Topics in Cross-Border Journalism

Kurzfassung/Abstract

This chapter looks at the topics that appear most often in cross-border coverage. We define topics as the main subjects of a discourse. Focusing on cross-border investigative journalism networks, we evaluated 119 different projects according to the main topic, news values, starting point of the investigation, and timeframe. In more than 55 percent of our sample, the projects involved more than two journalistic partners. The projects mostly dealt with systemic failure in a continuous, open-ended perspective, not with single terminated events. Business crime was a prominent topic, closely followed by ecological destruction. The projects share the characteristic that their focus is on negativism, harm, and damage. Future research should include smaller (bi-national) and non-investigative collaborations for comparison.