Kicking things off the way this community does best: together in one room in a new European city!
Expect a warm welcome, a quick rundown of what's ahead, and a chance to meet the people you'll be spending the next two days with.

An investigation is published. Then what? Sometimes: nothing. But sometimes a story forces a resignation, reopens a case, changes a law — or puts its author in the crosshairs. In this opening session, current and former IJ4EU grantees tell us what followed some of their biggest investigations. They'll walk us through what it took to get the story out, and what happened once it was loose in the world — the reckonings, the fallout, the doors that opened and closed. A reminder of why we do this work, told by the people who've lived it.

Four journalists, four countries, one shared experience: being told, in no uncertain terms, to back off.

Reporters from Turkey, Hungary, Albania, and Azerbaijan share the investigations they published despite government pressure, legal threats, and worse — one of them still reporting on their home country from exile in Europe, unable to return.

This is a session about the choice to keep going: what it costs, what it takes, and why they did it anyway. Come ready to be a little unsettled and a lot inspired.

Corrupt actors and extremist groups don’t just attack the story—they target the reporter. Grounded in a decade of tracking attacks on journalists, this workshop teaches investigative reporters how to identify their own digital vulnerabilities, assess incoming threats, and adopt counter-tactics.

You’ll walk away with practical strategies to keep publishing safely—and crucial protocols to blunt the emotional, psychological, and professional toll targeted harassment takes on your life and reporting.

Sometimes all you need is a twenty-minute with the right person. Book a slot with an experienced mentor to talk through whatever's on your mind, whether it's grants and budgeting, cross-border reporting, or satellite data for investigations. It's informal, one-on-one, and entirely shaped by what you need.

By registration only. Only 9 sessions are up for grabs.

Meet these year’s mentors:

Cora Moyano

• Funding & grant/fellowships applications
• Project budgeting & financial management
• Contracts, invoicing & administration
• EU rules & regulations (basics, not tax advice)
• Cash flow & business planning
• Pricing & rates strategy

Jelena Prtorić

• Kicking off a cross-border investigation
• Finding collaborators to pursue a story
• Organising working process & research
• Finding environmental stories in the EU
• Grant applications & budget drafting

Michael Anthony

• Using satellite imagery and Earth observation in investigative journalism
• Finding the right satellite data for an investigation
• Verifying claims with geospatial evidence
• Working with radar (SAR), thermal and hyperspectral satellite data
• Commissioning custom satellite imagery ("tasking")
• Combining OSINT, AI and satellite data in investigations
• Ethical use of AI-enhanced satellite imagery
• Building collaborations between journalists, scientists and satellite providers

Think of these sessions as a rapid-fire tour of investigative journalism across Europe. IJ4EU grantees take the stage, each with just five minutes to share what they're working on: an ongoing investigation, a cross-border challenge they've run into, or a solution they've found worth passing on. Whatever the focus, each speaker leaves us with one big takeaway: a lesson learned, a hurdle cleared, or a finding worth knowing about.

After we've heard their stories, we'll open the floor for questions and reflections. Prepare your pen and paper because things will move fast and you'll probably want to capture the ideas and inspiration as they fly by.

In this session we will hear all about:

• How Europe’s gas diversification fuels environmental and social harm in the Global South (Giorgio Michalopoulos)
• How scrap from conflicts fuels the steel industry in rich countries (Andreas Mourenza)
• Biofuel fraud and sanction breaches (Camille Corcoran)
• Mining, steel and survival (Daniel Winzenberg)
• Big Tech’s data centre secrecy (Nico Schmidt)
• Conflict gold fuels EU defence (Vittoria Torsello)

Investigative work takes a toll. For women in the field, that toll has its own shape: threats, burnout, barriers to sources and leadership, the quiet cost of staying in the story.

This working session puts gender and investigation on the table, alongside the practical fixes that keep women in the field.The idea is to move from problem to solution: In the first half, Ukrainian investigative journalists share what that toll has looked like for them, and what actually helped. Then the floor opens. For 30 minutes, anyone in the room can join in: name a challenge, share a solution that worked, or simply ask the group for feedback. 

This session is organised by Women in Media (Ukraine) and European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (Germany) and supported by the #CivilSocietyCooperation programme of the German Federal Foreign Office.

Most investigative journalism survives on grants, goodwill, and fumes. Direkt36 doesn't. As one of Hungary's leading investigative outlets, it has built something rare — a newsroom that holds power to account and pays its own way, largely on the strength of readers who choose to fund it. Co-founder András Pethő walks us through how they did it: the model, the mistakes, the numbers, and whether any of it travels to newsrooms in other countries and markets. For once, this is not a debate about whether investigative journalism should have to pay for itself, but a working example of what it looks like when it does.

Think of these sessions as a rapid-fire tour of investigative journalism across Europe. IJ4EU grantees take the stage, each with just five minutes to share what they're working on: an ongoing investigation, a cross-border challenge they've run into, or a solution they've found worth passing on. Whatever the focus, each speaker leaves us with one big takeaway: a lesson learned, a hurdle cleared, or a finding worth knowing about.

After we've heard their stories, we'll open the floor for questions and reflections. Prepare your pen and paper because things will move fast and you'll probably want to capture the ideas and inspiration as they fly by.

