Category: News and Events

Balkan Investigative Network (BIRN) is extending a call for applications. BIRN is inviting media outlets interested in connecting with their audiences and reporting on original stories that will make an impact to apply for Audience-Engaged Journalism Grants.

Individual grants will be awarded to selected media outlets that wish to cover national/regional/local topics on their own. Collaborative grants will be awarded to selected media outlets that want to investigate cross-border issues with a media partner.

Audience-engaged reporting, in which ordinary people’s voices are heard and unresolved issues are tackled, has proven a game-changer. Using it helps media outlets to listen to these voices and report on essential topics for their communities while bringing innovation to their investigative reporting and newsrooms.

Audience-Engaged Journalism Grants support media outlets that want to engage their audiences in reporting by providing them with training and mentorship in engagement journalism and usage of the B-Engaged tool, developed by BIRN.

Audience-Engaged Journalism Grants are part of the Media Innovation Europe project managed by a consortium led by the Vienna-based International Press Institute. The consortium includes the Kyiv-based Media Development Foundation, the Berlin-based Thomson Foundation and BIRN.

Ten (10) successful applicants will receive grants based on this call.

BIRN will grant €4,000 to five (5) successful applicants interested in making an individual audience-engaged story.

BIRN will grant €5,000 to five (5) successful applicants interested in making a cross-border collaborative story.

If you already know a media partner with whom you want to work on a cross-border story, you will receive €10,000 to cover expenses for both partners involved. If you are interested in investigating a cross-border story but don’t have a partner, BIRN can find you a matching media outlet.

Content may include news, analysis, investigations etc, and can be in any form – text, audio, video. The content must be promoted through the outlets’ social media channels.

The selected grantees will undergo a four-day training programme that will be offered online, as well as on-the-job mentoring by BIRN editors on how to use and implement innovative, effective audience-engagement tools for investigative community-based reporting.

The participating media will receive training in the use of the B-Engaged tool, an online tool developed by BIRN that enables the direct engagement of members of the public who are interested in sharing information and evidence related to issues they are facing.

Through training and mentoring, media outlets will also learn:

how to select engaging topics;

what is important to the audience;

how to develop a callout;

how to analyse crowdsourced data;

how to incorporate data in stories,

and how to shape a story according to engagement journalism standards.

The call is open until November 4, 2022, midnight CET.

To read the full call for application click here.

To apply for a grant, use the online application form and send us a proposal for a story and the required documents.

Follow BIRN on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to get more notifications.

Co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Commision. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

 

Sinisa, 42, is half Croat and half Macedonian. He studied literature and anthropology but finished journalism. He has worked as a journalist for 17 years and this year celebrates his 15 years’ anniversary in BIRN.

Sinisa told us about his work and Balkan Insight’s virtual newsroom where differences become familiar commonalities, his favorite BIRN’s “Happy Friday” mantra, his noisy keyboard and BIRN’s new endeavor “European Focus” – a weekly newsletter published by Balkan Insight and nine European Media such as Domani, Delfi, Tagesspiegel, Hvg.hu, El Confidential, Gazeta Wyborcza, Liberation, and N-ost.

Let’s meet him:

1. What do you like most in your job, and what is the most challenging thing?

Coming from a small country, born before the internet was a thing, who experienced first-hand as a teenager the breakup of former Yugoslavia and the isolation of the country that followed during the 1990s, not only from Europe, but from the immediate neighbors as well, to this day I consider it as my biggest achievement that through my work I have expanded my horizons and managed to keep the door with the outside world open.

Nothing makes me happier than the notion that I get to share and communicate daily with a group of talented people from so many different countries who work at BIRN, and realizing how many commonalities we actually share, both personal and societal. And whenever we  meet in person, it’s a joy. It is a great asset to have in my career, sure, but it also makes me genuinely grateful.

As for the most challenging aspect, it is connected to the most joyous one. It is hat I work from home, or from a corner at my home that I’ve transformed into an office.

It is a blessing for some and a curse for others. For me it is a bit of both. Any journalist would tell you that it could be very challenging at times not sharing an actual physical space with your colleagues.

It helps a lot when you share your worries, laughs and “buying” or “selling” ideas with people in person. It eases up the day, nudges you in the right direction and motivates you to be better than yesterday. It is a base where you go to and you return to after each battle, to replenish your energy and motivation. If nothing else, it helps a person writing for a living, not getting stuck too much in his or her own head. Sadly, that natural human interaction that we all crave for is a little bit lost on the internet.

