Author: SummBirn

by Aleksandra Vrbica

The first session of Day 4 of the BIRN Summer School in Ohrid started with BIRN consultant Alex Anderson’s session on policy-oriented investigative reporting.

Anderson recounted a two-week project he completed in Ukraine in 2014 titled “Ukraine must stop ongoing abuses and war crimes by pro-Ukrainian volunteer forces”. This was a quick-fire policy intervention report that required him to complete a seven-page report with a three-day turnaround from field to publication.

He also walked the participants through another project he did. Published with Human Rights Watch, his report “Leave None to Tell the Story” addressed genocide in Rwanda. The report was published five years after the events and was more than 600 pages long.

The day continued with a session on the Engaged Citizens Reporting (ECR) Programme, BIRN’s audience engagement tool. The session was led by Ana Petruseva, BIRN Macedonia Director, and Karla Junicic, Engaged Citizens Reporting Programme Coordinator at BIRN Hub.

“It can be created in multiple languages. Everything that people upload is encrypted, and one of the most important things ECR provides is digital safety,” Junicic said.

This tool is also used by other media outlets in the Western Balkans.

“We trained different media in the region to work with this tool. For citizens – this is a safe place, they don’t necessarily have to share their names if they don’t want to,” Petruseva added.

However, not every topic is an engagement topic.

“Some good topics for ECR are healthcare (for example, the waiting lists), daily evidence of corruption, environmental issues. It’s always important to do a pre-research and you should ask yourself – who is your stakeholder, what language are they using, and how to reach them,” explained Junicic.

She shared the BIRN investigation TikTok Used Across Balkans to ‘Slutshame’ Women and Girls with participants as a way of demonstrating how ECR can help in the investigation process. Through this tool, one of the victims left her contact information, which enabled the investigation’s author to interview her.

After Petruseva and Junicic’s session, Felicia Cretu, editorial fact-checker at CU SENS Media Project, held a session on fact-checking. She presented the checklist of what should be checked before the publication of an investigation: names, spelling, numbers and statistics, quotes, descriptions and any potential bias.

Cretu warned that using Wikipedia or media outlets that don’t fact-check as a source is something that can land journalists in trouble or result in a legal suit. “That’s why we verify every date, time period, time frame in the story,” Cretu said.

Together with participants, Cretu did an exercise from her organisation and showed all the steps she used to fact-check information.

The final session was on reporting on the environment, how to investigate pollution and the risks and impacts on public health.

Blake Morrison, lead trainer and investigative projects editor at Reuters News, discussed his investigation into the impact of pollution on children, a topic that was not sufficiently investigated in the United States at the time.

“First, I got two databases – the location of every school, and the location of every polluter in America. And I was looking for a school that the government had to close because it was so toxic. I found one near a plastic factory where the risk of getting cancer was 50 times greater than what was allowed by law,” explained Morrison. Later, he found more than 150 such locations.

The topic started a lively discussion with the participants, and the day ended with work on pitches that journalists will present on the final, sixth day of the summer school.

by Aleksandra Vrbica

The BIRN Summer School of Investigative Reporting in Ohrid started off Day 3 with a session on digital security. Sharbil Nammour – a media safety advisor and the founder of Vallaris Solutions, a consultancy specialising in working with media in risk assessment and safety planning – explained to participants all the ways they could be attacked.

“Especially in the Balkans, these are the most common digital threats: state surveillance, online harassment/doxing, targeting. Doxing is taking what you consider private [information] and exposing it online to intimidate you and harass you. It’s exposing your ID, your address, your information to millions of people. But almost all of these threats can be fixed, can be mitigated,” Nammour explained.

Nammour also presented information on spyware, such as Pegasus, Predator and Finisher, and how journalists can protect themselves.

But, Nammour said, “spyware isn’t the biggest issue – the intimidation is.”

Speaking about the roots of all of these threats, Nammour noted that there’s usually a personal factor and that “99.9% is human error.”

“I’m not blaming journalists – it’s just the fact. You will be tired, and we all have digital burnout. And social media always exposes people the most. Be aware of that. If you’re not posting, your partner is, for example,” Nammour said.

After Nammour’s session, Jeta Xharra, BIRN Kosovo Director, explained through her own professional experiences why some investigations spark change and others don’t.

Xharra explained that during the 1990s in Kosovo, one of the ways Albanians showed opposition to Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic was by not paying their electricity bills. However, this practice continued long after his rule. Later, in 2007, during local election debates in Kosovo, together with the BIRN crew and other NGOs, Xharra went to the seven biggest municipalities and filmed TV shows with local mayoral candidates addressing the electricity issue. The impact of this programme was a 40% rise in Kosovars paying electricity bills.

“We didn’t know that it would work, but we did some steps that made some changes,” says Xharra. “Try and test the institutions. I contacted them, and at first, they were laughing. In Kosovo, until 2008, there was no country, so we were all a little bit playing the state. I call that moment ‘a spirit of the time’.”

She also shared what affected the success of these TV shows.

“Its frequency – the TV show was broadcast daily – different locations and by using the colloquial Albanian language, which were just some of the success elements, this series had a big impact,” says Xharra.

Xharra also explained how BIRN has grown into an organisation of engaged journalism and how BIRN investigations contributed to the changes in Western Balkans countries.

The second part of the day started with the lead trainer Blake Morrison’s session on interviews.

“You have to show confidence in your own skills. You have to think about how you’ll present yourself, and play out the many possibilities,” stressed Morrison.

