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Minority Reporting Project

17 07 2007  

Between April and July 2007, BIRN Bulgaria conducted a three-month-long minorities reporting project. The aim of the project was to address and counter cases of systematic campaigning against minorities and bad journalistic practices, of which Bulgarian media are often criticised. Through this project, BIRN started to develop a network of Bulgarian journalists to report on minority issues.

The project consisted of two phases. The first phase included a three-day workshop in which majority and minority journalists from national, regional an international media discussed standards, practices and ideas for media reports on minorities.

The chief lector of the workshop was Andrew Lam, a journalist and editor at New America Media, the biggest online collaboration of ethnic media in the US. Discussions were also held with Tatyana Vaksberg, a journalist at Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, Oriental scholar Velin Belev and BIRN Bulgaria Director Albena Shkodrova.

For more information on the project, including participants’ feedback, see here.

For more information on the workshop’s speakers and summaries of their presentations, see here.

For more information on the workshop’s participants, see here.

For materials about the project and interviews with Lam published in other media, see here.

The second phase of the project consisted of the commissioning, research and publications of a series of articles on minority issues in Bulgaria. With the assistance of BIRN Bulgaria’s editorial team, six journalists from BIRN’s local network produced feature articles that presented the broader situation of some of Bulgaria’s traditional ethnic minority groups through personal stories. One article focused on refugees in Bulgaria, while another comment examined the overall situation of minorities.

The articles were published on BIRN’s website in Bulgarian and in English and distributed among Balkan Insight’s subscribers.

In addition, the articles - together with other training materials and information on the project, were printed in a booklet. Available in Bulgarian and in English, it was distributed among those who participated in the project, as well as other interested media and NGO organizations. Albena Shkodrova, BIRN Bulgaria’s director, presented the booklet to editors in regional media.

The articles included:

Suleyman, who used to be Yulian, and his grandson Michael, about the pressures on Bulgaria’s Muslim community to change their names from Muslim to Christian ones and vice-versa;

Nasredin Rabi Abdu: Being Black in Bulgaria, about the life of an African refugee in Bulgaria;

Exilia: The Blogging Teenager Who Dispeled Myths about Bulgaria’s Turks, about a small-town ethnic Turskish girl who used the web to bridge her life between two cultures;

Sevda, the First Who Took Roma’s Fight Against Racism To Court, about the a Roma activist who uses a new anti-discrimination act to prevent shops and businesses from praticing the now-routine abuse and harassment;

Assen: “There is Nothing I Am Looking Forward to”, about a member of the Roma minority, which has widespread heroin use because of unemployment and poverty;

Rosa, Rubie and Ruska: New Homes Don’t Bring New Lives, about three of the participants in a failed social engineering experiment;

Comment: Ethnic groups in Bulgaria are more apart than many believe, a general overview of the increased gap between ethnic communities resulting from Bulgaria’s transition to democracy.

This project was part of BIRN Bulgaria's long-term programme to foster tolerance and mutual understanding in the country, through the dissemination of reliable and in-depth analyses on crucial topics and the improvement of Bulgarian media professionalism. It strengthened BIRN's capacity and positively affected media in the Balkans, which widely republishes the organisation's articles.

The project was supported by the US Department of State.