LEARNO is the European Journalism Centre’s video training platform. The free, self-guided online courses tackle the needs of journalists and journalism students navigating the ever-changing media world.

We also serve bloggers, advocacy groups, media entrepreneurs, and writers. Our topics cover current practical challenges and our instructors are experts in their fields, and are often available to connect with participants via our online community platform.

Courses include Charting Tools for the Newsroom, Mapping for Journalists, Going Viral Using Social Media Analytics, Cleaning Data in Excel, Bulletproof Data Journalism, Google Search for Journalists, Emergency Reporting and Verification: The Basics.

Until 2017, the European Journalism Centre worked alongside EU departments through framework contracts, enabling us to address all main EU policies.

Journalists were trained on a wide variety of topics, from the complex issues of TTIP, to environmental protection, to EU Enlargement. In 2015 and 2016 we were able to work mainly with those EU departments overseeing humanitarian aid and development cooperation allowing us to take many journalists to the regions often underrepresented in mainstream media.

Since 1992, the European Journalism Centre has been informing and educating journalists through background briefings, press trips and hands-on training. Over the last few years we have diversified our activities and moved online with self-led video courses and curricula-defining handbooks created by our in-house production team. Our proven expertise on a wide range of topics, from government policy to basic journalism skills, helps us build dynamic and educational programmes that really benefit participants and partners wishing to build capacity and develop skills.

The Data Verification Handbook is a definitive guide to verifying digital content for emergency coverage. Authored by leading journalists from the BBC, Storyful, ABC, Digital First Media and other verification experts, it provides the tools, techniques and step-by-step guidelines for how to deal with user-generated content (UGC) during emergencies. It has been translated into ten languages and dozens of partners were involved in its production.

When a crisis breaks, trusted sources such as news and aid organisations must sift through and verify the mass of reports being shared and published, and report back to the public with accurate, fact-checked information The handbook provides actionable advice to facilitate disaster preparedness in newsrooms, and best practices for how to verify and use information, photos and videos provided by the crowd.

While it primarily targets journalists and aid providers, the handbook can be used by anyone. Its advice and guidance are valuable whether you are a news journalist, citizen reporter, relief responder, volunteer, journalism school student, emergency communication specialist, or an academic researching social media.

Mobility across borders is in the European Union’s DNA. But how does it actually work out? What are the dynamics, benefits and drawbacks of mobility within the EU, and how do they relate to migration involving third-country nationals? How do common perceptions stack up against the facts? And which factors shape such perceptions?

The research project Role of European Mobility and its Impacts in Narratives, Debates and EU Reforms (REMINDER) finds out. Led by the University of Oxford, it includes a dozen major universities, think tanks, and research organisations.

Within this interdisciplinary group, the European Journalism Centre explores how journalists as well as their institutional sources position themselves as arbiters of public knowledge and debate about mobility and migration.

The project as a whole delivers broad evidence-based input for European policy-making and training programmes, but it also underpins the professionalism of journalists and improves their access to dependable information.

When hate speech online threatens individual journalists or news outlets, it not only takes a high personal toll on the victims, but also thwarts legitimate conversation in social media and discussion forums. However, fighting it one by one amounts to tilting at windmills. In order to achieve scale, a Data-driven Approach to Countering Hate Speech (DACHS) is the way to go.

Together with information management company DataScouting, the European Journalism Centre is developing an open source platform based on Machine Learning that helps journalists identify and fend off threats efficiently in real time, and that renders concerted misinformation or hate campaigns transparent.

First and foremost, the platform will be a practical tool for journalists and news organisations to protect a healthy public discourse. At the same time, it will also provide systematic and actionable insights into the dynamics of toxic online conversations, and enhance the accountability of social platform providers.