2. Can you share a good memory of when you were on duty?

Being a duty editor in Balkan Insight sometimes resembles being a flight controller at the airport. You have to sort each article that flies your way, find its angle and place on the website and make it land well with the readers, while always multitasking and having the bigger picture in mind.

Having said that, I am happy to say that I have one good memory that reoccurrs each week. It is the “Happy Friday” exclamation each Friday at the morning editorial meeting that our Editor-in –Chief, Dusica Tomovic makes. I am fully aware that to an outsider this may sound totally lame. That’s OK. But for me it is a stress relief pill, acknowledgement that we are still here, we have almost made it through the stresses of the working week and a reminder to look forward to turning the “autopilot” at least for a while during the weekend.

3. Besides your work, you are mostly known among people in BIRN as the editor with the noisy keyboard. Are you planning to change your keyboard?

I recently decided to look for a better keyboard. I figured out that for a person that spends so much time in front of the PC, a nicer keyboarded experience may be worth it. But to my horror, after paying an arm and a leg for a very expensive mechanical keyboard, I found out that the same soothing clicky sounds that my keyboard makes are the very sounds that annoy my colleagues when on a call.

I have to be honest. I have already spent my allowance for keyboards for the foreseeable future, and going back to the generic membrane keys of the old one is out of the question. So, sorry guys but no. I am not planning to change it.

I hope, though, that an ambient noise canceling software may help, and I pledge to look into it.

4. Balkan Insight together with nine European media outlets publish together a weekly newsletter called “European Focus”. Tell us more about this cross-border initiative and its main scope

We started with the premise that Europe is not just Brussels, and surely not just the European Union nations, and that through cooperation with some of the best informative outlets across the continent, we can try to understand our common home a bit better.

We felt that while our nations share common challenges, national media alone are often not enough to offer European audiences the bigger European picture and often not able to connect the topics and discussions that are moving Europeans.

So we set up to try and offer this wider perspective that we feel our readers deserve. Thus, together with Tagesspiegel, El Confidencial, Liberation, Domani, Delfi, HVG.hu, Gazeta Wyborcza and N-OST we launched our joint weekly free of charge newsletter to cover topics that connect or affect us all and to exchange our different perspectives on them.

Our newsletter has five brief original pieces, which we also republish in the local languages of our different print and online publications to bring a variety of perspectives to our readers. And our hope is that this will enrich the essential debate in our joint European space.

5. Each week journalists from nine different European newsrooms meet and decide European Focus’s context; how easy or difficult is this?

In professional terms, it is never easy to produce a good, well thought of, digestible yet informative and helpful newsletter. But we are not short of professional and enthusiastic colleagues from all corners of Europe, and not just from the aforementioned media outlets and organizations. So this enthusiasm and will to collaborate showed right from the start at our editorial meetings.

We are never short of ideas either. One colleague inspires another to try to look for similarities or differences in his or her own country, different angles, positive or negative examples. And just as we are thrilled, finding out new things and connecting the dots, we are sure that our readers will find the product of our work equally interesting and informative.

At the end of the entire process, of course, we have to decide on the topic of the week so we simply vote. It is plain and simple and as democratic as can be. Then we produce each newsletter jointly with a weekly rotating a team of five journalists and editors-in-chief.

6. What kind of stories do you choose to present to the readers? How can you make multicultural readers be interested in these stories?

I must say, at the beginning of our cooperation, when we were still at the planning stage, we never imagined that the launch of our newsletter would coincide with the serious effects of the Russia aggression of Ukraine that has affected us all, from concerns about our security, to soaring fuel, electricity and food prices, all the way to how all these things fuel social and political movements in our countries.

And while at the beginning we felt, and still feel, compelled to tackle some of these issues that are undoubtedly shared among us all, causing great headaches but also inspiring great feats, we never feared that a European-focused newsletter could run out of topics, crisis or no crisis.

Be it the debate on EU enlargement, or the climate challenges or the worrying spread of wildfires this summer that showed that even countries like the UK are not unfazed by it, our Europe is simply too interesting to ignore, for good or for ill.

