months. All feedback is welcome. Please e-mail .

Posted on January 10, 2008 by EJC
Filed under projects.

EJC, local partners begin two-year Armenian media development programme

Maastricht - October 30, 2007

The Matra Social Transformation Programme, part of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, awarded a two-year grant to the European Journalism Centre to implement the Journalism Practices Enhancement Project in the Republic of Armenia in cooperation with two local partners: the Media Law Institute and the Freedom of Information Centre. Both are based in Yerevan, the capital.

This is the second project ever funded by the Matra program in the South Caucasus country. It will formally begin in November 2007. 

The project will help prepare local journalists to address corruption in government and private business sectors by providing Armenian students with the reporting tools for analytical and thoughtful investigative pieces. It will also provide them with practical legal assistance, by way of fostering relationships between journalists, media lawyers and students. The hope is to avoid the legal minefields associated with producing investigative stories in Armenia. 

“One of the underlying aims is to bring the Dutch experience of a free press to Armenian journalists and media lawyers,” says Josh LaPorte, EJC project executive for the program. “Investigations of these kind can lead to greater transparency and good governance.”

Specific programme activities include investigative journalism competitions leading to published pieces in the local press and a conference dedicated to updating and modernizing journalism and media law curricula at the university level.

The project ends with study visits to media outlets and journalism schools in the Netherlands for the student winners of the competitions.

By embedding Dutch best practice in journalism and law faculty curricula, the project will maintain sustainability of its ideals well after the implementation period.

Posted on October 30, 2007 by EJC
Filed under projects.

Computer-assisted reporting seminar series in Balkans begins in November

Maastricht - October 8, 2007

Computer-assisted reporting, while difficult and time consuming, can yield groundbreaking stories.

During a series of three computer-assisted reporting workshops, the EJC and its partners in Southeast Europe will help journalists in the Balkans further their ability to glean relevant information from electronic data. Starting in November, 2007, workshops will be held in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Macedonia.

The first will take place at the Media Centar Sarajevo from 9-11 November for 12 journalists from Bosnia-Herzegovina.  Veteran EJC trainers, Jan Gunnar Furuly of Norwegian daily Aftenposten and Per Anders Johansen of Norwegian television, will lead this course. It will focus on practical tools journalists in developing media markets can use to deepen and strengthen the impact of their investigative pieces. 

Funding for the workshops comes from the Oslo-based Fritt Ord Foundation.

The second workshop will take place in February 2008 in partnership with the Media Centar Nis for journalists from Serbia and Montengro.

The final workshop will be held in April, 2008, in Skopje with the Macedonian Institute for the Media for journalists from Kosovo and Macedonia. Journalists that show exceptional ability will be nominated for attendance at the 2008 Global Investigative Journalism Conference to beld in Lillehammer in September.

For more information please contact Josh LaPorte.

Global Investigative Journalism Conference 2008 Blog

Posted on October 8, 2007 by EJC
Filed under development.

Bloggers (Un)Conference asked back

Maastricht - September 28, 2007

Even before the first annual European Bloggers (Un)Conference ended Friday, the European Journalism Centre was invited to hold a second edition.

Monique van Dusseldorp, the programme director of Picnic/Cross Media Week - a four-day creative festival held at a former gas factory building in Amsterdam - visited the bloggers’ conference Friday morning to thank its participants for travelling to Amsterdam and invite the EJC to host the conference again next year.

Wilfried Rütten, director of the EJC, happily accepted the invitation.

The two-day (Un)Conference gave bloggers from the Ukraine, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Georgia, Macedonia and Lativa a chance to meet and dialogue with their Western counterparts.

The EJC uploaded videos, slideshows, links and summaries about the conference online. All material is available here.

Also, visit our Picnic network page or our wiki site.

Posted on September 28, 2007 by EJC
Filed under announcements.

Party at Brussels press centre will toast relaunch of EU4Journalists

Maastricht - September 10, 2007

The European Journalism Center is always trying to make the job of journalists who cover the European Union a little easier. So on 21 September it will host a cocktail party celebrating the re-launch of www.eu4journalists.eu in the lobby of Brussels’ press center.

The EJC will host journalists and policymakers alike in the Residence Palace for a two-hour celebration of this invaluable online tool, starting at 16:00. Wilfried Rütten, the director of the EJC, will deliver the welcome words.

