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The Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence provides financial and editorial support to professional journalists who have strong ideas for cross-border stories. This year’s theme is the Rule of Law.

Mid-career journalists from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia and Slovakia are eligible to apply.

Each year, 10 journalists are chosen through open competition to receive a €3,000 bursary, close editorial supervision and mentoring, and the chance to attend international career development seminars and be published in the most influential regional and international media. In addition, the top three articles chosen by an international jury will receive awards.

So how do you maximise your chances of winning a place on the programme? Here are some tips from our editors, based on reviewing hundreds of applications:

1. Look at Fellowship stories from previous years.If the theme of your story has been covered by the Fellowship in the last three years, make sure your story has a sharp, new angle. In other words, your story should present the familiar theme through a fresh lens, perhaps even forcing us to question what we thought we knew. (You can find previous years’ stories online in the stories archive)
2. Be as specific as possible. Don’t just say you want to look at a broad subject; say what in particular you want to explore. For example, not just “migration” but “changes in migration between country X and country Y in the last five years”. And tell us howyou plan to do it and why that matters.
3. Do your pre-research.You’re not expected to research your entire story but do as much as you can to give a sense of what you expect to show. A proposal that says “I want to find out what’s happening with X” is not as strong as one that says “I want to find out what’s happening with X and my research so far suggests this is the answer and this is why”.
4. Tell us what’s new. Make sure to include what’s new about your proposal, compared to other media reporting on the subject. What do you hope to reveal or highlight? Why will this be interesting/important to readers?
5. Remember the investigative/analytical element. Your story does not have to be a hard-core investigation but it should be more than just descriptive. It should show not just what’s happening but why it’s happening. Make clear what you will investigate or analyse — and how. For an investigative story, this might mean obtaining documents. For an analytical story, it might mean analysing data and/or talking to academic experts. But…
6. Keep it journalistic. The Fellowship features seminars and mentoring and insists on the highest standards of accuracy but it is not an academic programme. It exists to help journalists improve their skills and produce a high-quality piece of journalism, not an abstract academic article. Your story should hold the attention of inquisitive readers all over the world, and not just in your country or region.
7. Whatever happens, don’t be downhearted. Every year there are more outstanding proposals than there are places on the Fellowship. Don’t take it personally or regret the work you put in if you’re not selected. The Fellowship is such a great opportunity that it’s worth giving it your best shot. If your proposal is strong but isn’t chosen, you may be able to publish the story elsewhere.

The application form, guidelines and further information about the Fellowship are available online at https://balkaninsight.com/fellowship-for-journalistic-excellence/

For more information about the programme and the application process, write to us at [email protected]

If the answer to these questions is ‘yes’, now is the time to submit your ideas. The candidates with the best proposals will undergo a training, to be held in Montenegro in the end of March 2020.

The training will be followed by a selection process. Three candidates with the best ideas, journalistic skills and knowledge will implement their investigative projects, with a close supervision and mentoring of the editorial team from the country and the region.

After completion of the investigation, all stories will be published at the websites of CIN-CG and BIRN, as well as in a special bilingual publication and e-book.

All journalists from Montenegro who have interest and experience in investigative journalism are eligible to apply. Apart from the training, mentoring and editorial support, the selected applicants will receive € 1,000 bursary for their stories (reduced by approximately 9% tax).

Applications should be submitted by March 4^th, 2020 to: [email protected]. The application form is available online at www.cincg.me.

Should you have any additional questions, please send them to: [email protected] or [email protected].

After 14 years of supporting journalists across the Balkans, we are now also accepting applications from Visegrad Group countries — Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.

The Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence provides financial and editorial support to professional journalists who have strong ideas for cross-border stories. This year’s theme is the Rule of Law.

Send us your application with your proposal by March 10.

