BIRN Summer School participants gain SCOOP funding for investigative stories

The last day of this year’s BIRN Summer School of Investigative Reporting saw participants present their investigative story ideas. All investigative pieces, submitted by previously determined participant groups, were given the opportunity to gain funding from the SCOOP Network of investigative journalists, based in Denmark.

SCOOP has decided to fund five of the seven submitted investigative story proposals.

Journalists will cover a wide range of topics, from a local Kosovo story about work permit tax collection, through influences and connections between political parties and war veterans’ associations in Balkan states, to a story entitled ‘Follow the Garbage’, about how Albania is Italy’s new rubbish dump, a Netherlands’s cover-up of a mass grave and property related to organized crime in Croatia and Serbia.   

The investigative teams will complete their articles in the next six moths and BIRN will publish them on the popular www.balkaninsight.com website.