Award-Winning UK journalist Joins Fellowship Jury

Paul Lewis, special projects editor at the British daily newspaper The Guardian, has joined the annual jury for the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence.

He recently received the European Press Prize’s Innovation Award for spearheading a major research project into the causes and consequences of the riots in England in summer 2011.

Lewis lectures across Europe about the use of social media in journalism and teaches a masterclass in investigative reporting. You can watch his TED talk here. Last year, he trained journalists at BIRN’s investigative reporting summer school.

He was named Reporter of the Year at the British Press Awards in 2010 and won the 2009 Bevins Prize for outstanding investigative journalism. He previously worked at the Washington Post as a Stern Fellow. In 2012, he was nominated for both Reporter of the Year and the Orwell Prize for Journalism. He was also the winner of the ‘Best Twitter Feed’ award at the Online Media Awards.

He joined the Guardian as a trainee is 2005 after studying at Cambridge University and Harvard University. He lives in London and can be followed on Twitter: @paullewis

The Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence is an annual bursary for cross-border investigative and long-form reporting. Ten journalists are picked by the fellowship’s selection committee each year to receive funding, training and professional support to conduct fresh, in-depth investigations. The independent selection committee is made up of regional and international journalists, editors and prominent Balkan experts. It consists of six permanent and one annual member, selected in accordance with the annual topic. This year’s Fellowship programme topic is Integrity.

You can find out more about the project on its website: http://fellowship.birn.eu.com/en/page/home

More than 100 Applicants for Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence

This year’s competition for the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence programme closed on March 5.

After receiving more than 100 applications, the BIRN team has now launched preparations for the selection process and eligibility checks, after which members of the selection committee will begin the process of choosing the journalists to participate in this year’s programme. The criteria for selection are based on the quality of applications and the journalistic merits of the candidates.

The results of the committee’s deliberations will be announced on March 29 on our website, fellowship.birn.eu.com, while all candidates will be individually informed about the results of the annual competition.

Each year, ten Balkan journalists are selected to take part in the programme. Successful applicants receive a bursary, an additional travel and research allowance of up to €2,000 and the chance to participate in a seven-month programme of professional development and excellence in reporting. Experienced regional and international editors provide hands-on support throughout.

Fellows must be available to attend seminars and editorial sessions during the course of the programme. Participants are expected to complete 2,000-word stories, which will be subject to international-style editing processes and will showcase top-quality journalism with a cross-border reporting angle. The final articles are disseminated in local languages, English and German and are republished in the Balkans and beyond.

The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, alongside its partners, the Robert Bosch Stiftung and ERSTE Foundation, would like to thank all the applicants for their interest in the programme and wish them the very best of luck.

BIRN Director Speaks About Balkan Media on Berlin Panel

BIRN’s regional director Gordana Igric spoke in Berlin on February 25 on a panel about reporting in south-east Europe and the pressures on journalists that exist in all the countries in the region.

Igric talked about political pressures on the media in the Balkans, noting that political parties try to influence the media elsewhere too but the phenomenon is more pronounced in countries which are suffering economically.

“I don’t see any sources for mainstream media to be independent,” she said, referring to a discussion about the impact of financing on media independence.

Igric also said that one of the problems of the media in the Balkans is ownership, which is often not as transparent as it should be.

Ljiljana Zurovac of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Press Council said that the media laws in her country were very good, but what was lacking was their proper implementation. She agreed that one of the problems for the media in the Balkans is the lack of money.

But Goran Milic of Al Jazeera Balkans said that the lack of money is not always a problem because a large number of media have managed to develop strong audiences.

The panel was a part of an alumni meeting of past participants in Economic and Political Reporting From South-East Europe journalism training courses organised by the Robert Bosch Stiftung and the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The three-day meeting brought together six groups of journalists who had been on the course at different periods for panel debates, discussions and workshops.

UNDP Praises BIRN’s Transitional Justice Reporting

The United Nations Development Programme in Kosovo published a new report called ‘Perceptions on Transitional Justice’ on Tuesday, outlining the current problems that Kosovo is facing over reconciliation, missing persons, reparations and other key post-conflict issues including media coverage of war crimes topics.

