Afterword: Cross-border journalism: Issues and questions for research and practice

Definition

Cross-border journalism is a capacious concept. It refers to collaborations among an array of institutions (e.g., news organizations, funders, freedom of the press organizations) based in different countries. Cross-border journalism features institutional partners with different types of professional capital: knowledge (sources, contacts, understanding of local conditions), thematic/subject expertise, funding/networks, and technical skills (reporting, production, format, data analysis). Journalists and news organizations based in different countries and regions partner up to cover stories and strengthen local reporting with transnational dimensions and implications. They collaborate around several initiatives: news projects/stories; funding and technical support for news organizations; the use of local labor by global news organizations; and training programs on professional skills, digital safety, and other issues. Cross-border journalism also underlies myriad examples of global journalism, that is, news coverage of cross-border risks and problems that focuses on the connections among phenomena in different corners of the world.

Significance

Cross-border journalism is a global object of study (Waisbord, 2025). As such, it condenses distinctive dimensions of the globalization of news and journalism: standardization and heterogeneity of journalistic practices; multiple connections among media organizations, journalists, and publics; the mobility of capital, technological platforms, and professional practices; and the hybridization of narratives and journalistic cultures. Cross-border journalism is a valuable analytical prism that puts attention on structures and dynamics of global journalism - how local, national, and global actors and forces are intertwined and shape newsroom practices and news/information systems.

Cross-border journalism has special relevance given current global challenges for democracy and public life. It is also critical as global risks, such as the climate crisis, migration, and pandemics, continue to reshape our world. In this regard, cross-border journalism is emblematic of cosmopolitan actions at a time of growing nationalism, xenophobia, and isolationism. It is a laboratory of myriad experiments intended to strengthen and diversify news ecologies, especially amid dire situations.

Conditions

Several papers in this issue confirm that successful cross-border collaborations require specific conditions.

Partnerships require trust and collaborative spirits. Past research on cross-border reporting (Berglez and Gearing, 2018), notably the Panama and the Paradise Papers, concluded that trust is a fundamental condition for successful collaboration, given the sensitivity of the information and safety requirements, particularly for investigations on powerful political and financial actors. Whereas journalists can judge relatively quickly partners’ reporting and production skills, trust is more intangible. It demands time, especially when partners never collaborated before.

Successful partnerships also require that professional norms are aligned around shared principles about work process, information quality, source reliability, and professional ethics. Shared norms lubricate relationships which, in turn, help to build trust. Conversation and negotiation skills are important, too. Partners often need to discuss and agree on several matters, such as roles, information sources, approach, storytelling, secrecy, and resources. Unsurprisingly, when these issues are not properly addressed and resolved, partnerships suffer.

In her analysis of cross-border practices in African journalism, Ruona Meyer discusses obstacles and disagreements over compensation and funding, journalistic and local cultures, risks, and personal and collective impact of the work. Her findings offer a note of caution to journalists and organizations and help to identify potential sources of conflict for developing sustainable, productive relationships. A related matter are power asymmetries that underpin collaborations, particularly around goals and funding. Power asymmetries are “the elephant in the room” that are rarely recognized, let alone addressed. They need to be acknowledged rather than ignored or swept under the rug. Otherwise, collaborations may experience continuous tensions that can derail efforts.

Shared emotional dispositions, namely empathy and solidarity, are also essential for the success of partnerships. This issue is addressed in the articles by Zheng on China, Hrybenko on Ukraine, and Hoxha, Andresen and Mulliqi-Bojaj on Ukrainian reporters in exile. International organizations need to understand work conditions and concerns from the perspective of local reporters. They should listen and understand, rather than unilaterally impose beliefs and approaches. They need to have a good grasp on the challenges that local reporters confront during and after projects, such as lawsuits and threats. This is particularly the case of journalists who live and work in illiberal and authoritarian regimes, war and conflict, and violence. In these contexts, local journalists may prioritize self-protection and safety measures over other considerations when covering specific stories.

Another important issue is that official suspicions about journalists who work with international organizations as well as government persecution of non-government organizations challenge cross-border collaboration. Bringing attention to these issues is important, especially given uneven attention to local and national obstacles to practicing critical reporting. The plight of local journalists, on issues such as work safety and labor precarity, rarely gets adequate and sustained global attention. Attention to and solidarity with journalists working in extremely difficult situations reflect geopolitical and economic factors. For example, western governments are not uniformly concerned about the fate of local journalists who work for global organizations in conflict zones, as Paterson perceptively analyzes in his article. Although freedom of the press associations report on the plight of journalists under authoritarianism and war, government attention is selective, shaped by specific geopolitical calculations and positions, as the current wars in Ukraine and the Middle East suggest. Not all stories of journalists experiencing difficulties and tragedies, such as persecution, imprisonment, and death, vault to official and global attention. For every case that receives much-deserved attention, scores of cases remain undercovered and forgotten.

