Based in Chisinau, Madalin Necsutu has been Balkan Insight’s correspondent from Moldova since 2017.
He is a political and investigative journalist who specialises in Eastern Europe and the politics of ex-Soviet states in the region.
He has worked as a journalist since 2006 for Romanian media outlets like the Mediafax news agency and daily newspapers ZIUA, Curentul and Evenimentul Zilei.
He was awarded for his political and investigative stories in Romania by the Romanian Professional Journalists Union in 2016; won the prize “European Reporter in 2017” by the European Commission; and has been awarded in Moldova by the UN Development Project in 2016.
He graduated from the Faculty of History in Bucharest, Romania, where he also completed an MA in International Relations. He did his postgraduate studies on diplomacy and is now doing a PhD in history in Chisinau, Moldova, where he has been based since 2015. He speaks Romanian, English, French, and basic Russian.
The 10 participants for this year’s Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence (BFJE) have been chosen.
The programme received 99 applications; the selection committee chose 10 participants from across the region.
Applicants from around the Balkan region pitched their story ideas on “TRUTH”, the theme for this year’s edition of the BFJE. A selection committee had to make some tough choices and evaluate the applications based on the relevance, feasibility and originality of the proposals, as well as the professional qualifications, motivation and journalistic approach of the applicants.
A regional comparison of how media report on cases of organized crime and corruption in Bosnia, Kosovo and Serbia analysing the main obstacles faced by reporters.
BIRN’s project “Exercising the Freedom of Expression and Openness of State Institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Serbia” supported by the German Federal Foreign Office Stability Pact fund, was a regional, 10-month long project with aim to contribute to professionalizing media reporting on legal proceedings related to organized crime and corruption.
The project also intended to increase public awareness on the issues of access to justice and contribute towards more transparent and more responsive institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Serbia.
The project resulted with three unique country-based and one cross-regional analysis, the first of its kind offering a regional perspective on this topic.
Aside from the looking at how media report on the topic, the study also sought to unpack why media report on organized crime and corruption in the way they do. Specifically, the study sought to identify the challenges and constraints faced by media organizations across the region when it comes to reporting on organized crime and corruption.
The book is downloadable free of charge, contains all BIRN’s reports on the case. The e-book contains more than 500 articles and runs to more than 600 pages. Mladic’s trial, which began in 2011, lasted for 530 days and heard evidence from 591 witnesses, of whom 377 appeared in court.
The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network has published an e-book about the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, aiming to increase understanding about the newly-established court that will try ex-guerrillas for crimes during and after the war.
BIRN’s e-book, entitled ‘Kosovo Specialist Chambers: From Investigations to Indictments, published on October 31, 2017, includes expert analysis, interviews and archive reports that trace the history of the Kosovo Specialist Chambers from the initial Council of Europe investigation into wartime and post-war crimes by Kosovo Liberation Army fighters to the establishment of the new court to try them in The Hague.
Documentary ‘Your House was My Home’, which tells how Serbs and Croats from Kula in Croatia and Hrtkovci in Serbia swapped houses and moved to each other’s villages after the outbreak of war in 1991, had its television premiere on Al Jazeera Balkans in September 2017.
The half-hour documentary follows the stories of two of the villages’ residents – Goran Trlaic, who left Kula for Hrtkovci, and Stjepan Roland, who left Hrtkovci for Kula. Before the 1990s conflict, Kula was predominantly populated by Serbs, while the majority of the people in Hrtkovci in Serbia.
Since the end of World War II, they had lived peacefully together – until the first multi-party elections in 1990, when nationalists came to power and minorities were not welcome in either republic anymore.
A series of threats and violent incidents started a chain reaction as increasing numbers of inhabitants of Kula and Hrtkovci exchanged properties so they could escape to safety.
This was described by officials as ‘humane relocation’, but it was actually a forced population exchange in the midst of a war.
The personal recollections in ‘Your House Was My Home’ show how this forced population exchange had a devastating long-term effect on the lives and relationships of ordinary people from both villages, said Baljak.
The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, partnered with the Centre for Investigative Journalism in Montenegro, is launching a call for investigative stories on the environment.
The call for investigatorive stories with an environmental angle was launched on March 16 as part of the project to strengthen investigative reporting in Montenegro, founded by the EU Delegation in Podgorica.
Three journalists will be awarded grants to cover their expenses while carrying out investigations and writing stories on the environment and related to Chapter 27, within the accession process of the EU.
The journalists will have nine months to dig deeper and research their ideas, and will also have the opportunity to work with experienced editors as their mentors to guide them through the process of writing to BIRN standards.
The call applies only to journalists from Montenegro. It closes on April 6.
Click for more information about the application procedure, with details in Montenegrin.
A training course entitled ‘Innovative Techniques for Quality Journalism’, organised by BIRN and the Independent Journalism Center in Moldova (IJC), was held on March 16-17 in Chisinau, Moldova.
Fifteen participants representing national and regional media who are interested in launching partnerships at the international level and in publishing their stories in foreign media with the support of BIRN HUB, took part in the training.
The training was conducted by BIRN editors Timothy Large, Marija Ristic and Marian Chiriac, who shared their experience in the field of narrative journalism.
The trainers offered journalists a number of instruments and techniques for enhancing their reporting skills.
The participants had the opportunity to hone their features, news and analysis writing skills and gain insights into online journalism and into the correct ways of reporting on conflict situations.
The participants said they appreciated the training course, giving feedback responses saying that they learned how to write interesting futures, improved their professional skills and `learned new techniques for writing quality articles.
The Media Policy Forum was organised in Chisinau by Freedom House, the Black Sea Trust for Regional Cooperation and Internews, and co-sponsored by USAID, the Friedrich Naumann Foundation and BIRN.
“In the last few years in Moldova, we cannot talk about progress, but more about regression,” Nadine Gogu, executive director of the Independent Journalism Centre in Chisinau, told the Media Policy Forum in the Moldovan capital on Tuesday.
The biggest problems identified by the speakers at the forum related to the increasing politicisation of the country’s media and the alleged concentration of ownership in the hands of proxies for the ruling party, which was described as a threat to the country’s democracy.
The president of the Moldovan parliament, Andrian Candu, told the forum however that “it is important that the media should be allowed to raise its economic capacity”.
Candu argued that the media should have more access to public information and that the debates at the forum should help politicians to improve mass media legislation in Moldova.
But Moldovan media NGOs complained about the unwillingness of the authorities to offer more rights to journalists.
Participants at a panel moderated by Tim Judah, a special correspondent for The Economist, stressed the need to increase the level of media literacy in the country as a tool to combat propaganda and so-called ‘fake news’.
The director of Romanian Centre for Independent Journalism, Ioana Avadanei, described a successful media literacy programme that was implemented in some schools in Romania with young pupils.
“It is not so much fake news that causes trouble, it is disinformation that comes in many shapes and form and it’s not only about banning content from social media, it is about how to educate people today,” Avadanei said.
Photo: Freedom House in Moldova
BIRN’s Macedonia Country director Ana Petruseva noted how investigative journalism had played a very significant role in the fight against the concentration of media power and the disinformation spread by government-controlled media in Macedonia over the past few years.
“We had a situation when on three to four private TV stations, we could see the same exact report… the only different thing was the voiceover,” Petruseva recalled.
The Media Policy Forum was organised in Chisinau by Freedom House, the Black Sea Trust for Regional Cooperation and Internews, and co-sponsored by USAID, the Friedrich Naumann Foundation and BIRN.