For more information and how to apply please visit: 
balkaninsight.com/fellowship-for-journalistic-excellence/

The Resonant Voices Initiative is pleased to announce the new cohort of Resonant Voices Fellows and welcome Filip Balunovic, Valbona Bezati, Saska Cvetanovska, Merxhan Daci, Harun Dinarevic, Vladan Djukanovic, Jelena Djureinovic, Una Hajdari, Andjela Milivojevic, Predrag Momcilovic, Jeton Musliu, Ani Sandu, Fjoralba Sinoruka.

They will join the growing community of researchers, journalists, and activists working to expose and challenge extremist messaging targeting vulnerable audiences in the European Union and its neighbourhood. Fellows’ work also contributes to developing communication strategies as a means to combat these threats.

Similar to the previous year, the competition was fierce, and we received many more high-quality applications than we could support. Selected Fellows will receive funding and professional support from Balkan Investigative Reporting Network editors and experts to conduct in-depth research and investigation.

The ten new fellowships in 2020 are awarded to individuals and teams that will explore audience engagement strategies of media manipulators, trace the origin of far-right memes to discern their international appeal, deconstruct conspiracy theories and analyse the evolution of ideological and political identity of diaspora communities in multiple European countries.

The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) launched a cross-border journalism platform on Thursday with the aim of helping journalists all over the globe by providing them with knowledge and assistance necessary in today’s world.

BIRN Investigative Resource Desk (BIRD) is an innovative interactive platform created for professional and citizen journalists who want to keep up-to-date with the fast-changing world of technology without sacrificing their ethics or the standards of professional journalism.

In times of media deterioration, and with new challenges in the digital sphere that are shaping the world, journalism’s ecosystem is changing fast, and in unpredictable ways. The role of journalists across the world has never been more complex.

BIRD is BIRN’s latest move to strengthen journalism in Southeast Europe and beyond. For months, we have worked together with a team of dedicated journalists, editors and developers to create a platform that is easy to use and provides all relevant information in one place.

As we believe that information is power, our vision was to use the potential of the BIRN network and its knowledge base to create something that can be used widely, for free.

Through BIRD, we wanted to offer journalists an easy way to learn and stay on track with the latest developments in the digital sphere. That way, BIRD users will be able to get all the latest updates on the state of digital freedoms, opportunities within the journalism network and beyond, and news covering these topics.

The platform provides investigative journalists with various types of assistance and a set of tools and resources related, but not limited, to freedom of information, data access and protection, cyber-security and open-source datasets.

The assistance of our experts is free and provided on a needs basis.

BIRD also contains various databases and a set of tools that can be used in daily reporting. Currently, the platform offers 20 different publications on topics such as freedom of information, data protection, journalism sustainability, verifying information and many more. And we intend to add more in future.

As part of our drive for openness, we have also established a free, user-friendly, searchable online library of public documents and scraped database. Called BIRN Source, it currently contains almost 1,300,000 documents, files and records. The numbers will soon rise as the database is being updated in real-time.

BIRN Source is designed to be easily searchable and useful to journalists and editors from Southeast Europe, and all over the world. The database offers text recognition in multiple and all-local languages.

We are also proud of BIRD’s How-to’s section. This is where users will be able to read case studies and guides done by some of the most prominent journalism experts, such as Blake Morrison, Frederik Obermaier, Benjamin Strick and others. We believe that the experience they have shared may motivate journalists to implement some of the solutions in their own newsrooms, and come up with new ideas.

As a result of our partnership with Share Foundation, an integral part of BIRD is the regional digital freedom-monitoring database, covering the state of digital rights in Southern and Eastern Europe (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Hungary, North Macedonia, Romania and Serbia).

Recognising the open and global nature of the online arena, the database stresses the importance of a human rights-based approach towards people in the digital environment.

Together with Share, BIRN journalists will monitor and fact-check cases of digital rights violations across the region as soon as they happen.

The database is searchable by different criteria (date, country, affected party, means of the attack, description, attacker, etc.) and is available in both English and the local languages of the countries where the monitoring is being conducted.