Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

In this session, we'll cover budgets in all shapes and sizes — including investigation budgets, project grants, EU grants, and organisational budgets as a whole. We'll provide you with tools to translate your ideas into budgets to present to donors, and to explore different financial scenarios. We will also discuss how to improve your financial reporting and what you need to know about financial statements. We'll look at how to budget for your organisation when there is little core funding and lots of project funding, mistakes to avoid, and how to juggle reporting needs. This aims to be a candid, hands-on session where we can help each other and learn together — so be ready to bring your questions and ideas!

What can you learn from a discarded laptop? In this session, participants will gather in small groups, and each will receive a laptop. They will have 50 minutes to get as much information as possible from the machines, especially about their past owners. Due to the risks to their (past owners') privacy, a clear code of conduct will be read out at the beginning of the session: no personal information contained in the machines will be photographed or shared at any time.

The session organizers will document the strategies developed by each team to investigate and share the results with all participants. The participants' findings are not shared with the room (for privacy reasons). Besides the fun of satisfying naked curiosity, participants will be able to hone their forensics skills on hardware, develop investigative strategies in large amounts of files, and use OSINT techniques to cross-validate information. They will also have to develop team management skills so as to ensure that all team members have access to the data.

Finally, this session will serve us as a reminder to seriously erase data before disposing of hardware. Please note: in order to attend this session, you need to register. The maximum number of participants is capped at 20.

This panel explores why biodiversity stories often struggle to find a place in general newsrooms and how to pitch them more effectively.

Two experienced journalists will share practical, replicable strategies, including reframing biodiversity as political, economic, or investigative stories; grounding pitches in data, regulation, and accountability; and targeting beyond environmental desks.

If you have had difficulty getting your biodiversity or environmental stories published, this session offers a chance to exchange experiences, ask questions, and learn from journalists who have successfully persuaded editors of the importance of these stories.

We can all agree that Europe’s green energy transition is critical. But the transition has to be fair and not leave anyone behind. Therefore, the EU’s €26.7 billion Just Transition Fund – which is intended to support communities shift away from fossil fuel industries, such as coal mining, to greener economies – is hugely important. But, surprise, surprise, those crucial billions do not appear to be going where the EU promised they would. In this presentation, we will explain how our cross-border team dug into the fund – FOIs, sources in the European Parliament, following the money – with the aim of helping you to do exactly the same and find your own exclusives.