Thus, it is worth examining whether the United States, the European Union, Russia, China, and other global powers are equally interested in the fate of every journalist around the world, especially when local reporters face harsh conditions and violence that result from their actions and policies. It is important to document the double standards of governments and other actors about when and why they care about journalists’ safety and labor conditions. This matters because they have the power to bring global attention to these issues. Global powers, UN agencies, and INGOs (like the International New Safety Institute) play crucial roles in turning particular cases into matters of concern for the international community, providing legal and safety support, and working with news organizations and families. Their actions may not immediately remedy structural problems that cause anti-press violence and precarity, but they can make a difference in particular situations.

Several articles emphasize the importance of solidarity among journalists and news organizations through effective actions. This issue is particularly important given the tendency to view problems as individual challenges and to ignore and to stigmatize emotional impact, as Kotisova discusses. Nurturing a sense of care and community is important, especially when situations are exceedingly complicated. For local journalists facing threats, lawsuits, and precarity, support from international colleagues and organizations matters.

It is important to draw lessons from fruitful experiences to determine the conditions that help partnerships. For example, in their analysis of national and regional collaborations in Latin America, Mesquita and de-Lima-Santos show that adequate funding support, participation, solidarity, and security are necessary.

Altogether, these studies confirm the value of analyzing the emotional dimensions of journalistic work, particularly in relation to labor conditions. Despite important differences across national contexts, challenges to mental well-being are common in many settings, in the form of burnout, dissatisfaction, and trauma. Future research needs to document and compare responses to determine when and why actions effectively address journalists’ situations.

Theoretical issues

While the study of cross-border journalism has been primarily driven by practical experiences, it brings up valuable theoretical lessons and questions for journalism studies that deserve attention. Cross-border journalism in a dispersed field of studies about different issues and experiences, including journalists in exile, international support for independent news/media, global investigative projects, the labor economy of global news companies, anti-press violence, humanitarian journalism. It would be important to develop a common analytical framework that brings these issues together.

First, this special issue confirms the continuous gravitational pull of the local/national in journalistic practice. While global dynamics are at work, journalistic practice is deeply entrenched in local situations. Because cross-border actions need to attend to specific situations, “the local/national” is as important as transnational actions. Cross-border projects need to be understood in the context of local opportunities, needs, and obstacles. These should not be analyzed simply as contextual factors that “affect” transnational projects and collaborations. This is why collaborations need to foreground local perspectives in order to determine how they are situated vis-à-vis the agenda of global news organizations, governments, donors, and INGOs. Approaches should be attuned to local experiences and perspectives to determine how cross-border journalism impacts local and national journalists and news organizations.

Second, studies need to examine the scope and the significance of cross-border journalism in national press/media systems. Sure, one finds myriad examples in the vast global landscape of news and information. Yet, their local relevance is not immediately obvious. To assess this issue, several questions need to be asked. What is the impact of collaborations on local/national news sites, stories, training, and support networks? Are they exceptional and peripheral? Do experiences scale up, and move from the periphery to the center of news ecologies? Have they been influential in terms of scale, audience, and resources? Did they contribute to innovating professional norms and practices, as well as work conditions? How do successful experiences of cross-border journalism spread across news systems, journalistic practices, and ownership and funding models? Do they spearhead positive changes beyond specific investigations/news stories and collaborations? Do they contribute to weakening media capture, and fostering more secure working conditions?

Third, cross-border journalism offers plenty of insights to further refine theoretical discussions about emotion in journalistic practice, a topic of growing interest in the field. Here are a few questions to consider: When and why protective actions make a difference on journalists’ safety and psychological conditions? What factors stimulate empathy and solidarity? How do local understandings of emotional labor, grounded in socio-cultural matters, affect cross-border actions? What do (un)successful cross-border experiences tell us about the viability of specific practices in various settings?

Fourth, because cross-border journalism largely refers to experiences in the Global South, researchers should contribute to building and refining theoretical frameworks in journalism studies that are still primarily grounded in the experiences of a few western countries. This issue confirms the complexities and challenges of cross-border journalism for professional practices, norms, and ethics (Estella, 2024). A wealth of experiences and insights provides exceptional material for further developing theoretical concepts and arguments grounded in an array of global cases and comparative lessons.

In summary, future work should consider these questions to discuss and draw theoretical lessons from studies on cross-border journalism.

Conclusion

Cross-border journalism is an area of research brimming with rich cases and findings. It puts in evidence global actions that bring together journalists and organizations around several goals - strengthening independent and critical journalism, producing international news, documenting tragedies and hopes of journalists, bolstering better work conditions. This issue convincingly demonstrates that there is no single approach or form to cross-border journalism, but rather, a range of partnerships and practices shaped by different actors and conditions.

Cross-border journalism offers researchers a unique opportunity for public scholarship (Billard and Waisbord, 2024) by engaging with non-academic actors, such as international agencies, news organizations, donors, and governments. As a topic that straddles research and practice, cross-border journalism helps us understand key aspects of global news and journalism, and to address myriad challenges for journalists who live and work in the frontlines of global turbulence, violence, instability, and precarity.