On April 28th and 29th the SEE Media Observatory will organize a regional meeting in Skopje, Macedonia. The aim of this meeting is to bring together civil society organisations, individual activists, independent state bodies, non-profit media and investigative journalists to discuss and prioritize issues for concrete actions to effectively influence national media policies for protecting and strengthening media freedom and media integrity in the countries of Western Balkans and Turkey.

Capacities of SEE Media Observatory as a regional partnership to initiate and support national coalitions for media integrity and concrete actions with own funds and instruments will also be explored.

Participants will be national teams from 7 countries involved in the project: Macedonia, Serbia, Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro, Bosnia and Hercegovina and Turkey. Every team will be composed of partner representative, media CSO/civil activist, investigative journalist, representative from non-profit online media, representative from independent state body or self-regulatory body.

As a result of this meeting, it is expected every national team to create synergies and generate fresh, creative ways for effectively reaching relevant stakeholders. These activities could steer towards submission of policy/legislative initiatives or they will use various traditional and digital communication tools for concrete issue-campaigns.

Data, arguments, key messages and recommendations from monitoring and research reports of the SEE Media Observatory (produced in 2014, and to-be produced in 2015 and 2016) will be used for the potential legilsative initiatives, public campaigns or other type of actions.

The event will take place at the Holiday Inn hotel.

Full agenda of the meeting can be found here.