HERTA - Hedging European Research Transfer Activities

Research funding institutions spend considerable sums each year to support media/journalism research, so far without ensuring reliably that research results gained with taxpayer money arrive in newsrooms or society at large. The European Journalism Observatory aims to address this problem in the new convergent and Web-based media world – with the goal to support the work of researchers and students, of quality conscious journalists and other media practitioners who are interested in research results across cultural and language barriers. EJO is becoming more and more a network of research institutes, analyzing developments in international media systems and journalism cultures in addition to training young journalists and media researchers to facilitate the transfer of knowledge. With its broad, multifaceted and multi-channel approach, this network is a low-budget project which brings researchers and media practitioners from different European countries and cultures together and which serves as an international platform for information exchange. Our SCOPES-proposal is aimed at enlarging this network of cooperating research institutions and journalism training facilities to Baltic, Central Eastern and South-Eastern European countries. All new partners share the interest in making research more visible and in improving journalism through an increased transfer of research among journalists and newsrooms, utilizing old and new media, particularly the Internet, as a platform for professional exchange and growth.