Category: News and Events

BIRN Journalists in Finals for Investigative Award

Three BIRN stories have been named as finalists for this year’s Investigative award by Independent Journalistic Association of Serbia in the categories for electronic [TV and radio], print and on-line media.

 

The jury, composed of Danica Vucenic, journalist from Insajder, Milorad Ivanovic, editor-in-chief of Newsweek Serbia, Predrag Blagojevic, editor-in-chief of online portal Juzne vesti and Pedja Obradovic, producer at TV N1, chose the following BIRN stories:

“Secret of Vucic’s tavern” has been nominated for the print media category.

BIRN Serbia journalist Jelena Veljkovic wrote on how Serbia’s Property Directorate claimed not to know that an exclusive restaurant had been opened in a part of the Belgrade Cooperative building, which the directorate leased to the “Belgrade on water company, refusing to answer whether it believed this use of public property was in accordance with the law.

The article was published in the weekly Vreme.

“Flatland without Birds?”, a documentary about illegal hunting in Serbia is nominated for the electronic media category.

The film, by journalist Dragan Gmizic, co-produced by BIRN Serbia and Greenfield Productions, examines how hunting rare turtle doves and quail is organised in Serbia and asks how and whether it can be controlled. The documentary was aired on TV N1, TV CG and Al Jazeera Balkans.

A story by a group of journalists from BIRN and OCCRP, “Making a Killing: The 1.2 Billion Euro Arms Pipeline to Middle East”, has been nominated for the online media category.

The story revealed how thousands of assault rifles, mortar shells, rocket launchers, anti-tank weapons, and heavy machine guns have poured into the Middle East from Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia and Slovakia. The same story is also among three finalists for the Czech Journalism Prize, the best-known Czech media award.

This year, 75 journalists applied for the award given by the Independent Journalists Association of Serbia, NUNS, and the US embassy in Serbia.

The award ceremony will take place at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade on May 10 at 5.30pm.

BIRN journalists have won this prize for the last four years.

BIRN Albania Presents Report on Local Government Transparency

The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network in Albania on April 26 presented its newly published national report, Local Government Under the Lens of Freedom of Information: A Comparative Monitoring of Transparency Indicators Online and On the Ground 2016-2017.

The report was published as part of BIRN Albania’s project Strengthening the Local Partnership between Media and Civil Society.

The project, funded by Leviz Albania and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, aims to strengthen the public’s pressure mechanisms on local government institutions and increase transparency by strengthening cooperation between journalists, civil society groups and grassroots organisations.

The report contains the results on the transparency of the 61 local government units in Albania, based on 50 indicators, evaluated in both 2016 and 2017, tracing the progress made by local municipalities in the implementation of the freedom of information and public consultation laws.

According to the monitoring data, these indicators were realised by 46 per cent of local municipalities in 2017, with the majority of the municipalities failing to realize half of the monitored indicators.

The figure represents a modest improvement of three per cent from 2016, when the transparency level was 43 per cent.

The new data collected through the report in 2017 shows that as in 2016, local municipalities in Albania are more transparent when it comes to the ‘freedom of information’ and ‘municipal councils’ category/indicator, and less transparent on a national level in ‘financial transparency’ and ‘legislation’.

The monitoring of municipalities for the report was carried out in February 2017 and June 2016 by a network of local journalists across Albania.

Click here for copy of the report in Albanian

Call for Expression of Interest

Strengthening the media’s role in transparency of political party financing.

Durres, April 29-30, 2017

Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, Albania (BIRN Albania), as part of the project ‘Strengthening the media’s role in transparency of political party financing’ supported by the National Democratic Institute in Albania, will organize a two-day training session in investigative journalism techniques that help shed light in the field of political party financing in the country.

BIRN Albania is seeking 15 mid-career journalists from all the regions of Albania to attend the investigative journalism training workshop on April 29th-30th 2017, in Durres.

Introduction to the training:

The training serves to provide a guide to the basic methods and techniques of investigative journalism as well as an overview of the political parties’ finances in Albania. It aims to strengthen the skills and training of mid-career journalists to look closely at systemic issues of illicit financing of political parties and conflict of interest, with a special focus on the red flags raised by the reports filed in the Central Election Commission, CEC.

Who should attend:

The training targets mid-career journalists in Albania who are interested to deepen their knowledge of investigative journalism techniques and political party finances in Albania. Journalists from other regions outside Tirana are encouraged to apply. BIRN Albania will cover travel costs for all journalists participating in the training.

Training objectives:

The outcome for participants will be:

1. Improved understanding of Albania’s political party finances;

2. Improved applied methods and techniques of investigative journalism.

Application procedure:

Interested candidates must send a letter of interest to [email protected]. Applications for this training close on Thursday, April 27th. Successful candidates will be informed shortly thereafter.

Bursaries:

The journalists who take part in the training will participate in a competition from which BIRN Albania through an independent jury will select story ideas for five in-depth analyses related political party finances that will be funded from the project and published with the help of BIRN editors via the online publication Reporter.al.