In this session we will hear all about:

How an ultra-catholic movement influences the anti-rights agenda in Europe (Fernanda Seavon)

Working conditions in the automotive supply chain (Lucia Steinwender)

The Reinvention of the Transnational Surrogacy Market in Europe (Magdalena Bandera)

The Business Behind the Misogyny (Mayya Chernobylskaya)

TBA (Laura Margottini)

A grant lands in your account. Congratulations — you may now owe tax on it, in a way nobody warned you about, in a manner that depends entirely on which country you file in. Freelancing means being your own finance department whether you signed up for it or not, and the investigative work only makes the paperwork stranger: cross-border grants, multiple currencies, income that arrives in lumps and then not at all

This hands-on workshop pools what the room already knows. We'll map the recurring headaches — tax on EU grants, invoicing across borders, planning around feast-and-famine income — and work toward practical protocols you can actually use in your own jurisdiction.

Part workshop, part clinic: bring your messiest money question and we'll take it on together. No finance degree required.

How well do you actually know your fellow investigative journalists and the strange corners of the news?

This quiz mixes cross-border journalism trivia with genuinely bizarre pop-culture questions. Participants compete for nothing more and nothing less than bragging rights until the next UNCOVERED and a brand new IJ4EU t-shirt.

The moment we've all been waiting for: the three winners of the 2026 IJ4EU Impact Award are about to be revealed. Chosen by an independent jury from a strong pool of nominees, each winning team will receive €5,000 in recognition of their impactful investigation.

Now in its sixth edition, the award puts impact at its heart, honouring investigative teams from across Europe whose work reached far beyond the news, translating into real change: policies reformed, wrongdoing exposed, power held to account.

Join us as we pay tribute to the very best examples of cross-border journalism from 2025.

Sometimes all you need is a twenty-minute with the right person. Book a slot with an experienced mentor to talk through whatever's on your mind, whether it's grants and budgeting, cross-border reporting, or satellite data for investigations. It's informal, one-on-one, and entirely shaped by what you need.

By registration only. Only 9 sessions are up for grabs.

Meet these year’s mentors:

Cora Moyano

• Funding & grant/fellowships applications
• Project budgeting & financial management
• Contracts, invoicing & administration
• EU rules & regulations (basics, not tax advice)
• Cash flow & business planning
• Pricing & rates strategy

Jelena Prtorić

• Kicking off a cross-border investigation
• Finding collaborators to pursue a story
• Organising working process & research
• Finding environmental stories in the EU
• Grant applications & budget drafting

Michael Anthony

• Using satellite imagery and Earth observation in investigative journalism
• Finding the right satellite data for an investigation
• Verifying claims with geospatial evidence
• Working with radar (SAR), thermal and hyperspectral satellite data
• Commissioning custom satellite imagery ("tasking")
• Combining OSINT, AI and satellite data in investigations
• Ethical use of AI-enhanced satellite imagery
• Building collaborations between journalists, scientists and satellite providers

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the financial challenges that newsrooms face. But there are strategies that can help newsrooms identify where they should and shouldn’t invest their time and resources when trying to build long-term sustainability.

In this workshop, we will explore some applications of these strategies and how to contextualize it to your organization’s editorial niche. Participants will evaluate their organization’s unique value proposition and use this information to help inform how they approach new revenue streams.

Much has been said about the mental health toll of investigative journalism: The trauma, the pressure, the isolation. But if you ask journalists what actually wears them down, it's rarely just the story.

Stress and burnout tend to build up quietly, often exacerbated by everyday tension with colleagues that never gets fully addressed. Tension that's often driven by nothing more than clashing communication styles.

In this session, together with Emma Thomasson, we get into what's really going on beneath that tension and offer practical ways to manage conflict before it takes a toll on mental health and find ways to support each other better.

Grants are a major lifeline for investigative journalism, but does everyone get equal access? Freelancers may often wait on money that never comes, see their share of a shared grant shrink before the work even starts, and be excluded from most labour-intensive, high-risk stories altogether. 

Moderated by EJC’s Juliette Gerbais, this open conversation with Sofia Cherici and Andrei Petr gets honest about the cracks in how grants work for freelancers and unpacks a quieter bias in collaborative journalism. 

Freelancers, editors, and funders alike are invited to dig into what's working, what isn't, and what a fairer system could look like.

Think of these sessions as a rapid-fire tour of investigative journalism across Europe. IJ4EU grantees take the stage, each with just five minutes to share what they're working on: an ongoing investigation, a cross-border challenge they've run into, or a solution they've found worth passing on. Whatever the focus, each speaker leaves us with one big takeaway: a lesson learned, a hurdle cleared, or a finding worth knowing about.

After we've heard their stories, we'll open the floor for questions and reflections. Prepare your pen and paper because things will move fast and you'll probably want to capture the ideas and inspiration as they fly by.

In this session we will hear all about:

TBA (Lucas Tonks)

Data Collection in Opaque Sectors (Maria Christoph)

Footprint of Datacenter and Nuklear Weapons in Belarus (Michael Anthony)

Large dataset leak related to DR Congo (Robert Flummerfelt)

Weaponising archaeology in occupied Crimea (Nikola Budzińska)

Curacao, offshore gambling paradise (Sam Kunti)

No slides, no script, no agenda. This is your space to share a story, a rant, a lesson learned the hard way, or a moment from the field that's stuck with you. The past edition included everything from investigative near-misses to a very memorable pair of bear gloves. It's unpredictable, it's real, and it's one of the best moments of the conference.

UNCOVERED never really ends when the room empties out. It carries into the stories, new collaborations, and ideas that follow. This is where we mark that — a moment to reflect on two days of sharp conversations, and start wondering which European city will be the next to host this community.