Journalismfund.eu funds stories investigative money-laundering and slave labour

Posted by Emma Heald on March 17, 2010 at 10:00 AM

The European Fund for Investigative Journalism, or Journalismfund.eu, launched in February 2009 with a plan to raise funding for investigative reporting that involved cross-border collaboration in Europe.

"In Europe we can see that politics, business, even organised crime all cross borders, while journalists and their coverage are often focussed purely on a national target group and are reluctant to cross borders," director Brigitte Alfter explained in an interview last year.

Just over a year on, two investigative stories have been published and eight more are currently being researched, with groups of two to six journalists working on each. The money raised by Alfter goes towards travel, advice, time and making freedom of information requests.

The first story to be published was on slave workers in Central Europe: men and women are lured to the Czech Republic under false pretences and then held captive and forced to work. Asparagus that is then sent for consumption in Western Europe is picked under such conditions.

The story involved collaboration between journalists in Romania, the Ukraine and Moldova, with a budget of €4180. A journalist from the Czech Republic backed out because he feared getting involved with reporting about organized crime. The story has so far been published in Romania, the Ukraine, Moldova and Croatia.

A money-laundering scheme was the subject of the second investigation, published earlier this month. Two Estonian reporters working at business daily Äripäev applied for €2550 from Journalismfund.eu to investigate rumours of money-laundering in Estonia and Bulgaria, and established contact with a Bulgarian investigative journalist who researched in his country.

Stories were published in Äripäev about dishonesty in politicians' campaign-funding, which led to an amendment of the law to tighten the monitoring of party campaign costs, and about a corrupt investment scheme, which led to an investigation by the Estonian finance watchdog agency.

As well as funding these specific investigation, Alfter hopes that Journalismfund.eu will leave behind a network of journalists who are inspired to participate in further cross-border collaboration.

Journalismfund.eu, a project started by the Belgian Pascal Decroos Fund, is currently operating thanks to a €114,000 grant from the Media Program of the Open Society Institute. Alfter is preparing to launch another round of funding, and is planning to start a similar project, whereby journalists carry out in depth research into an aspect of European legislation and this is then adapted and published throughout the European Union. She also hopes to pursue research into new business models for journalism in the near future.

A sister project from the Pascal Decroos Fund is Wobbing.eu: a site that supports and helps journalists who are submitting freedom of information requests.

As newspapers are forced to cut back on investigative reporting, nonprofit initiatives running off donations are increasingly common, particularly in the US, where a flock of small start-ups have sprung up in the past couple of years. But is this model sustainable? Is this the only way to fund investigative journalism?