So we see the multiculturalism, multi-ethnicity and multi-confessionalism of our readers not as an obstacle but as our advantage. That is the whole point and our distinct European advantage, being able to compare, pinpoint the similarities, acknowledge the differences and simply try to learn from each other.

That was the thing that made us launch this newsletter and I believe that will be the thing that will keep our readers interested.

 

From 20-21 October, 11 youngsters from all over the Balkans met in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo for the “Visual Storytelling Using War Crime Archives” workshop organised by Balkan Insight’s Transitional Justice program.

With the help of Denis Dzidic, director of BIRN BiH and Lamija Grebo, journalist for BIRN BiH, and Nejra Mulaomerovic, programme associate for BIRN BTJ, they learned how to use war crimes archives and how to conduct interviews. Azem Kurtic, journalist for BIRN Hub, held a full-day workshop covering visual storytelling and video-making principles.

With the help of the trainers, the participants watched and analysed previous work that BIRN published on this topic, like “44 Months Under Siege” and “Lives Behind the Fields of Death”.

“These stories are a way to heal together beyond borders and nationalities. It’s nice to see people doing these kinds of projects, and putting in the effort, it’s inspiring. But it makes you wonder why nobody else is doing this,” reflected a participant. 

All these tools and knowledge will come in handy for the second part of the workshop, which starts when they travel back home. Each of them will produce two short video interviews with people who survived the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

The best five applicants will be selected for a one-month exchange programme in 2023 in Sarajevo. This will enable the participants to foster closer networks, learn more about different facets of the war, gain skills and do more research into court archives.

In the previous edition of this project, held last year in Tuzla from July 25-29, 2021, ten young people from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia also produced interviews with war crime survivors. The whole playlist can be found here.

 

Amer Alija, one of 13 recipients of grants from the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network to create small projects based on the archives of the UN war crimes tribunal, held a workshop for young journalists in Pristina on Thursday about how to research Kosovo war crimes in court archives.

“Documents administered by courts provide many details and insights into historical events that researchers and journalists can use to tell the truth, using official documents and sources,” Alija, a legal analyst at the Humanitarian Law Centre Kosovo, told the journalists.

His workshop was divided into two sections: lectures on the history of trials for crimes committed during the 1998-99 Kosovo war, and training on using the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY’s database and the databases of Kosovo and Serbian courts dealing with war crimes cases from the Kosovo war.

Alija talked through the events of the Kosovo war, the forces involved and the difference between war crimes and crimes against humanity.

He explained that crimes related to the Kosovo war have been tried in five different types of courts including the ICTY, Kosovo’s domestic courts, Serbian courts, Montenegrin courts and the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, a hybrid court that exists within Kosovo legal system but is located in The Hague and is trying former KLA members.

He said that there are 11 cases currently ongoing in Kosovo’s domestic courts and three at the Specialist Chambers.

He also said that contrary to common belief and reporting in Kosovo’s media that such cases are unpunished, five people have been convicted of bearing responsibility for sexual violence during the Kosovo war.

In the second part of the workshop, Alija showed the journalists how to do research in the ICTY’s database of court documents that include indictments, testimonies, official state documents, photographs and other documents admitted in court.

He also provided documents and step-by-step guides for using the ICTY database and domestic courts’ and non-governmental organisations’ databases in former Yugoslavi countries.

Alija showed the journalists how, by opening an account for the ICTY database, they can find more information about specific massacres during the war or particular war crimes by reading the indictments of individuals who have been tried already and the evidence from their trials.

Nejra Mulaomerovic, programme associate at BIRN’s Balkan Transitional Justice programme, said that archives play an important role in ensuring that the past is properly documented.

“The archives themselves are not a guarantee of the non-recurrence of conflicts, but if they are used by various actors from different research and academic backgrounds, they can contribute to raising awareness and can be used as tools to spark dialogue and inspire others to continue their efforts to seek justice and truth,” Mulaomerovic said.

BIRN’s other grantees have been exploring topics such as gender-based violence, Roma war victims, wartime sexual violence, the experience of women in conflict and the role of photography in prosecuting war crimes.

 

 

Even though almost all Western Balkan countries have excellent written Freedom of Information laws, they are mostly on paper. State institutions still need to improve regarding Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, speakers from the region told BIRN’s panel discussion, “Freedom of Information in the Balkans: No political will, no access, no progress”, held on Wednesday.

