As part of the ongoing joint project ‘A Paper Trail to Better Governance,’ BIRN HUB and BIRN Kosovo gathered around 20 journalists from the Network offices in Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia, for a two-day regional training in investigative reporting.
The training took place in Pristina, Kosovo, on March 19-20.
On day 1, BIRN Albania editor-in-chief Besar Likmeta walked the journalists through the methods of investigative journalism – storytelling, sources and building a narrative around the evidence. Presenting some of the hard-hitting country-based and cross-border investigations produced by BIRN and published on Balkan Insight, Likmeta stressed the importance of team work on complex stories while staying true to the basic journalistic principles and ethics.
“Have people retell the story well and have people talk about details,” Likmeta advised, adding that journalists should spend some time with their sources and interviewees in order to warm them up and get better stories.
The participating journalists also got acquainted with the intersections of technology and journalism with Redon Skikuli and Boris Budini, advocates for digital rights, open access, open knowledge and online privacy, and also co-founders of Open Labs Hackerspace Albania and Cloud 68.
During the sessions, Skikuli and Budini shared tips and tools on how to effectively use the open source intelligence OSINT in journalistic investigations, and guided the journalists through the essentials of the dark and deep web. The trainers also instructed the participants on how to limit their digital footsteps and mitigate big tech in order to protect their work, their privacy and their sources, among other things.
On day 2, the journalists worked side by side with BIRN editors Apostolis Fotiadis, Dusica Tomovic, Jeta Xharra, Vesar Prebreza, Besar Likmeta and Kreshnik Gashi, discussing potential cross-border stories that will be published as part of the ‘Paper Trail to Better Governance’ project, implemented by BIRN HUB and BIRN Kosovo since 2013.