Author: SummBirn

BIRN Summer School Day 2: Journalism in Exile

On the second day of BIRN’s Summer School of Investigative Reporting, participants were introduced to visual investigations and had a panel discussion on journalism in exile.

The second day of BIRN’s Summer School of Investigative Reporting in Thessaloniki, Greece on Tuesday started with a session on open-source investigations entitled How to Expose Police Violence.

Marija Ristic, manager at Amnesty International’s Evidence Lab, explained how open-source elements and information can be used to analyse policing weapons and equipment.

Ristic also talked about journalists in demonstrations. “Journalists should be considered bystanders at protests. Any attack on them is generally not allowed,“ Ristic said.

Sam Joiner, visual stories editor at the Financial Times, talked about how to take a complex story and make it digestible.
“Visuals have to carry you through the story. Visual journalism allows you to understand stories differently. It requires lots of people to think outside the box,” Joiner told participants.

“There are two types of projects. Stories that use visuals to explain topics and themes that transcend the daily news agenda. And there are visual investigations, public interest journalism using visual evidence to break stories of global significance,” Joiner said before presenting the FT’s visual investigation into North Korean oil-smuggling.

The general secretary of the European Federation of Journalists, Ricardo Gutierrez, spoke about helping journalists in exile.
After Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine, “our first reaction was to try to evacuate colleagues from Ukraine. But they wanted to stay. So we changed our plans and provided them with safety equipment so they could continue their work,” Gutierrez said.

“We have a programme in Kosovo. We convinced the government to offer shelter to 20 Ukrainian journalists in exile. We launched the programme in March 2022, and the first journalists arrived the following month,” he continued.

The European Federation of Journalists doesn’t have comprehensive European data on journalists in exile, partly because many don’t want to be put on a list, Gutierrez explained. Most of the Russian journalists who fled to the EU now live in Germany or the Netherlands, he added.

Journalist and researcher Hanna Liubakova left Belarus after the presidential elections in 2020, when the government intensified its crackdown on independent journalism.

Liubakova said she fled after she was put under surveillance. “For security reasons, I had to change my location every few days. Then I received a signal that it was better for me to leave the country,” she said.
She told participants that Belarusians are still interested in independent news and use social media such as TikTok as well as websites to follow what is happening in the country.

The Summer School continues on Wednesday with digital security training and a workshop about mental health and burnout.

BIRN’s Annual Summer School Kicks Off in Greece

BIRN’s 13th Summer School of Investigative Reporting is bringing together 36 journalists from South-East and Central European countries for a week-long training to develop skills, explore new techniques and cooperate in cross-border stories.

This year’s Summer School of Investigative Reporting started on Monday in Thessaloniki, Greece.

During the week-long programme, journalists from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Kosovo, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Turkey, Georgia and Uzbekistan will master their investigative skills and techniques and learn from Pulitzer and European Press Prize winners.

Regional Director of BIRN HUB Milka Domanovic welcomed the participants to one of BIRN’s flagship programmes. “We hope that you will be able to implement the knowledge you gain here and connect even after the course is finished,” Domanovic said.

Ivana Nikolic, Programme Manager at BIRN’s Investigative Reporting Initiative Programme, presented the agenda to participants selected from a record-breaking number of applications – more than 220 this year.

“We are very proud to have had this amazing number of applications, and to be honest, it was very hard to select the best ones,” Nikolic said.
During the week, participants will learn about basics of investigative reporting; OSINT; visual investigations; how to stay digitally secure while working on a story; essentials of cross-border reporting; how to avoid burnout in journalism; how to master data journalism, etc.

In addition, there will be two panel discussions: one dedicated to “journalism in exile”, that is, reporting about one’s country from afar, and one dedicated to investigating the migrant crisis in Greece. The full programme can be found here.
The first day started with Michael Montgomery, a senior reporter and producer for Reveal. He talked about the fundamentals of investigative reporting. “It’s less often than not that you will come up with a completely new story. A new angle on a story that’s been covered can be even more impactful,” Montgomery said, advising participants to follow their passion and check their sense of outrage when choosing a story.

“It’s always easier to get someone to confirm something you already know or think you know than to get them to volunteer information you do not possess. That’s super important, to get people to talk. Most people don’t like to think they are spilling secrets,” Montgomery told participants.

Marija Ristic, Manager at Amnesty International’s Evidence Lab, introduced Open Source Investigations.
“Open-source researchers expose themselves and the subjects of the information they collect to various digital threats. Understanding how to protect yourself and the data generated during your research from threats is essential knowledge for digital investigators,” she said.

The first day ended with a workshop on story pitching, with journalists sharing ideas.

Ricardo Gutiérrez

Ricardo Gutiérrez is the General Secretary of the European Federation of Journalists, EFJ, the largest organisation of journalists in Europe, representing over 320,000 journalists across 45 countries.

A former journalist for the Belgian daily newspaper Le Soir, he is senior lecturer at Université Libre de Bruxelles, ULB. He is a member of the Belgian Press Council CDJ and of the Executive Committee of the European Trade Union Confederation ETUC. He has conducted training for journalists on hate speech, ethical journalism and reporting on ethnicity and religion. He is also a member of the board of experts of the Justice For Journalists Foundation and is a member of the jury of the Fetisov Journalism Awards. You can catch a glimpse into his interests (i.e. journalism and media freedom) by following him on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Molenews1) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/RicardoGutierrezVe).

Hanna Liubakova

Hanna Liubakova is a journalist and analyst from Belarus.

