Regional meeting of investigative journalists
Event date:
Sat, 2013-11-23 09:00
The eleven journalist from five countries attended a regional meeting of investigative journalists on 23 and 24 November 2013 in Zagreb.
The aim of the meeting, organized by SEE Media Observatory and supported by The Guardian Foundation, and hosted by the Investigative Journalism Center in Zagreb, was to gather two groups of investigative journalists from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia and Serbia to work together with international trainers and with each other on stories aiming to disclose abusive and excessive control of the media by particular interests, and exposing them to corruption, clientelism and other practices that undermine proper functioning of free, independent, pluralistic and viable media.
First group is comprised of six journalists, grantees of the SEE Media Observatory sub-granting scheme who are selected by an international jury and already work on their investigative stories.
In the second group there are five additional journalists from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia and Serbia, each selected by the partner organisation in their respective countries. Journalists in that group developed their ideas for investigative stories during the meeting.
In addition to the support provided by the European Commission to the SEE Media Observatory, the regional meeting was supported by the Guardian Foundation which provided two international trainers: David Leigh (investigative journalist of The Guardian, UK) and Jonathan Stoneman (freelance trainer and consultant, former BBC reporter, producer and editor, UK).
David Leigh spoke about methods used by The Guardian to expose corrupt politicians and corporations worldwide, including media phone hacking, arms deal bribery and Wikileaks.
Jonathan Stoneman spoke on how to find and filter data on the internet that can support a story with hard facts and how to create databases to help journalists pull a story together.
Both of them also collaborated at the meeting with the jury members for the SEE Media Observatory sub-granting scheme to investigative journalists – Stefan Candea (Director and Co-founder of the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism), András Lőke (Chairman of the Board of the SOMA Foundation Budapest, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of ittlakunk.hu) and Sasa Leković (freelance investigative reporter and Director of the Investigative Journalism Center in Zagreb, Croatia).
Stories written by sub-grantees should be published until the end of December on this web portal as well as in mainstream media in five countries.
„The highlights of interesting and useful meeting were two training sessions. One was about advanced internet search techniques. Another one was about using xls to transform normally useless data bases into usable form and to mine data out of those transformed data bases.“ (Ermin Zatega)
„I learned a lot about the overall press picture in the countries involved in the programme. The picture is unfortunately even darker than I supposed it would be.“ (András Lőke)
„The most important experience for me is to listen about The Guardian key investigations done last few years. This kind of contacts and sharing of information is extremely important for the journalists who want to reveal secret ways of functioning in their own societies“. (Esad Hecimovic)
„To meet new people from the region and to learn from veterans of investigative reporting was the most importing thing during the meeting in Zagreb. Also, it is always important to share views and ideas with other journalists involved in investigative reporting“. (Slobodan Georgijev)