Political will is as important as laws, and public authorities need to make more progress with FOI requests, agreed speakers at the event, at which BIRN’s annual freedom of information report was officially launched.

 Saša Dragojlo, a BIRN journalist from Serbia, told the panel discussion that the laws are good only in theory. „The key word is political will. In our societies, it is much more important than laws”, Dragoljo said. Although the new law Serbia implemented last year is an improvement, if public institutions do not answer FOI requests, journalists will submit fewer of them. They will try to gather information unofficially, and that is a danger, he told the panel.

Helen Darbishire, executive director for Access Info Europe, said political will is often an individual decision, which leads to different reactions from even the same institutions. „In some countries, we have seen progress. Journalists tend to ask for more controversial pieces of information, therefore, have different impressions than the rest of the public. That’s not the way it should be,” Darbishire said.

Elona Hoxhaj, General Director of the Right to Information in Albania, told the panel that, „although much progress has been made towards transparency, civil servants are still unaware of their obligation towards the press and the public, so they question the requests”. The Information and Data Protection Commissioner’s Office is actively working with the Albanian school of public administration.

The Agency for Personal Data Protection and Free Access to Information in Montenegro also helps public servants and journalists. But it is struggling to deal with more than 6,100 appeals, the Head of the Department for Free Access to Information said. „Some first-instance bodies don’t have enough money to have websites, so despite their goodwill, they are unable to publish public information”, Biljana Božić described the situation.

All Western Balkan countries have problems, the panel heard. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, there is a need for a strong, independent body monitoring the implementation of a new law submitted last year. In Kosovo, the local agency aims to raise awareness of public institutions that providing access to public information is obligatory.

In Serbia, one of the most significant problems is the so-called „silence of the administration”. „The common goal for all of us, both in the region and in Serbia, should be zero tolerance”, Serbia’s Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection, Milan Marinović, wrote in a statement sent to the panel.

According to BIRN’s annual Freedom of Information report, this institutional silence is one of the most critical problems in the region. Monitored institutions from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia continue to struggle with implementing their own Freedom of Information laws. They are failing to become more transparent and accountable to their citizens.

BIRN’s annual FOI report is part of the „Paper Trail to Better Governance” project, funded by the Austrian Development Agency.

 

 

The panel, including representatives from the Freedom of Information commissioner’s offices from several countries in the region, will discuss main findings of the report: that politics in the Balkans has a significant influence on access to information.

The report is part of BIRN’s ongoing project, A Paper Trail to Better Governance, whose main aim is monitoring access to information and exposing wrongdoing through country-based and cross-border investigations.

Speakers:

Krenare S. Dermaku, Commissioner of the Information and Privacy Agency, Kosovo

Besnik Dervishi, Commissioner for the Right to Information and Personal Data Protection, Albania

Irma Hadžiavdić, Deputy Ombudsperson, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Biljana Božić, Head of Department for Free Access of Information, Montenegro

Cvetan Stanoeski and Makfirete Morina Sulejmani, lawyers, Agency for Protection of the Right to Free Access to Public Information, North Macedonia

Helen Darbishire, Executive Director, Access Info Europe

Shengyl Osmani, author of BIRN’s Freedom of Information in the Western Balkans report in 2021: “No political will, no access, no progress”.

Moderator of the event: Ivan Angelovski, BIRN Investigations Editor

Zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82662905904?pwd=Z2dKZTJoeGo4RjB0Rytwck11VlUwdz09

The report will be available on https://bird.tools/publications/ after the official launch event.

 

 

The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN, launched a new round of support for media outlets across the Balkans in October 2022, continuing the regional Media for All project.

BIRN will provide editorial and mentoring support to journalists and editors from total of 28 media outlets from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia.

The group of 28 media outlets was previously supported in 2020 and 2021 within the same project through training, grants, technical support and mentorship to enable engagement with local communities and enable citizens to participate in the reporting process, by suggesting topics, providing testimonials, documents and evidence.

BIRN’s support will now equip local media to further develop their skills in engagement journalism and raise their editorial standards, with a particular focus on storytelling, data analysis, verification and fact-checking, contributing to the fight against misinformation and disinformation.

The media receiving the support will continue to use the Engaged Citizens Reporting tool, ECR, which was developed by BIRN during the previous phase of the Media for All project.