The UNDP report analysed the role of media in reporting on transitional justice issues, comparing the current situation with a previous survey published by the organisation in 2007.

“Although print and electronic media throughout the region still continue to reproduce nationalistic narratives, it is evident that respondents [to the latest survey] can clearly make a distinction between media that are professional in researching and reporting on war crimes,” the report said.

“New media cooperation initiatives in the Western Balkans that cover transitional justice issues have become more visible after the 2007 survey. For example, the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network and Balkan Insight have managed to cover these topics successfully,” it underlined.

The report, based on a public opinion survey of 1,250 people from all Kosovo’s ethnic groups, said that past grievances were still obstructing progress on reconciliation within society.

The survey’s authors interviewed 850 ethnic Albanians, 200 ethnic Serbs and 200 people of other ethnicities in Kosovo.

Conference Criticises “Discriminatory” EU Labour Curbs

Speakers at a conference in Bucharest have attacked temporary restrictions that prevent Romanian and Bulgarian citizens from working freely in several EU countries.

The curbs are due to remain in place until their maximum legal limit expires at the end of 2013 – seven years after the two so-called “A2 countries” joined the bloc.

“Seven years no longer mean restrictions, they no longer mean differentiation – they mean discrimination,” said Vasile Puşcaş, Romania’s chief-negotiator with the EU in 2000-04.

Romanian MEP Renate Weber told the conference, organised under the auspices of the Balkan Fellowship of Journalistic Excellence, that her country had expected the curbs to be lifted sooner.

“When we joined the EU, we agreed to these long-term restrictions, hoping they would be lifted long before the deadline,” she said.

She argued that this would have been logical as European Commission studies had “demonstrated the benefits [to other EU economies] of the Romanian and Bulgarian labour force”.

However, she said, the restrictions had become an “electoral weapon” in the domestic politics of the countries that had imposed them.

Several EU nations – including the UK, Germany and France – have enforced laws that aim to restrict Romanian and Bulgarian migrants to specific sectors of their labour markets. Under EU rules, any such curbs must be lifted by the end of 2013.

The looming deadline has prompted speculation in the media that some governments may look for ways to extend the curbs.

However, speakers at the conference said any talk of prolonging the restrictions was misinformed.

Luminita Odobescu, a senior official from the Romanian Prime Minister’s Chancellery, said her government was confident that its European partners would lift the curbs in January 2014, in accordance with the EU accession treaty.

Weber added that Romania would challenge any member state that “invented reasons or statistics” to extend the restrictions on A2 citizens’ right to work in the EU.

The conference, held on February 13 at Bucharest’s Novotel Hotel, looked at the effects of the curbs on A2 workers as they entered their seventh year. Participants in the debate included Romanian government officials, academics, foreign diplomats and trade union officials.

The conference was prompted by an investigation by reporter Sorana Stanescu that showed how labour curbs have left Romanian builders vulnerable to exploitation in the UK. The investigation argued that the restrictions were in some respects counter-productive, harming indigenous workers by driving down wages and safety standards, as well as depriving the British economy of tax revenue. Stanescu’s report was produced as part of the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence, an annual bursary for investigative and long-form journalism.

Governments in the UK and elsewhere argue that the labour curbs have protected the domestic workforce and restricted immigration from eastern Europe.

However, speakers at the conference questioned if the restrictions had been effective.

Sean Bamford, a migration expert with the UK’s Trade Unions Congress, said there was “no evidence that Romanians and Bulgarians have threatened the jobs of British nationals”.

“They have however left Romanian and Bulgarians open to extreme forms of exploitation.”

Bamford said the British workforce’s problems were caused by “casino capitalism” and the failure of government regulation, rather than by migration from eastern Europe.

Dumitru Costin, the president of the Romanian National Union Block, said the labour restrictions had benefitted “employers, some employment agencies, lawyers, insurance companies… and last, but not least, those politicians who lack solutions and vision”.

Sociologist Dumitru Sandu said most Romanians in future would choose to migrate to Germany, rather than the UK, because its economy was stronger.

