This week, The Loop talks to Brigitte Alfter, founding director of Arena for Journalism in Europe. Arena creates infrastructure for cross-border collaboration for journalists and is the organisation behind Dataharvest, the European Investigative Journalism Conference, and Climate Arena, an annual conference for climate and environmental journalists.

Brigitte Alfter has been part of cross-border collaboration among journalists in Europe from the very early stages, beginning with Brussels-based journalists meeting every year to acquire the data on EU agricultural subsidies. This work led to the important realisation of how journalists can work together across borders without any competition.

“In journalism, we have this tradition of competing.  But we established this annual meeting where we met and looked at shared data, shared documents, and also shared methodology and the experience of collaborating, because journalists don’t have a tradition for that.”

Today the cross-border collaborations are almost mainstream, and a new way of working together has emerged: A non-hierarchical cooperation where there is something to gain for everyone involved in the sense that the collaboration adds something to the journalistic product.

“It is all voluntary, and the work is based on motivation rather than on hierarchical structures. That changes the character of how we work.”

Listen to the episode to hear more about the history of collaborative journalism in Europe, how new editorial roles have developed, and how independent entrepreneurial journalism have been founded and organised themselves.