EIJC & Dataharvest is an annual, four-day conference, organised by Journalismfund.eu, which brings together journalism heavyweights, data specialists and coding whiz-kids to exchange skills and story ideas. EIJC18 & Dataharvest will take place on Thursday 24, Friday 25, Saturday 26 and Sunday morning 27 May 2018. Like last year, place to be is the charming city of Mechelen, 20 minutes outside of Brussels and very easily accessible! Address is Zandpoortvest 60, 2800 Mechelen at Thomas More University College - Campus De Vest.
Journalismfund.eu vzw is an independent non-profit organisation under Belgian law that aims to promote quality in-depth and cross-border journalism by giving working grants to journalists, by providing networking opportunities and by organising training sessions.
The European garbage companies are transnational, makes billions of euroes each year and is vital to any city´s daily life. But how can we analyse them? What data do they have? And how can we get our hands on it? All the methods perspectives presented can be used for stories in other Europan countries. Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet revealed how and why Oslo’s renovation company "Veireno” failed at collecting garbage, while also violating the working environment act systematically. Among 180 employees, mostly of eastern European origin, the team identified more than 2000 violations of the Working Environment Act in four months. The findings caused a political uproar, in a city ruled by a centre/left coalition priding itself of supporting worker’s rights. In total Dagbladet analyzed more than 2 million excel-cells. It was the use of and knowledge about spreadsheets and Excel that led to the most important findings in the project. Using VBA-codes, filter-functions and different queries. While claiming the collection of garbage was getting better, Dagbladet revealed the chaos dominating both inside the company and the city administration, analyzing data handed out via Freedom of information acts. In 2017 the project won the national contest for data journalism, Data-Skup.