Media outlets will receive support until the end of February 2023. They will also be able to carry on using the ECR tool after the project is complete, to ensure sustainability of engagement journalism methodology in the region and enable media to better answer the information needs of local communities on a long-term basis.

The project aims to achieve a level of relationships and standards in which media outlets and journalists report together with citizens, and not only about them.

The project intends to build on the results from the previous phase but also to help prevent the spread of and the susceptibility to misinformation and disinformation. It will continue to work towards the creation of high-quality, accurate and relevant content created with the community by using the ECR tool and with support from BIRN’s editors and journalists.

Community-engaged reporting, in which ordinary people’s voices are heard and unresolved issues are tackled, proved to be a game-changer, as shown by numerous examples from the previous project phase.

Citizens’ engagement in the reporting process has put additional pressure on local authorities and decision-makers to act on issues of concern. It has helped media outlets to listen to voices from the community while bringing innovation to their investigative reporting and newsrooms.

Journalists and editors who have already used the ECR tool say that it has transformed the way the media outlets communicate with their audiences, who feel empowered by helping shape the content of their own media.

“It has direct impact on mobilising communities to solve a problem, because we provide data … that they can rely on, and continue to seek their rights,” Dorjana Daka, editor of Albanian news website Informim, told BIRN in August 2022.

Informim investigated stories about the Roma community, whose members often do not have access to the internet and lack trust in journalists, but managed to engage them through ECR and community events.

BIRN’s manager for the Media for All project, Marija Vasilevska, said that BIRN continues to support the media outlets in the creation of quality content “required by citizens and for citizens”.

“This way we are bringing back trust in the media, but also increasing the audience of local media outlets. Moreover, we are giving voice to the voiceless, such as minorities and vulnerable groups of citizens to share information that can be placed on media outlets’ front pages, lobbying and advocating for real needs in society,” Vasilevska said.

This extension of the projects is built on successes from the previous phase. During the first phase of the project, 51 media outlets were supported, directly engaging more than 39,000 citizens in six countries through more than 300 different callouts for engagement, which resulted in more than 700 journalistic products in various formats, including articles, video, podcasts and multimedia content.

The Media for All project is being implemented in six countries in the region: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. The project is funded by the UK Government and implemented by a consortium led by the British Council together with BIRN, the Thomson Foundation and Intrac.

 

 

Nejra Mulaomerović, Programme Associate at BIRN’s Balkan Transitional Justice Programme, presented BIRN’s new museum, Reporting House, dedicated to media workers who covered the war in Former Yugoslavia at Incubator for Media Education and Development – IMEDD’s International Journalism Week in Athens.

IMEDD, a Greek non-profit organization with a mission to support transparency and independence in journalism and promote meritocracy and excellence in the field, organizes the International Journalistic Week in Athens, where international organizations, journalists, and the student community meet to exchange experiences, opinions and knowledge.

Mulaomerović spoke to an international audience about BIRN’s initiative to create the first regional museum in the Balkans “built” by journalists and dedicated to them.

To ensure that transitional justice efforts are heard by a wider population, in 2021 BIRN started a bold initiative to create the first independent, non-profit regional museum in the Balkans that would bring the comprehensive story of the break-up of the former Yugoslavia and its aftermath to the attention of as many people as possible.

Guided by constant reevaluation and examination of the existing archives within BIRN and outside the network, a new direction emerged that unmasked a need for a distinct and reshaped approach to education and research within the transitional justice process, but also to role of media in it, in particular to disinformation and propaganda, but also the role that quality journalism plays.

“Journalists are engaged in creating the collection of the museum. We want to celebrate media workers who covered the war. A lot of people are not addressing the war trauma in our region. Reporting House would be a place where this topic will be discussed together with other issues of conflict journalism and transitional justice,” Mulaomerović said in her speech.

The museum will offer compelling, fact-based narratives on the break-up of Yugoslavia, the role of media propaganda in the war, war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, the life of journalists and media workers during the war and the overall challenges of war reporting in the 1990s in parallel with present conflict journalism challenges.

The goal of the museum will go beyond serving as a heritage venue of wartime history; despite the tragic events, BIRN wants to celebrate journalists, photographers and media workers who courageously reported the war and its aftermath, exposing atrocities and serious human rights abuses while maintaining the highest professional standards – despite the deadly risks they faced.