In 2015, four students at Amsterdam University College — Ties Gijzel, Kyrill Hartog, Marije Martens, and Mick ter Reehorst — grew frustrated with the way traditional media covered European news and politics. Headlines obsessed over Brussels, Brexit, and borders while ignoring the lives of the 450 million people who actually inhabit the continent. So they started a blog. By 2016 it had become a foundation. By 2017 an online magazine publishing monthly issues with contributors across Europe. By 2018, with grant funding from the Stimuleringsfonds voor de Journalistiek and the European Cultural Foundation, a print edition.
Are We Europe is a non-profit media organisation with offices in Brussels and Amsterdam, and its founders belong to what editor-in-chief Anneleen Ophoff calls the Erasmus generation — people for whom national borders in Europe are not as distinct as they used to be, who can study and fall in love across borders, but who had no media platform for those cross-border stories. Each issue approaches a broader theme — climate change, elections, colonialism, queer life, disinformation — through personal stories, essays, photography, and reportage from contributors across the continent. The question is always the same: how can we have a more inclusive and complex understanding of the people who live here?
The magazine was shortlisted for the 2019 European Press Prize with “The Drums of Democracy,” and the organisation has since expanded well beyond print. Projects include ENTR, a multi-channel video series for young European audiences; Borderlines, a podcast series about border areas and in-between spaces; MigraVoice, amplifying migrant perspectives in European media; and Awe Studio, a creative agency that designs media projects for socially engaged organisations. The team coaches new generations of reporters, builds journalism hubs in under-resourced places, and operates on the conviction that the future of journalism is collaborative and decentralised.
Are We Europe does not answer its own question. It asks it from enough different angles — Finnish, Portuguese, Romanian, Dutch, Greek — that the reader begins to form an answer of their own. That the question still needs asking, nearly a decade after four students in Amsterdam first posed it, says everything about the continent it describes.
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