Hanna is a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council. She has written about the latest developments in Belarus for The Washington Post, The Economist, Deutsche Welle, and other international outlets. She started her career at the only independent Belarusian channel Belsat TV, now banned by the regime in Minsk. Liubakova reported in four languages from various countries and regions, including Belgium, the UK, Poland, and Chechnya. She is currently writing a book about Belarus.

Liubakova is widely recognised as one of Belarus’s leading voices of the free press. Her coverage of the protests against the authoritarian regime of Aliaksandr Lukashenka garnered significant attention. She was forced to flee Belarus and later learned she was on the regime’s wanted list. Despite this, she has continued to report on the people’s resistance, which has become even more crucial amid the Belarusian regime’s participation in the war against Ukraine.

Liubakova won the 2023 One Young World Journalist of the Year Award. In 2021, she was a European Press Prize finalist. In 2019, she was the first fellow from Belarus chosen to participate in the World Press Institute Fellowship in the US.

Hanna holds an MA with distinction in International Journalism from Brunel University London, where she won the Peter Caws Prize for best postgraduate dissertation in 2017. She also received the Vaclav Havel Journalism Fellowship at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in 2014.

Stavros Malichudis

Stavros is a reporter and editor at We Are Solomon.

Stavros is a reporter and editor. He has worked for the Agence France-Presse and inside story, and has participated in cross-border investigations with Lighthouse Reports and Investigate Europe. He’s a member of Reporters United. His reports have been published in European media. He was shortlisted for the European Press Prize ‘21 and won the IJ4EU Impact Award ‘22. In 2019 he was selected as a fellow for BIRN’s Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence (BFJE). He has been trained in data journalism at Columbia University in New York on a fellowship.

Apostolis Fotiadis

Apostolis Fotiadis is a researcher and investigative journalist.

Apostolis covers EU policy issues including developments in population movement, security and defence, privacy and big data policies. In the past, he has co-operated with many international media outlets and organisations. He has authored numerous reports, published two books on EU migration and border control policies and has been a member of numerous cross-border investigations. He currently co-operates with investigative outlet Solomon and also works as a freelance researcher.

Eleni Stamatoukou

Eleni Stamatoukou is a Communications Manager and a data journalist based in Athens, Greece.

Eleni joined BIRN Hub in 2021 as a Communications Manager. She is a data journalist based in Athens, Greece. She has worked for Greek and foreign media and the NGO SolidarityNow. Eleni has covered a big range of issues: migration, refugee crisis, corruption, LGBTI and human rights, politics, business, sports, environment, health and culture.
Eleni is a Fellow of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation and Columbia Journalism School 2019.
Eleni has a BA in Balkan Studies from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and an MA in Social Anthropology (Europe) from Sussex University, United Kingdom.
She speaks Greek, English, Turkish and Serbian.

Alison Killing

Alison Killing is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and licensed architect specialising in open source and visual investigations.

Alison Killing is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and licensed architect specialising in open source and visual investigations. She worked in architecture and urban planning practices in London and Rotterdam for several years, before starting her own studio, Killing Architects. Since then she has produced and curated an exhibition on death and architecture called Death in Venice, carried out research into the reconstruction in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake and developed Migration Trail, a mapped data visualisation about migration to Europe.

In 2021 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, together with Megha Rajagopalan and Christo Buschek for a series of articles exposing the network of detention camps in Xinjiang, China. This work used satellite imagery and architectural expertise, as well as interviews with two dozen former detainees, to identify and investigate this vast new infrastructure.

Laurent Richard

Laurent Richard is a journalist, executive producer of investigative documentaries, founder and executive director of Forbidden Stories.

Laurent is a French award-winning documentary filmmaker, producer, and founder of Forbidden Stories, a global network of journalists whose mission is to pursue the investigations of reporters who have been murdered, jailed or threatened. Richard has directed documentaries for 20 years; he was a Knight-Wallace Fellow in 2017 at the University of Michigan and he was also named European Journalist of the year 2018 by the Prix Europa in Berlin.

Since its creation, Forbidden Stories has won numerous awards including the prestigious “European Press Prize”, two Georges Polk Awards or the “Reporters Without Borders Impact Award” for the “Pegasus Project” published in 2021.

Documentary producer, Laurent Richard has produced, among others, the series “Green Blood” which won the Europa Award for the best European documentary series in 2020 and is currently producing several documentaries for PBS Frontline, BBC and Arte.

To further protect journalists, Laurent Richard has created the Safebox Network, a unique tool that allows the most threatened journalists to protect their ongoing investigations and to let those who would silence them know that they are no longer alone. The launch of Forbidden Stories’ Safebox Network was announced at the 2022 World Press Freedom Day conference in Uruguay. Since then, more than 50 journalists around the world have already protected their investigations using the Safebox Network.

Sandrine Rigaud

Sandrine Rigaud is a French investigative journalist.

Sandrine Rigaud is a French investigative journalist. As editor of Forbidden Stories since 2019, she coordinated the “Pegasus Project” published in July 2021 and the “Cartel Project,” a massive cross-border collaboration to finish the investigations of a murdered Mexican journalist that won a George Polk Award and the Maria Moors Cabot Prize.

Before joining Forbidden Stories, she directed feature length documentaries for French television. Her films have been shortlisted or awarded in multiple festivals, including DIG, Europa, Fipadoc, FIGRA, SeoulEco. She has reported from Tanzania, Uzbekistan, Lebanon, Qatar and Bangladesh.

In 2008, she co-wrote a book on the war of the socialist tenors in France. Of Egyptian origin, she grew up in the Middle East where she still travels regularly.