BIRN Investigates Scandals at the University of Prishtina

The University of Prishtina has been plagued with scandals in recent years, leading BIRN to investigate the university’s practices. Through its television programme “Life in Kosovo,” BIRN presented its findings on suspicious promotion cases and dubious professorial publishing practices. 

Responding to allegations that the University of Prishtina promoted academics with disregard to meritocratic criteria, Marjan Dema, the university’s current rector, shifts the blame to the Senate, explicitly declaring that the previously mentioned is under the Senate’s responsibility. Rozafa Koliqi, a whistleblower, revealed allegedly unjust promotion practices at the Faculty of Medicine on BIRN’s programme, declaring that she was unjustly rejected for the position of teaching assistant at this faculty. “Life in Kosovo” shed light onto the suspicious voting procedures of University of Prishtina senators, which failed to apply the highest standards for ensuring equality in the selection and promotion of academic staff.

A group of civil society organizations, including BIRN, sent a letter to Minister of Education Arsim Bajrami, explicitly displaying their concerns about academic integrity within the university and asking him to find a solution for the dire state of Kosovo’s higher education. Bajrami confronted these public concerns after a detailed investigation by “Life in Kosovo” and wrote a letter to Dema demanding that the University of Prishtina ensure the application of the highest academic principles and standards of transparency when selecting and promoting academic staff.

Representatives of the Organization for Increasing Quality in Education, ORCA, contributed to the topic by presenting its sobering findings from their report on the academic integrity of the managing staff, which claims that a high percentage of the university’s faculty published in fraudulent articles.

“Life in Kosovo” also hosted two European-Commissioned experts, Ian Smith and Tom Hamilton, who discussed high salaries and “vulgar corruption” within the university. The guests emphasized the crucial need to fight corruptive behavior in Kosovo’s higher education. Their own report came after the recent scandals involving unfair promotions, revealed by BIRN, at the University of Prishtina. 

BIRN Discusses Fake News

 On April 4th, 2017, BIRN was pleased to participate in a weekly salon organized by Democracy for Development, D4D, in Prishtina to discuss the phenomenon of fake news. Opening remarks were delivered by the panelists, including BIRN representatives, about the Internet’s strong influence on loosening the public’s grip on the truth. 

 

BIRN reaffirmed the notion that those who care about democratic governance must keep asserting the importance of facts as a means of resisting government coercion. Panelists emphasized that the media has a responsibility towards providing not only the truth, but the ‘whole truth.’ Literacy is not enough. Challenging our assumptions, pondering relevant questions, and actively seeking additional information on what we are reading is mandatory to support factual accuracy.

Panelists said that though social media has the tendency to provide everyone with a voice, there is a troubling downside to this revolution. Social media has enabled the dissemination of fake news and contributes to misrepresentations of reality. Readers are confronted nowadays with a flood of fake information, and distinguishing between fact and fiction has become a challenge. During the panel discussion, participants shared their concerns about how misleading the news can be and shared best practices for approaching fake news. BIRN, along with other panelists, shared its advice with the wider public on resisting confirmation bias through the expansion of the sources of information we seek.

Who owns the Media in Serbia?

The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) and Reporters Without Borders have started a joint “Media Ownership Monitor” project to shed light on the Serbian media market.  

The project will research who owns and ultimately controls the media in Serbia. The results of the project will be accessible in Serbian and English in a form of a website with a comprehensive information about the media landscape in the country as well as a database of major media outlets and their owners.

The project is financed by the German government. Based on a standardized and transparent methodology, MOM assesses the most relevant media outlets across all types of media (TV, radio, print, online) based on their respective audience shares. Transparent indicators will reveal the ownership concentration in the media markets, including political affiliations of media owners and/or their economic interests in other sectors of the economy. In addition, the project will provide a context analysis and evaluate whether the legal framework allows for independent media regulations. 

“This is a one-of-a-kind research done in Serbia so far. It will help people understand how ownership structures shape the news and increase their ability to assess the reliability of the media. Transparency of ownership structures therefore provides the basis for a more reliable journalism but also increases the credibility of the information the public can get”, explained Tanja Maksic, Program Coordinator of BIRN Serbia. 

“For a majority of people media is a primary source of information on political, social and economic developments of a country. We rely on media reports in forming our political and socio-economic opinions and decisions about the present and the future of our society therefore it is instrumental for any democratic society to have a healthy and transparent media sector” says Nafisa Hasanova, RSF Project Manager for Media Ownership Monitor.

The findings of the three-month research project will be presented at the end of June in Belgrade and henceforth a website will inform the general public as well as civil society advocates and political decision makers who owns their media.

 

Initiated by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network and Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the Media Ownership Monitor project is a global research and advocacy effort to promote transparency and media pluralism at an international level. The country studies were so far conducted in Colombia, Cambodia and Tunisia Turkey, Ukraine, Peru, Philippines and Mongolia.This year MOM investigates media markets in Serbia, Ghana, Brazil, Pakistan and Morocco. For more visit MOM website: http://www.mom-rsf.org

 

 

Krypomëter Explained at University of Prishtina

April 4th saw the first public lecture on fact checking at the University of Prishtina’s Faculty of Philology, Department of Journalism, concerning the “Krypometër’’ tool created by Kallxo.com. 

