Newsroom members of the EIC.network endorsed the creation of the EIC Incubator Stichting, an independent Foundation registered in 2023 under the Dutch Law (RSIN number 865036822, KVK number 89603060 ).
The main focus of this Foundation is to match existing newsroom investments in investigative journalism with outside grant making and donations, and primarily center on the impact of Climate Collapse on Society with more resources.
Think about a similar rollout like EIC.network's Football Leaks series of revelations, or the Predator Files, only focused on Energy, including geopolitical and secret services war-games, illustrated with crime stories and strong characters, as well as with new and surprising implications for European societies. The stories will be richer than if done by a single newsroom, wider in approach, deeper in scope, European wide.
The aim of the Incubator is to do investigative stories that are larger and more impactful, not for financial benefits, but for the benefit of the European public interest. The EIC Incubator will serve to steward and scale such cross border and cross-disciplinary investigative journalism in Europe.
To do so, the EIC Incubator will offer journalists working with EIC newsrooms the opportunity to be released of the time constraints and limitations imposed by newsrooms (targeted focus on local angles and audiences). They will be hosted in a Lab-like environment, for up to a year, and will be supported financially under the form of a story-producing Fellowship that will be matched with work done by the EIC newsrooms. We will focus on journalists with great ideas and leads, substantiated by insightful data and a solid preliminary research.
Secondly, the EIC Incubator develops and maintains independently-deployed collaborative technologies under the Liquid Lab, an affordable and safe bundle of tools for collaborative knowledge production between concerned citizens, investigative journalists, media organizations, and research activists.
This transformative approach will grow an interinstitutional pool of talent around a journalistic R&D, yielding in-depth and high-impact stories and tools.
The role of Director for this Foundation is taken by Stefan Candea, currently the coordinator and co-founder of the EIC network. The Director and the Incubator’s staff are remunerated. Wages and/or fees do not exceed the average income within a field of competence and seniority of the team member.
Karel Verhoeven (Chair), Micael Pereira (Secretary) and Liana Ganea (Treasurer) are forming the kick-off Supervisory Board, which will grow based on cooptation up to 9 members. The majority of the Board will be made from people who are not part of the EIC.network newsrooms. Board members receive no remuneration for their work but are reimbursed for their expenses incurred while performing their duties to the Foundation, such as costs to attend board meetings.