<< Background >>Crossborder collaborative journalism is applied more and more widely in the media, as journalists address global challenges and networked societies. The move towards collaborative journalism applies both for globally known investigations such as the Panama Papers on tax avoidance schemes (ICIJ, 2016) and for local and regional collaborations focusing on topics of immediate importance for the citizens such as affordable housing (Arena, 2021), just to mention a few examples. The digital opportunities have allowed for and accelerated the development of a new way of doing journalism (Konow-Lund, Gearing & Berglez, 2019), among practitioners dubbed crossborder collaborative journalism (Alfter 2019). This mindset and method occur at the level of the individual journalist as well as among media. Thus, crossborder collaborative journalism is a competence that journalism educations need to provide their students with, in order to meet demand in the industry. This is the immediate need we wish to address with this project. Particularly in education of future journalists, it is paramount to embed the overall objective into the larger context of democratic societies and the role of journalists in them. The major challenges we face all transcend national borders – be that the climate, the pandemic or the inequality – and can only be solved in shared efforts. An informed public is essential in democracies, and the content of such information needs to transcend borders. Crossborder collaborative journalism holds enormous potential to bridge gaps and to provide necessary information in this field of tension – between the local level, where citizens live and work and send their children to school, and the European or global level, where political decisions can be made to address the challenges. This is the essential need we wish to address. Crossborder collaborative journalism practice is generally defined by 1) journalists from different countries 2) decide on an idea of mutual interest, 3) gather and share material and then 4) publish to their own audiences. In practice, this means that journalists work near the audiences they serve while – through the process of working with the partners in the collaboration team – not only get access to information from other countries but also maintain the European or global outlook and in the process challenge each their own potential national bias. These developments mean we have to equip the next generation of journalists – our students – with additional competences such as intercultural communication or the competence to constantly maintain a transnational outlook even when doing local, regional or national journalism. Practical competences include interpersonal communication in remote and diverse teams and international project management. Digital competences are indispensable , so future journalists need the necessary familiarity with digital tools to actually make journalistic research and publication happen while being mindful of digital opportunities and limitations, digital routines, and digital security for example for source protection, as well as an understanding of ethics and media law in transnational contexts. With the Crossborder Journalism Campus project, CJC, we want to develop a model for crossborder collaborative journalism education. Once developed, tested and documented, the pilot collaboration model is flexible because it enriches already existing curricula and thus has high transferability potential. Alfter, B. (2019). Crossborder Collaborative Journalism. A Step-by-Step Guide. Oxon/New York, Routledge. Arena (2021). Cities for rent https://cities4rent.journalismarena.media/ ICIJ (2016). The Panama Papers: Exposing the Rogue Offshore Finance Industry https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/ Konow-Lund, M.; Gearing, A. & Berglez, P. (2019). Transnational Cooperation in Journalism. In: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Oxford University Press<< Objectives >>Crossborder collaborative journalism is included into national journalism educations occasionally, though not yet widespread and often taught rather than practiced. To our best knowledge and according to our stocktaking efforts, there is no other European partnership of journalism educations offering a model like the one we here envisage (Alfter, Wiik & Deuze, 2019). For the Crossborder Journalism Campus partnership, five universities and one professional organisation join forces. Together, we have some of the most experienced and well-connected practitioners, most senior journalism educators and most prominent academics in the field. With the CJC project, we want to develop a pilot collaboration model to teach crossborder collaborative journalism. We do this applying a collaborative approach adapted to the goals, reality and curricula of higher education. The objective is a model, that enriches existing curricula with the European and collaborative competences while at the same time fully respecting the existing structures. We deliberately want to develop a flexible model, because it will be immediately applicable by other journalism educations without the need to adapt, integrate and nationally accredit new curricula. The CJC will produce adapted curricula for the partner journalism educations to be applied during and after the project phase. The summarizing concept of the CJC model will be the starting point to adopt, adapt and further develop the model. Within this overall concept of networked educations, we want to provide the students not only with a shared set of basic knowledge and understanding of this new field of journalism practice, but also with journalistic tasks for them to apply skills, analyse and create material and evaluate the outcome. This will provide the students with a valuable experience and competitive advantage after graduating. To achieve this, we will run two pilot collaborative journalism classes at master level with students from three universities in an integrated teaching process. In each of the pilot years, each university will follow its own curricula, embedded in the respective university’s journalism programme. Together we will design and develop a variety of learning activities, guidelines and teaching material to ensure that all teaching staff and students have the same understanding of the process and all work towards the same goals during the yearlong joint investigations/students’ crossborder collaboration projects. The entire process will be observed, documented and analysed by our participating lecturers and other academic staff with the goal of making the final concept clear, easily accessible, transferable and sustainable. The purpose is to create and share an innovative way of teaching a new journalism practice. We know from our preparatory work that there is an interest among other journalism educators for transnational projects, and there is a general demand for internationalisation within following many universities overall vision. To support this overall objective and the general goal of the Erasmus+ Cooperation Partnership, the Collaborative Journalism Campus works towards four outcomes: 1. Pilot collaboration model: To develop a comprehensive and flexible model integrating crossborder journalism into existing curricula 2. Journalistic outcome: To facilitate students’ crossborder journalism production through facilitating a collaborative culture in offline and digital environments 3. Digital collaboration