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.