Balkan Insight

Balkan Insight is a website of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), that focuses on news, analysis, commentary and investigative reporting from southeast Europe. It is run by journalists in southeast Europe—the Balkans—including BIRN regional director Gordana Igric, who reported on war crimes in the former Yugoslavia.

Balkan Insight
Official website
www.balkaninsight.com

BIRN was founded in 2004 as a network of non-governmental organisations promoting freedom of speech, human rights and democratic values in Southern and Eastern Europe.[1] Balkan Insight reports from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Moldova, Romania and Serbia. Its articles have been republished by 95 media outlets in southeast Europe.[1]

According to the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN), BIRN is "dedicated to creating a strong, professional, independent media in Southeast Europe as an essential component of developing democracy and a market economy in the Balkans".[2]

Staff, contributing editors and board members

Balkan Insight staff editors, contributing editors and board members include:

  • Gordana Igric, BIRN Regional Director, is a veteran Belgrade journalist and winner of Overseas Press Club (USA) and Human Rights Watch awards for her reporting on human rights abuses and war crimes during the violent breakup of Yugoslavia during the 1990s. She later directed the award-winning Balkans program of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. With former IWPR colleagues across southeast Europe, she founded BIRN in 2005.
  • Ana Petruseva, Assistant Editor, is a journalist in Skopje, Macedonia, where she is the founder and country director of BIRN Macedonia. She has worked for a wide variety of media outlets since 1997, including Reuters, Arte (France/Germany), Spiegel TV (Germany), Rai Uno (Italy), Deutsche Welle (Germany), Forum (Macedonia), covering both the Kosovo war of 1998-1999 and the Macedonian conflict of 2001. She also produces documentary films.[3]
  • Marcus Tanner, Editor and Trainer, is a journalist in London. A former assistant foreign editor and Balkans correspondent for The Independent (UK), he covered the break-up of Yugoslavia, the fall of communism in Bulgaria and Romania, the wars in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia and the siege of Sarajevo. His books include “Croatia: a Nation Forged in War” (1997), “Ireland’s Holy Wars” (2001) and “The Last of the Celts” (2004), all published by Yale University Press.[4]
  • Eric Jansson, Contributing Editor, is an American journalist based in the UK. He has reported since 1997 from central and eastern Europe and the Balkans. A former Balkans correspondent for the Financial Times and Baltics correspondent for dpa Deutsche Presse Agentur, he has also written for The Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune and many other media outlets. In addition to editing, he has consulted BIRN on future development of Business Insight.[5]
  • Tim Judah, a British journalist who has covered the Balkans for The Economist, the New York Review of Books and others, is the president of the board.

Awards

BIRN journalists and reports that have received awards include Krenar Gashi and the BIRN investigative team, who won the Best Print/Online Story of 2006 for "Ex-Policemen Run Kosovo Passport Scam" handed out by the Association of Professional Journalists of Kosovo. Arbana Xharra was the winner of the 2006 journalism competition organized by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and Kosovo Anti-Corruption Agency; for her reporting on corruption in both Balkan Insight and the Kosovo daily newspaper Koha Ditore.

In 2020, BIRN received the Press Freedom Award from the Austrian chapter of Reporters Without Borders.[6][7]

Financing

Donors to the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network include the European Commission (EC), the Delegation of the European Union to Montenegro, the Austrian Development Agency and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.[8]

References
  1. "About BIRN. About Balkan Insight". Balkan Insight. Retrieved 2019-09-09.
  2. "Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN)". GIJN.
  3. "Ana Petruseva". BIRN. Retrieved 2019-09-09.
  4. "Marcus Tanner". BIRN. Retrieved 2019-09-09.
  5. "Trainers (Eric Jansson)". BIRN. Archived from the original on 2007-08-19.CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  6. "Press Freedom Award geht an investigatives Netzwerk BIRN und Gründerin Gordana Igric | Reporter ohne Grenzen" (in German). Retrieved 1 October 2020.
  7. "BIRN Wins Austria's Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Award". Balkan Insight. 1 October 2020. Retrieved 1 October 2020.
  8. "Partner Network: Donors :: Balkan Insight". Balkan Insight. Retrieved 2016-04-23.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.