Improving investigative journalism in Macedonia

Recent training on investigative journalism in the new media, held in late January, 2018 rounded the cycle of ten advanced trainings in which a total of 96 journalists from 55 media from all over the country gained new knowledge and improved their skills for research and reporting on the most important topics in the society.

The topics of the trainings were selected depending on the recommendations of the journalists according to their needs or as a reaction to the current issues in the society starting from searching "Panama Papers", to research and reporting on the election process, on financial and economic issues, on topics of local importance, to specialized trainings for television journalists and journalists from the new media, as well as trainings for use in the research of digital and forensic tools and trainings for providing quality investigative journalism for junior journalists, as well as for those most advanced ones.

Lecturers were investigative journalists, trainers and experts from Europe, the region, but also from Macedonia. Among them, Christiaan Triebert, award-winning researcher from the Netherlands, Keith Stafford, the leading global journalism trainer of Reuters, Rachel Wright, a former BBC producer, investigative journalists and editors from the leading investigative journalism TV program Insider and one of the best regional corruption research networks, Krik, both from Serbia.

As a result, the regular annual monitoring of media reporting showed an increased presence of investigative stories and analytical articles in 2017 compared to 2016, from 5% to 8.8%, along with improved quality of these stories.

All of these activities are carried out within the framework of the EU-funded project “Investigative reporting to boost reforms”, implemented by the Center for Civil Communications in partnership with the NGO Infocenter and BIRN Macedonia.

The project encompasses a series of workshops for improving the cooperation between journalists and the civil sector in achieving common societal goals, support of journalists from Macedonia for research on the ways in which certain problems that are facing in Macedonia are solved in other European countries, support to local NGOs for the preparation of research and databases on important phenomena of the country, which will further serve journalists and the civil sector to improve and support their activities, etc.