Tag: Trainers 2026

Bojana Paneva is a Senior Associate at Qoku & Partners based in Skopje, North Macedonia.

With nearly ten years of experience as an attorney, Bojana focuses her practice on dispute resolution. She is experienced in domestic and international commercial and investment arbitration and regularly represents clients before courts in complex litigation proceedings. 

Summer School of Investigative Reporting 2026 Sessions

Reporting Under Legal Pressure: Protecting Investigative Journalists from Legal Risks and Reprisals

This session examines the legal risks faced by investigative journalists when reporting on matters of public interest, including defamation claims, privacy and data-protection issues, protection of journalistic sources, confidentiality, and strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs). It will explore how legal proceedings, threats of litigation, and other forms of legal pressure can be used not only to seek legitimate remedies but also to intimidate journalists, create financial and psychological burdens, and discourage further reporting.

The session will provide a practical overview of the legal framework protecting freedom of expression and investigative journalism, with particular attention to the European Convention on Human Rights and relevant European Court of Human Rights case law. It will also consider the Macedonian legal context and the role of lawyers in preventing and responding to legal threats against journalists.

Through practical examples and case studies, participants will discuss how journalists and their legal advisers can assess risks before publication, protect confidential sources, respond to legal threats, and distinguish legitimate legal claims from abusive litigation. The session aims to strengthen practical legal protection for investigative journalism while maintaining the necessary balance between freedom of expression, individual rights, and the public interest.

Besar Likmeta is an Albanian journalist and editor with more than two decades of experience in print, television and digital media in the US and Albania. Editor of BIRN Albania since 2007 and Balkan Insight’s former Albania correspondent, he began his career at the Florida Times-Union. His reporting has appeared in international publications including The Christian Science Monitor, Global Post, Washington Post, The Sunday Telegraph and Foreign Policy. In 2009, Likmeta received the CEI/SEEMO Award for Outstanding Merits in Investigative Journalism.

Summer School of Investigative Reporting 2026 Sessions

The Flamingo Revolution: Environmental Journalism in the Middle of a Protest and an Information War

The session will explore how Reporter.al covered Albania’s “Flamingo Revolution”, a protest movement that emerged from opposition to a major tourism development linked to the Trump family in the protected Vjosa-Narta landscape and evolved into a wider challenge to government policies, political power and the influence of private interests. Using Reporter.al’s reporting as a case study, the presentation will examine how journalists combined reporting from the ground with public records, corporate research, environmental evidence and digital verification to establish what was happening and who stood behind key decisions.

The session will also examine how the story expanded beyond the physical protests into a contested information space. Government officials, pro-government media, activists and social-media accounts promoted competing explanations of the movement, including allegations of foreign interference, misleading or manipulated imagery and efforts to discredit individual protesters. Participants will see how journalists can investigate such claims without inadvertently amplifying them or abandoning critical scrutiny of the protest movement itself.

Based in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, Azem reports on daily developments for BIRN’s Balkan Insight and Balkan Transitional Justice programme. He covers politics, rule of law and human rights, transitional justice, corruption and organised crime, producing in-depth analyses, investigations and features combining elements of traditional and data journalism and multimedia storytelling.

Summer School of Investigative Reporting 2026 Sessions

Geolocation and Visual Investigation

In this session, participants will explore how to harness open-source techniques and visual clues to uncover, verify and analyse digital evidence found online.

Through hands-on examples, the training will show how even the most ordinary elements in a photo or video can reveal the exact location of an event.

Attendees will learn how to cross-reference visuals with publicly available satellite imagery, maps, and metadata, and use investigative tools like Google Earth, Street View and reverse image search to build solid geolocation findings.

Ana has been working as a journalist since 1997. She was a staff writer for the Skopje-based Forum magazine until 2000. During the 1999 Kosovo conflict, she also worked with television stations Arte, Spiegel TV and RAI Uno.

In 2000 she won a scholarship for a professional year development at Indiana University’s School of Journalism and spent a year in the United States. While overseas, she worked as a correspondent for Deutsche Welle’s Macedonian service.