Background information

The Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence was established in 2007 by the Robert Bosch Stiftung and ERSTE Foundation, in cooperation with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), to promote incisive, cross-border reporting. The first prize-winner of the 2012 edition was Romanian journalist Sorana Stănescu, for her investigation: “Cheap, and Far from Free: The Migrants Building Britain”.

http://fellowship.birn.eu.com/en/fellowship-programme/cheap-and-far-from-free-the-migrants-building-britain.

BIRN’s Balkan Transitional Justice Team Holds Donors’ Meeting

The Balkan Transitional Justice team held a meeting in Belgrade on February 7 to present the project’s first year activities and results to donors.

At the close of the project’s first year, the BTJ team presented to its donors what had been achieved in terms of editorial coverage, online publishing and radio and television production. The team also outlined the project’s future targets and plans, among them a series of major regional investigations and the release of a documentary film and television series.

Lode Desmet, the director and producer of the upcoming film, in which six young people testify about their lives in the Balkans, showed sequences from the documentary for the first time. During the afternoon session, there was a debate on current transitional justice issues and in-house briefings from six BTJ reporters across the Balkans who explained the major themes and challenges for journalists working on the subject in their respective countries.

“Despite various challenges, we managed to reach the public in the region and provide crucial information. Twenty years after the wars in the Balkans, people still need answers and the public is entitled to receive information about war crimes trials. BIRN’s aim is to distribute necessary information supporting reconciliation among communities, but also to raise questions related to facing the past in the Balkans,” BIRN Project Manager Anisa Suceska Vekic said at the meeting.

During the first project year BTJ has achieved the following results:
•             Established, trained and developed a regional network of six transitional justice reporters
•             Developed a unique online written and audio archive of war crimes trials and analysis, with 1,160 published articles on transitional justice issues
•             Attracted more than 300,000 page views for the BTJ website
•             Gathered more than 13,000 followers on social networks
•             Finished filming the TV documentary
•             Released nine episodes of the ‘Roads to Justice’ radio programme
•             Recruited 100 radio stations in the region to broadcast nine episodes of the radio programme

The meeting was also attended by experts from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe OSCE, who actively contributed to the debate.

The Balkan Transitional Justice programme is funded by the European Commission, the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs of Switzerland and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Bucharest Conference To Probe EU Labour Curbs

A conference in Bucharest this February will discuss the impact of working restrictions on Romanian citizens in the EU, following an investigation by Sorana Stanescu that won the top prize in the 2012 Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence.

A panel of experts – including senior politicians, trade union officials and academics – will consider how the labour curbs imposed by several EU members on Romanian migrants have affected their economies and the rights of their workers.

The panelists will also look at the political context within which these transitional measures were imposed.

In the UK, an ongoing debate over immigration and EU membership has been fuelled by the government’s announcement that it will be lifting the labour restrictions at the end of 2013, in accordance with EU rules.

The conference, entitled “Six Years of Working Restrictions for Romanians on the EU Labour Market”, is due to take place on February 13 at Bucharest’s Hotel Novotel.

Speakers at the event include Renate Weber, MEP; Luminiţa Odobescu, a state counselor in the Romanian government; Vasile Puşcaş, Romania’s chief negotiator with the EU from 2000 – 2004; Dumitru Sandu, a sociologist at the University of Bucharest; and Sorana Stănescu, a journalist with TVR.

Sean Bamford, an expert on migration policy with the Trades Union Congress, one of the largest confederations in the UK, will be joining us to discuss the particular case of the working restrictions imposed on Romanians in the UK.

The conference is organised by the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence. Romanian journalist Sorana Stănescu won the Fellowship’s first prize in 2012 for her investigation “Cheap, and Far from Free: The Migrants Building Britain” . Her report exposed how Romanian and Bulgarian construction workers in the UK are more likely to be exploited as a result of the restrictions.

Balkan Insight Expands Its Subscriber Base

Balkan Insight attracted Premium Content subscriptions from 75 institutions and 225 individuals in 2012, increasing its institutional subcriber base by 150 per cent.

