Dataharvest – The European Investigative Journalism Conference is a meeting point where networks are established and nurtured, data and documents shared, cross-border projects conceived and teams established. The conference days are all about learning, inspiration and getting some work done.
The conference is like a European editorial meeting: Participants develop story ideas, get together in new networks to work on a common story or sit down with coders and designers to analyze and present a new data set. Editors talk about how to best structure the work process or how to best protect freedom of expression in practice. This is how Dataharvest works.
Participants range from senior investigative editors and journalists at established media and production companies to freelancers and journalists at non-profit outlets and junior journalists working on agenda setting projects.
What makes Dataharvest, The European Investigative Journalism Conference, unique:
- It is a working conference, where international teams meet and coordinate. Numerous stories have begun at the Dataharvest conference.
- It is a learning conference – with systematic training in data skills, digital safety collaborative methods and other relevant skills.
- It is an innovation conference – with knowledge sharing about new business models and new journalism techniques in a time of dramatic changes in the media world
- It is a networking conference – because stories don’t stop at the border. We actively stimulate the networking to build new teams for stories and collaborations
- It is a knowledge sharing conference – where speakers from successful and important journalistic projects and newsrooms give presentations, head workshops and share their experiences.
Dataharvest, the European Investigative Journalism Conference – how we got here
The very first Dataharvest meetings were held in 2009 and 2010, when a small group of journalists and data developers of the Farmsubsidy.org network met to work with fresh data about the beneficiaries of the EU’s generous farm subsidies. They were organized under the auspices of Farmsubsidy.org, a network working for the transparency of EU farm subsidies.
By 2011, the meeting took its current form and was given the title Dataharvest, open to all interested journalists, 35 at the time. It opened up to groups outside the Farmsubsidy.org community, inviting journalists, transparency experts and coders – all in the field of European, cross-border, collaborative, investigative and data journalism. The working atmosphere from the early years was maintained as the number of participants kept growing.
Dataharvest – The European Investigative Journalism Conference is arranged by Arena for Journalism in Europe and in 2024 attracted around 535 journalists from 48 countries.