With the participation of the ERSTE Foundation, Open Society Foundations and BIRN, fellows from Albania, Kosovo, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece and Macedonia came together with the Fellowship team to begin work on their in-depth stories.
They received practical tips from Fellowship programme editors, focused on planning, research, reporting and writing, as well as individually tailored advice and workshops on multimedia journalism.
The sessions were led by former Reuters bureau chief for the Balkans Andrew Gray, who was BFJE editor for the previous two years, and his successor as BFJE editor Matt Robinson, who also formerly led the Reuters bureau in Belgrade. Matt will now mentor and support the fellows over the months to come.
The 10 journalists also benefited from a workshop by Romanian photographer Cosmin Bumbut and BFJE alumna Elena Stancu, an EU Press prize nominee in 2015, on the value of multimedia in storytelling.
The fellows now embark on four months of research, reporting and writing, involving trips within Europe, before submitting their final work.