BIRN Serbia News and Events

BIRN Serbia organised a day-long training on investigating money laundering. The training, “Illicit Financial Flow and Money Laundering”, on June 22, in Belgrade, was designed to equip fellow journalists with the knowledge and practical tools required to detect and report on this type of crime.

For only the second time since 2000, an entire newsroom – BIRN Serbia – has been awarded the prestigious Stanislav Stasa Marinkovic Award.

Nenad Milanovic filed a defamation lawsuit against BIRN Serbia for publishing an investigation on his negotiations with Turkish company Kentkart – the fourth SLAPP lawsuit it received this year.

Each month, BIRN introduces you to a different member of its team. For May, meet Radmilo Marković, journalist at BIRN Serbia.

Radmilo Markovic, investigative reporter with BIRN Serbia, was awarded the prestigious Dejan Anastasijevic Investigative Award in the online media category for his reporting on illegal constructions in Belgrade.

After BIRN Serbia trained ten journalists to report on the development and use of surveillance technology and artificial intelligence, AI, half of the participants have been provided with funding to work on stories on this topic.

BIRN Serbia held a training on monitoring local government spending through public tenders for 13 local journalists and civil society representatives from Nis, Leskovac, and Vranje.

Belgrade mayor Aleksandar Sapic is suing BIRN Serbia over two articles about properties he owns, seeking 100,000 euros in damages – a move that the media organisation says is an attempt to discourage public interest reporting.

The Serbian state distributed 6.8 billions dinars, almost 58 million euros, on public competitions last year, a big rise on the year before and much of it spent in an untransparent way, according to a new BIRN Serbia report.

Court rules that lawyer’s words grossly violated the ethical code, but did not constitute a direct threat to the journalist’s life – an outcome Zoric said she had expected.

Visibility is replacing public interest as editors’ priority, while the media landscape is becoming ever more fragmented due to media drives to accommodate tech-companies’ algorithms, BIRN Serbia report finds.

Former State Secretary in Serbia’s Ministry of Interior Dijana Hrkalovic, who is accused of abusing her official position, in a guest appearance in the show Ćirilica (Cyrillic) on Happy Television, aired on Tuesday, presented a series of incorrect pieces of information about BIRN and Vreme journalist Jelena Zoric, and also mentioned her brother.

Untransparent and uncontrolled surveillance enables infringement of citizens’ privacy and changes how journalists work with sources, concluded the participants of the panel „Influence of new technologies, artificial intelligence and surveillance technology on freedom of expression and the media“, which BIRN organized in cooperation with OSCE.

Stories on air pollution, cronyism in business and manipulation of the COVID death toll received the top prizes at an awards ceremony on November 16.

BIRN Serbia journalist Natalija Jovanovic was announced as this year’s winner of the Dejan Anastasijevic Investigative Award in the online media category by the Independent Journalists’ Association of Serbia and the US embassy in Belgrade on Friday.