portal: To develop and apply digital and online resources for students and lecturers 4. Concept material and intellectual output: Ongoing analysis, knowledge sharing and dissemination within partner organisations and our target groups Alfter, B.; Wiik, J. & Deuze, M. (2019). Taking stock of crossborder journalism education in times of crossborder collaboration. Conference paper GIJC 2019 https://ijec.org/2019/11/24/gijc19-academic-track-reader/<< Implementation >>At the centre of the Crossborder Journalism Campus is the innovation effort to develop the networked curricula for a collaborative journalism education. To test them, we plan two pilot classes, each such collaboration class is set to last one academic year. In colloquial language we’ve dubbed this model ”plug-ins” to the existing curricula, because the collaborative concept builds upon these and intends to enrich the existing curricula at the participating universities. Instead of creating a new course, the crossborder collaboration project will be embedded into the courses and programmes at the respective universities. The first pilot with students will run from the autumn of 2022 to the early summer of 2023, the second pilot from the autumn of 2023 to the early summer of 2024. All activities are aligned with this academic rhythm. Pilot class 1 preparation (winter 2021/22) Preparation meeting of all partners / 1st transnational project meeting (Paris) Digital work environment set up, preparatory training of lecturers conducted, online frontpage launched Adaption of existing syllabi and curricula at each university to enable inclusion of the transnational students’ projects Pilot Class 1 (autumn 2022 - early summer 2023) Kick-off meeting 1 – students, lecturers, academics (Amsterdam, Brussels) Collaborative class (remote, students at each their university) Evaluation compiled 1 (summer 2023) Evaluation and further planning / 2nd transnational project meeting (Leipzig) Pilot Class 1 publication (summer 2023) Evaluation of first pilot class published on website Publication of students’ work on website Publication of students’ methodological reports on website Publication of data sets (if applicable) on website Social media activities by/with students about the publications, the evaluation and CJC in general First year multiplier events (spring/summer 2023) Multiplier events targeting journalism professionals, media managers and journalism lecturers. (Leipzig, Gothenburg) Initial professional exchange (presentation, feedback) about the CJC beyond the partners via existing networks and events for journalism professionals, media managers and journalism lecturers (as of summer 2023 and to end of project) Participation in online and offline conferences on national and international level such as the European Journalism Training Association (EJTA), Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN), European Broadcasting Union (EBU), World Association of Newspapers (WAN-IFRA) but also regional and national entities such as Netzwerk Recherche in Germany, Gräv in Sweden, Skup in Norway or the like. Evaluation first year and preparation Pilot Class 2 (spring-summer 2023) Meeting of CJC lecturers and academics Fine-tuning of syllabi and curricula, if needed Pilot Class 2 (autumn 2023 - early summer 2024) Kick-off meeting 2 – students, lecturers, academics (Amsterdam, Brussels) Collaborative class (remote, students at each their university) Pilot Class 2 publication Publication of student’s work on website Publication of students’ methodological reports on website Publication of data (if relevant) on website Social media activities by/with students about the publications, evaluation and CJC in general Second year multiplier events (spring/summer 2024) Multiplier events targeting journalism professionals, media managers and journalism lecturers (Paris, Gothenburg) Evaluation compiled 2 (summer/early autumn 2024) Concluding meeting lecturers and academics Final project report published on website Final knowledge sharing to national and international professional groups Participation in online and offline conferences (see above) Publication of material about the Crossborder Journalism Model on the project website Outreach to other journalism educators<< Results >>The Crossborder Journalism Campus plans four overall outcomes. Each of these headlines cover a number of tangible and measurable results: 1. Pilot collaboration model: To develop a comprehensive and flexible model integrating crossborder journalism into existing curricula 1.1 Crossborder journalism plug-ins to the syllabi/curricula of the participating universities 1.2 Two one-year pilot classes on master level including lectures, tasks and material addressing: 1.2.1 Crossborder collaborative journalism practice and theory 1.2.2 Intercultural and interpersonal communication in a diverse/crossborder journalism context 1.2.3 Remote team work, editorial coordination of teams, digital collaboration across borders 1.2.4 Journalists and journalism in network societies in practice and theory 1.3 Professional peer feedback gathered and model disseminated when presenting the concept for journalism professionals, media managers and journalism educators 2. Journalistic outcome: To facilitate students’ crossborder journalism production through facilitating a collaborative culture in offline and digital environments 2.1Journalism students collaboratively prepare and then publish journalistic production (articles, visualisations, podcasts etc) with national media and/or on CJC-website 2.2 Journalism students publish methodology reports underlying their journalistic publication on the CJC-website 2.3 Public data library of data used by the journalism students to document and/or visualize their journalistic publications, published on the project website to demonstrate data journalism aspects of the project 3. Digital collaboration portal: To develop and apply digital and online resources for students and lecturers 3.1 Shared secure work environment 3.2 Shared data library 3.3 Publication space compiling students’ publications and methodological reports 3.4 Publication space for CJC project material 4. Concept material and intellectual output: Ongoing analysis, knowledge sharing, feedback and dissemination within partner organisations and our target groups 4.1 The model of collaborative crossborder journalism education will be summarised in CJC concept documents with a detailed, step-by-step description of how to prepare, run and evaluate a collaborative crossborder journalism education 4.2 Throughout, lecturers will participate in peer-trainings to deal with crossborder journalism methods, digital collaboration and the shared data 4.3 Literature package with relevant material for students’ reading lists as well as literature for lecturers preparation 4.4 Teaching guide for lecturers 4.5 Articles targeting professional journals to get feedback and share the CJC concept 4.6 Empirical material gathered for an academic article to be published independently of the CJC project In the short term, the development of a collaborative crossborder journalism education holds the opportunity for significantly improving and Europeanising the participating higher education partners. In the longer term, this flexible and easily replicable crossborder journalism education concept holds the potential of a multiplier effect to answer the above noted needs for crossborder competences in the media industry and in our democracies.