From 2001 until May 2003 she covered the Macedonian conflict and its aftermath for Reuters. In 2002 she was Associate producer of IWPR`s documentary “Ohrid and beyond”. She was IWPR Country Director for Macedonia from 2003 until 2005.

In 2005 she established the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network in Macedonia, a local non-governmental organisation which is part of the wider regional network. In 2006 she produced BIRN`s documentary on Kosovo “Does Anyone Have a Plan?”. She has chaired and attended numerous public debates and is often invited to comment on current affairs in Macedonia by local and international media as The Economist, Radio Free Europe, BBC, CNN.

Summer School of Investigative Reporting 2026 Sessions

Engaged Citizens Reporting (ECR)

Audiences are increasingly dispersed and less actively engaged in supporting journalism’s core purpose of revealing and reporting facts. Engaged citizen reporting offers a way forward by revealing under-reported: citizens can become active participants in investigations, surfacing facts, pointing journalists toward where abuse or misconduct is happening, and providing evidence to support reporting. Through engaged citizen reporting, BIRN has produced some of its most important investigations on issues related to online abuse, environmental damage, gender-based discrimination and many more.

In collaboration with Karla Juničić, Engaged Citizens Reporting Programme Coordinator, this session will show how to launch an audience-engaged project and what to consider along the way — from crowdsourcing evidence, preparing effective callouts, to fact-checking and analysis and shaping storytelling. It will also address how to keep citizens engaged throughout the process, and why involving them ultimately builds greater trust and connection with your journalism.

Freedom of Information: Using FOI to Strengthen Investigative Reporting

This session will explore how Freedom of Information (FOI) can be used as a powerful tool for investigative journalism. It will focus on practical ways journalists can use FOI requests to uncover information, generate new leads, verify findings and strengthen evidence-based investigations. The session will also look at common challenges journalists face when requesting information and strategies for overcoming them.

Alex Anderson spent his early career in the former Soviet countries, alternating between running intergovernmental humanitarian aid projects and researching for investigative TV documentaries. After completing a master’s in social policy, he progressed as a researcher/country director through international human rights and conflict prevention.

NGOs: covering a range of Eastern European countries for Amnesty International, the South Caucasus for Human Rights Watch and Kosovo for the International Crisis Group. 

Summer School of Investigative Reporting 2026 Sessions

Policy-oriented investigative reporting

The training will show how to adjust research, writing and follow-up to the requirements of policy-oriented reporting. 

Field investigation → Political analysis → Prescription → Intended policy effect

Recreating the International Crisis Group high-impact model

Based in New York as the investigative projects editor at Reuters, Blake Morrison has overseen and edited three projects that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize: The Child Exchange, an investigation of America’s underground market for adopted children; The Echo Chamber, a special report that revealed how a handful of lawyers came to have an outsized influence in the US Supreme Court; and Cheat Sheet, an investigation into how standardised tests used by universities  to determine who to accept have been compromised by rampant, systematic cheating and other security failures.

Projects he has overseen have resulted in decades of jail time for individuals whose wrongdoing the Reuters investigations have exposed.

Prior to joining Reuters, Blake served as the investigations editor, deputy enterprise editor and investigative reporter at USA TODAY. His investigation into the impact of industrial pollution on schoolchildren spurred the US government to launch a $2.25-million project to examine the air outside more than 60 schools across the nation. The reporting earned honours including the Grantham Prize, a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism, the Fourth Estate Award, the America’s Promise Journalism Award, the Kevin Carmody Award for Outstanding Investigative Reporting, the Fred M. Hechinger Grand Prize, the John B. Oakes Award and the Philip Meyer Journalism Award. Before joining USA TODAY, Blake spent six years as a beat reporter, investigative reporter and editor at the St Paul Pioneer Press.

Summer School of Investigative Reporting 2026 Sessions

The Investigative Mindset

This interactive presentation is designed to reignite our curiosity and creativity in the field of investigative journalism.

Formulating Story Ideas: How to Structure Your Pitch

Building on lessons learned throughout the week, this final session will guide participants in crafting a compelling pitch that captures the essence of the story.

The Art of Interview

This session will explore the techniques and strategies essential for conducting effective interviews. From developing a personal interviewing style to navigating difficult conversations.