At www.eu4journalists.eu, we give journalists background details and essential information about the way the EU works: its main actors, institutions and policies. We try to do this with as little jargon as possible.

EU4Journalists works especially well as a starting point for journalists covering subjects with which they are unfamiliar.

Our dossiers give a solid background on particular policy areas and the links in the site give ways forward to finding the latest new developments. The EU Basics section explains the inner workings of EU machinery. Our Contact Guide puts journalists in touch with people giving more detailed information, and maybe quotes, on the matter at hand.

Reality necessitates that EU4Journalists always be a work in progress. The EJC is always adding new elements and removing old ones.

Parties interested in the relaunch celebration may RSVP by 14 September to

For more information about www.eu4journalists.eu, please contact

Posted on September 10, 2007 by EJC
Filed under announcements.

EJC to host bloggers at Picnic

Maastricht - August 14, 2007

The European Journalism Centre will host a European Bloggers (Un)Conference: “East meets West,” to be held 27-28 September in Amsterdam, in conjunction with Picnic/Cross Media Week.

The conference will allow bloggers from the European Union and its neighbour countries to meet, share ideas and discuss new media developments in their respective countries.

On Thursday morning Evgeny Morozov of Transitions Online will talk about how the ‘East-West divide’ is reflected in the blogosphere.
Later on, Community animator and Project Manager Vanessa Witkowski will present CaféBabel Blogs and the Cafébabel community.  Managing Editor Michael Nederlof will then talk about the experience of the community driven news site Skoeps.nl.

The rest of the conference will continue in parallel tracks:

• “Citizen Journalism: How and When It works”
• “Blogging in Dangerous Places: Security Issues”
• “How does blogging affects society and politics, and viceversa”
• “Building Successful Web2.0 applications”

The EJC has set up a wiki where you will find more information.

The official website of Picnic.

Posted on August 14, 2007 by EJC
Filed under projects.

Innovation Journalism: Detecting Weak Signals

Maastricht - July 20, 2007

The European Journalism Centre will from 25-27 July at Avenue Ceramique 50 host a group of media experts from Europe and the United States at its seminar, “Innovation Journalism: Detecting Weak Signals.”

“Innovation Journalism” is a major new concept shaping the future of the media landscape. It stresses the importance of technological innovations and addresses the necessity of better media coverage of these developments. Innovation and innovation reporting are seen by many as significant catalysts for social transformations. Innovation journalism can be a tool by which innovations will become more readily disseminated across society.

The conference will assess the impact of the early signals from the realm of innovation journalism and will look at the impact different actors in the innovation space can have on developments. It will also discuss the new ways in which information is now being generated and distributed by citizens and journalists alike.

The EJC has partnered with the Amsterdam-Maastricht Summer University, Stanford University and Deutsche Welle to bring about 15 industry experts to Maastricht for this three-day conference. Stanford’s David Nordfors, a pioneer of the concept of innovation journalism, will open the conference when he delivers the keynote speech at 3 p.m. Thursday.

The seminar will address in particular innovation developments within the European Union, seeking to identify what can be learned from both winners and losers in the innovation space. Discussions will also be held on integrating innovation into working newsrooms.

Speakers will include: Claude Erbsen of “Innovation Media Consulting”; Wilfried Runde, head of innovation projects at Deutsche Welle; John Burke of the World Editors Forum; Roland Strauss of the European Innovation Dialogue with Strauss & Partners; Rufus Pollock of Cambridge University; Marian Semm, a senior consultant for media and entertainment publishing at IBM; Manfred Moormann, the head of broadband services for Telekom Austria as well as speakers from Ernst&Young and KPMG.
To download the complete programme, click here.

Posted on July 20, 2007 by EJC
Filed under projects.

Programme of support for the Tunisian media

Maastricht - June 25, 2007

The European Journalism Centre and the African Journalist Training Centre (CAPJC) partnered in May 2005 to implement a programme aimed at supporting Tunisian news media.

The programme is designed to strengthen the press in order to improve ties between the media and civil society in Tunisia. It is financed by the European Union as part of the process of supporting the economic and social transition in the country.

To accomplish these objectives, the partners implemented a comprehensive media development programme aimed at Tunisian journalists. It includes professional training, stages and coverage of media events.

All the information about the programme is available on CAPJC website. To download the information brochure (available in French), click here.

Posted on June 25, 2007 by EJC
Filed under projects.