A new report “Back to the Drawing Board: Crafting the Ideal Journalism Education Curricula for South East Europe”, published in November 2017, analysed the current state of journalistic education in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. The main goal of the research is to create a set of indicators to evaluate study curricula in journalism across the SEE region. These indicators are to assist journalism faculties in ascertaining whether their curricula in journalism correspond to the overall state of the media in their countries and whether they enable students to acquire adequate journalism skills to help them maintain high professional…

The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ), along with the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) and other European trade union organisations, submitted on 6 November its position on the 2nd phase consultation on the revision of the Written Statement Directive (931/55/EC) trying to extend the right for a written contract and social protection to self-employed workers. The EFJ, along with the ETUC, request in their response that Member States should ensure that all workers (including self-employed workers) have the right to fair remuneration in accordance with national law, collective agreements or practice at the appropriate level in conformity with national industrial…

The grey area between employment and self-employment, symptomatic in the media sector, has been highlighted by two recent studies focusing on online work and the “gig economy”. The separate 2017 studies, one by Eurofound (the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions) and the other by Heyes and Hastings from the University of Sheffield, suggest a precarious status of employment for ever more workers. This precarity is tied to digitalisation and the “gig economy”. The study by Eurofound focuses on digital platform work. The most reliable estimate of this type of work among European Union member states is from the United Kingdom, where…

The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) has released an alert to the Council of Europe, concerning a death threat against Croatian reporter Maja Sever. Sever is a journalist from the Croatian Television (HRT, public media service), and received a threat on October 29 via Facebook in response to her story about Nigerian refugees. The private Facebook message was racially charged, stating that “if you want to live with N***ers, go live in England, France or USA, but do not promote that Freemason’s multicultural politics in Croatia”. The aggressor also called Sever a “whore” and a “Yugoslav – mason whore”, according…

On 2 November 2017, the EFJ Vice President Nadezda Azgikhina wrote a letter from Russia. The letter focused on fighting against hate and impunity towards journalists. Here, the EFJ publishes this letter: The first conference devoted to Impunity in Russia took place just before the Moscow IFJ Congress in 2007. It focused mainly on the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist murdered on 7 October 2006, and focused on other colleagues who were murdered too. For the first time, a list of deceased Russian journalists, prepared by Glasnost Defense Foundation, was presented to the international professional community. It consisted of…

Impunity is when threats, attacks and crimes against journalists go unpunished. It results in a high level of fear, intimidation, censorship and self-censorship that undermines press freedom, the public right to know and leaves victims and their relatives powerless. The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) joins the International Federation of Journalists’ (IFJ) campaign to #endimpunity, which aims at holding governments and de facto governments accountable for their impunity records and denouncing any crimes targeting journalists that remain unpunished. Murder is the highest form of these crimes but all attacks targeting journalists that remain unpunished must be denounced. In Europe, the EFJ…