“Don’t get flustered. This goes with how you handle pressure. We need to show humility because we ask people to trust us and to help us. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you don’t know something,” added Morrison.

Morrison shared experiences from several stories he worked on and what their impacts were. He also shared tips on how journalists can help their interviewees open up and talk about the subject at hand.

“Let’s not twist the arm, let’s hold the hand and build the trust,” concludes Morrison.

The third day ended with Sharbil Nammour’s scenario-based exercises and live problem-solving. Nammour showed how to help someone and save lives during unexpected situations, such as riots and protests, and how to provide first aid in the event of choking or bleeding.

“Be always active in this loop – observe, adapt and act. Most people freeze in such moments,” explained Nammour.

by Aleksandra Vrbica

The second day of the BIRN Summer School of Investigative Reporting in Ohrid, North Macedonia, started with lead trainer Blake Morrison’s wrapping up of Day 1, followed by a masterclass in open-source intelligence. This masterclass was led by Reade Levinson, visual investigations reporter at Reuters News.

Levinson showed participants how to improve their online search for images and data using different tools to find and verify publicly available information. Through practical exercises, participants learned useful tips and tricks on how to find data that is not easily accessible through Google.

She also explained how to use tools on social media to gain more information for investigations.

“The algorithms are getting better and better. When I did an investigation on the Nigerian army, I used TikTok,” Levinson said.

Participants had an opportunity to learn more about these tools through exercises, which included videos of the “Flamingo” revolution in Albania and the wildfires that broke out in Croatia this summer.

After Levinson’s masterclass, Jonathan Soma, professor of data journalism at Columbia University Journalism School, shared approaches to data analysis using the data tool Pandas and coding with the help of AI.

Together with Soma, participants did several exercises on coding basics in PDF files and learned how to find, analyse and change data in these files, using the Python programming language.

“All you need are patterns that you copy and change,” said Soma.

However, since journalists aren’t programmers, Soma showed participants how AI can make their work much easier, especially when data visualisation is needed.

“What you really want to ask ChatGPT and other AIs is to design the tool, which it will design for you. And for that, Claude is better than ChatGPT,” explained Soma.

In response to the question of why it is important for journalists to know coding basics when AI can do so much, Soma responded:

“Every single concept you know becomes a building block you can glue together. The more blocks, the stronger your foundation.”

The second day ended with Soma’s session on how AI transformed newsrooms, data and document-based investigation.

“Data journalism enabled small newsrooms to do really big investigations,” Soma said.

by Aleksandra Vrbica

On Monday, August 18, the 2026 BIRN Summer School of Investigative Reporting officially began in Ohrid, bringing together journalists from across the region and beyond for a week of intensive learning, collaboration and investigative journalism.

The week-long summer school brings together around 30 participants from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Serbia, Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria. Over the course of the programme, they will learn how to distinguish suspicion from fact and set high standards for investigative reporting.

The participants were welcomed by Ana Petruseva, BIRN Macedonia Executive Director; Gentiana Murati, BIRN Deputy Director; and Blake Morrison, lead trainer and Investigative Projects Editor at Reuters News.

The first day started with Blake Morrison‘s session, which set the tone for a week focused on one central question: How do we go beyond reporting what is happening and investigate why it is happening?

During the introductory presentation, Morrison presented a case study of a journalist who reported untruthfully, explaining the consequences for the profession as a whole and those who become the victims of fabricated stories.

Gordana Andric, Investigative Editor at BIRN Hub and BIRN Serbia, also discussed formulating story ideas and how participants should structure their pitch.

The session guided participants through the steps of developing a story idea into an article proposal. There was a discussion on sources and newsworthiness, how to move from a broad topic to a specific angle, what the key elements of every pitch are and why all of this matters.

During the second part of the day, a Q&A session was held with BIRN investigative journalists Gordana Andric, Sasa Dragojlo and Ana Petruseva, moderated by Jeta Xharra, BIRN Kosovo Director.

The session brought together BIRN’s leading investigative journalists to discuss how they developed stories from initial ideas into impactful investigations. Through a moderated Q&A and discussion, participants explored the editorial choices, research, challenges and investigative approaches behind 10 selected stories, gaining practical insights from the journalists’ experience.

Among other things, Petruseva presented BIRN Macedonia’s interactive online database Skopje 2014 Uncovered, which documents and maps the publicly-funded buildings, monuments, facades and sculptures that transformed the capital city. She gave input into how information of public interest can be checked.

“First, we relied on the electronic system. But the problem was – and this is how we figured out that the government wanted to hide this from us – there would be a lot of typos in the documents. You would go to a certain building, and it wouldn’t be the correct address,” Petruseva said, explaining some of the issues they experienced while working on this investigation.

Petruseva also presented the database on religious communities’ assets in North Macedonia.

Sasa Dragojlo explained how BIRN worked on a story about Serbian-Israeli ammunition cooperation and the latest investigation on Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and his connection with Jorg Heeskens, who has been advising Vucic almost since the moment he took power. Documents obtained by BIRN/Der Spiegel show just how closely Heeskens has worked with Vucic on a deeply unpopular lithium mining project, exposing what critics say is German complicity in the president’s subversion of democracy.

Over the coming days, participants will work with experienced journalists and trainers to strengthen their skills in investigative reporting, develop story ideas, explore new research and digital tools, and learn how to turn questions and suspicions into well-evidenced investigations.