A portal offering in-depth analysis, investigative reports, commentaries and interviews, the Premium Content section of Balkan Insight offers readers exclusive and independent information on a range of important issues affecting the region.

This section was restricted to subscribers in 2008 and marketed as BIRN’s primary commercial product in an effort to cover production costs and help provide self-sustainability.

Our subscriber base has also expanded to Australia, and subscribers now include the University of Melbourne as well as the University of Michigan in the United States, the Council of the European Union and the US State Department.

Access: Balkan Insight Premium, Facebook, Twitter

BIRN at CEAS International Conference on Security and Defense

BIRN Director Gordana Igric took part in a Centre for Euro-Atlantic Studies conference entitled ‘Serbia, the Western Balkans and the EU: What Do We Have in Common in the Areas of Security and Defence and How to Make the Most of it for Stability and Progress in the Region’ on January 29 in Belgrade, on a panel dedicated to the challenges facing transitional justice in Serbia and the Balkans region.

Together with Sandra Orlovic from the Humanitarian Law Centre, retired Serbian Army military prosecutor Lakic Djorovic, Dragan Popovic from the Policy Centre and publicist Zoran Janjic, Igric discussed the impact of security sector reforms on transitional justice.

BIRN at CEAS Conference on Defense and Security in Belgrade, 2013All the participants agreed that Serbian society has failed to accept its responsibility for the crimes committed in the 1990s, and considered it unlikely that the Serbian government will raise new indictments for war crimes given that the great number of its members were part of the 1990s war machine. Orlovic said that the security sector reforms appear to be nominal because reform of the security sector’s personnel has failed – a fact that has direct implications on transitional justice processes.

The presence of compromised personnel at the security sector directly contributes to a climate of impunity, she said. Orlovic added that is unlikely that security sector reform will ever achieve its goal of re-establishing citizens’ trust if people who took part in the 1990s conflicts are still part of the sector.

Igric said that all ex-Yugoslav countries have developed their own war narratives which, through the media, have entered their education systems. Each country has declared the conflict to have been defensive and has no will to prosecute the perpetrators, while Serbia acknowledges only the NATO bombing as a genuine war. She added that the opening of secret files should lie at the core of security sector reform.

The Centre for Euro-Atlantic Studies, CEAS, is an independent, non-religious, socially-oriented left-liberal think-tank founded in 2007 in Belgrade. With its research work, CEAS generates precise analysis of Serbia’s foreign, security and defense policies.

Apply Now for the 2013 Fellowship

Your chance to investigate cross-border stories with funded research, travel expenses, one-to-one mentoring and the potential for publication in the regional and international media.

Experienced journalists across the Balkans are invited to apply for the seventh annual Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence.

To apply, read or download the following:

For this year’s programme, we encourage applicants to consider the theme of Integrity. We expect the best proposals to put some of the broad ideas evoked by the theme into sharp focus.

We also expect applicants to reflect on the role society plays in their stories. It is ultimately the relationships between people that makes politics and other processes interesting.

Ensure you think about your story’s significance not just in your home country, but also in at least one other regional state and within the European Union. Choose phenomena that are relevant and current.

Journalists selected for the fellowship by our independent committee will receive a €2,000 bursary and up to another €2,000 for travel expenses. They will also be expected to participate in career development seminars in Vienna and the region.

Completed articles will be published in English and other languages in the regional and international media.

In addition, the top three articles, again judged by an independent committee, will attract awards of €4,000, €3,000 and €1,000.

Journalists who have taken part in the fellowship say it has developed their skills and extended their expertise to other countries.

“I am grateful that the fellowship programme allowed me to carry out an in-depth investigation on a subject matter I had been researching for a long time,” says 2012 Fellowship winner, Sorana Stanescu. “The best part was the opportunity to work with a very scrupulous editor, an experience you rarely get in the Romanian media and that can only enhance one’s storytelling.”

The fellowship programme aims to develop and support Balkan journalists reporting on complex reform issues. It was established by the Robert Bosch Stiftung and ERSTE Foundation in cooperation with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network.