The media industry in Europe has been experiencing and adapting itself to a sea of changes in the past decades due to the digital transformation. While the media industry has adapted to these challenges, the situation took a drastic turn following the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and the industry has been severely hit. While the pandemic has accelerated these changes rapidly, journalists, the media, and journalists’ unions are yet to catch up with and adapt to the changes.
Against this background, this project has its general objectives to improve the capacity of national journalists’ unions and associations in addressing challenges brought by the digital transformation in the media; and the compounding impacts of Covid-19 pandemic as well as the recent economic, social and political crisis brought by the Russian-Ukraine war.
Fair and decent working conditions are far from the reality without stronger journalists’ unions and associations to defend the rights of journalists. Therefore, the focus of the project is on the capacity of journalists’ unions in collective bargaining, workers’ representation (especially freelance / atypical workers), and engaging in social dialogues. The target groups are journalists’ unions and associations in the EU and candidate countries.
These objectives will be achieved through four main activities :
1) A series of 5 thematic, capacity-building workshops. The themes of the workshops will focus on:
- Collective bargaining in times of crisis (Istanbul, Turkey) – 23 – 24 September 2024
- Equal rights for freelances (Vichy, France) – 23 – 24 January 2025
- Online harassment and better protection of journalists (Belgrade, Serbia) – 31 March – 1 April 2025
- Well-being and burnout in journalism (Namur, Belgium) – 16 – 17 June 2025
- Organising in the age of AI (Copenhagen, Denmark) – 6 – 7 November 2025
- Final conference (Montenegro) – 26 – 27 March 2026
2) National capacity building-programmes with national partners who are chosen for their regional representativeness: NUNS (Serbia), TUMM (Montenegro), DJ (Denmark), TGS (Turkey), SNJ-CGT (France), AJP (Belgium). It aims to improve the capacity building of the partners with tailor-made programme to their needs. The national partners will produce and implement a national capacity-building plan focusing on key strategic issues (i.e. collective bargaining, organising/recruitment or social dialogue).
3) Two research studies. The objective is to identify relevant cases of European journalists who have experienced online harassment on online social platform and developing good practices and recommendations on the topics of mental health and burnout in journalism and online harassment to open social dialogues with online social platforms, policymakers, media managers and trade unions.
4) A final conference for a wider European exchange and dissemination.
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This project is funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
