BIRN Macedonia News and Events

BIRN Macedonia organized a training on Digital Rights for Journalists between June 8-10 in Mavrovo, North Macedonia. The training was designed to shed light on digital rights and equip journalists with skills and tools to cover stories stemming from this increasingly important topic.

What are digital rights, who is violating them and how, and why is it important to monitor and report on them? How can journalists recognise problems in this area, prepare stories and get mentoring and financial support for their development and publication?

New database will give the public essential information about the media on which they rely for current events and developments in the country and worldwide.

Winning stories tackled tragic fate of Balkan lynx, pandemic profiteers and over-employment in a government ministry.

To mark World Press Freedom Day on Sunday, campaign group Reporters Without Borders Austria awarded the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network with its annual Press Freedom Award – A Signal for Europe.

BIRN Macedonia’s story ‘Alive and Well: The Lucrative Business Club around REK Bitola’ by journalist Vlado Apostolov has been awarded best investigative story of the year 2019 by the Macedonian Media Institute, MIM.

New guide supplies Balkan journalists with range of ways to use Open Source Intelligence in their research.

BIRN journalist Goce Trpkovski was given an award by the Macedonian National Council of the International Council of Museums for raising awareness about the poor condition of cultural heritage in the country.

Some 20 international experts discussed approaches to rebuilding trust in journalism and alternative models of financing media on day two of BIRN’s digital media conference in Macedonia.

The first day of a BIRN Macedonia conference on media sustainability heard a number of speakers exchanging ideas and best practices.

BIRN Macedonia conference aims to explore both the opportunities and challenges for the digital media in a hyper-competitive age, marked by the exponential rise of social media.

BIRN journalists from Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and BIRN Hub attended a training course on mobile video production from August 19 to 21 in Skopje.

Directors, board members, partners and donors of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN, met in the Romanian capital Bucharest on June 2-3 for the network’s latest regional meeting of its governing bodies.

Monitoring reports produced by BIRN and articles published in its regional publication Balkan Insight continue to be quoted in international reports about media, human rights and politics in the region.

In 2017, BIRN Network operated in an environment of declining media freedoms and unregulated media markets, where authorities and pro-governmental media outlets pressured members of the Network and its journalists; nevertheless, BIRN received national and international prizes as well as different kinds of informal praise.