The lecture was delivered by the head of planning at Kallxo.com, author of DnK and editor-in-chief of newsletter JnK , Kreshnik Gashi and by Visar Prebreza.

The University of Prishtina and Professor Remzie Shahini Hoxhaj were partners behind this event, which included an open discussion with senior students.

Gashi opened the discussion by introducing the idea for a so-called Krypometër as a tool for fact-checking statements about politics, economics and other social aspects of life in Kosovo.

Fact checking has come to attention as a new part of global trend towards holding public figures more accountable for statements and promises they make.

The new tool was developed as an idea last year, but there were some time-consuming problems to solve first, since kallxo.com had to create a proper mechanism for weighing declarations made in the media.

Finally launched early in December 2016, the Krypometër now serves as a method of verifying and checking the statements and promises of public figures. The measuring tool has so far evaluated more than 40 such statements.

During the discussion, Gashi said the main difference between Krypometër and other media communication tools was that the Krypometër “does not judge but evaluates”. While explaining how this evaluation happens, he recalled also that citizens have a right to know the truth between the lines.

Prebreza, general editor of Kallxo.com, gave examples of typical statements that are considered right for fact checking.

“Our President, while serving in his [earlier] Prime Minister’s mandate, promised to create 200,000 jobs vacancies in his electoral campaign but statistical figures late showed the contrary,” he noted. “When promises are made we as people need to rely on facts provided by the state institutions,” Prebreza added.

He also said no complaints had been received in regard to their fact-filtering, or about ethical violations, noting that the work takes place under the close supervision of a legal department.

More aspects of fact checking will covered in an episode of the TV show “Jeta ne Kosove” and in another lecture, at University AAB. Also, at Dit’ e nat’, an open discussion entitled “How true is the news today?” will be held opened by Faik Ispahiu, founder of kallxo.com.

#Factcheck

Fact-checking Day Honoured at University of AAB

On April 5th, in honour of international fact-checking week, the kallxo.com team in cooperation with University of AAB’s Department of Mass Communications in Pristina, held a lecture at the university.

The main goal of the talk was to explain the on-going work of the “Krypometer’’, a tool for measuring factual errors launched last December, which has been used so far to measure more than 40 official statements from all fields of public life in Kosovo.

The lecture opened with a welcome by the host professor Zija Rexhepi and united two of the best-known faces of kallxo.com, Faik Ispahiu, executive producer of kallxo.com and Kreshnik Gashi, the author of DnK.

Ispahiu stated the importance of fact checking, referring to it as a new era of professional journalism.

Proving the truth, even though it is not easy to do, respects people’s desire for freedom and their right to know the truth. If news is fact-checked, it automatically has more quality and credibility, he said, explaining also how the Krypometer divides its subject matter into five categories of lies, which are explained on Prishtina Insight website.

Gashi explained how the idea behind this platform took more than a year to complete, the difficulties that were encountered while training the editors and how the process of measuring a lie is done.

According to Gashi, the platform has already succeeded in making those who issue official statements think twice about what they are going to say.

BIRN BiH Helps Initiative Plan Monitoring Bosnia’s

Members of the Initiative for Monitoring the European Integration of Bosnia and Herzegovina [the Initiative], including BIRN BiH, held a two-day strategic planning session focusing on monitoring Bosnia’s European integration process in the upcoming period. The session took place on March 21st and 22nd in the capital, Sarajevo.

The European integration process has been widely recognized as Bosnia’s best chance of improving its human rights and the standard of living of all its citizens.

In June, Bosnia and Herzegovina is due to submit its answers to the Questionnaire of the European Commission. After that, it hopes to obtain EU candidate country status.

Following the practice applied in Croatia and Serbia, where the NGO sector has actively participated in the negotiation and monitoring process, along with the state and the EU, the Initiative recognizes the need to assume an active role in the upcoming period and help Bosnian society and the country achieve the set goals.

On the first day of the planning session, Natasa Dragojlovic Ciric, coordinator of the National Convention on the European Union in Serbia, spoke of the importance of establishing bigger and stronger networking between civil society organizations in the process of monitoring the obligations undertaken by governments.

On day two, Jelena Berkovic, from GONG organization in Croatia, helped the members plan their activities in the upcoming period in order to be able to both follow and contribute to the EU integration process in the most efficient manner. 

 

BIRN Regional Project on Openness Now Underway

With the support of German Foreign Office Stability Pact funds, BIRN regional organisation has started the implementation of a nine-month regional project that aims to contribute to professionalizing media reporting on legal proceedings related to organized crime and corruption.

The new project, “Exercising the Freedom of Expression and Openness of State Institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Serbia” is intended to increase public awareness on issues of access to justice and contribute towards more transparent and more responsive institutions in these three countries.

The regional project will result in country-based and one cross-regional analysis, the first of its kind, offering a regional perspective on the accessibility of public institutions in the Western Balkan region.

The project will be implemented from April to December 2017 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Serbia.