20 Years On, New Threats Worsen Outlook for Free Media in Balkans
Source: Balkan Insight
In the early 2000s, when big and established electronic and printed outlets dominated the Balkan media landscape, and when their websites drew by far the most traffic, BIRN’s Balkan Insight was launched as one of the first primarily online media in the region.
The shift towards online was already visible, but many traditional outlets failed to see the writing on the wall.
“They ignored the fact that their websites were the most visited and were afraid that if they invested more in online production, their circulation or viewership would decrease,” explains Goran Rizaov, journalist and project manager at Metamorphosis, a non-profit from North Macedonia focused on democracy and digital media.
Many of these once prominent outlets are now history, and with them vanished their biggest potential value – their “big newsrooms, with many professionals and editorial teams that are unimaginable today”, Rizaov says.
In their place, Balkan readers and viewers now have a slew of new, smaller online outlets that lack the capacity of big newsrooms to produce original content and hold those in power accountable.
“Now we have hundreds if not thousands of online media but pluralism remains only a mirage. In fact, we only have a few narratives that everyone obeys because journalism has been reduced to copy-paste,” Rizaov comments.
These outlets are “struggling to survive, their sustainability is shaky and the salaries of journalists, workers’ rights and job safety are exceptionally low”, he adds, so “they make themselves available and subservient to anyone who sends them a ready-made text, a finished product”.
These ready-made products often come from state institutions and politicians, as well as private firms, who now hire more journalists, photographers and cameramen than media outlets, to maintain their PR image on social networks, Rizaov argues. This slew of small media simply amplify their patrons’ narratives without critical filtering.
“That’s where we come to a paradox – where media workers are hired to create PR for them and real newsrooms don’t have the resources to put this PR under scrutiny. In other words, it’s unfair competition,” he continues.
Competing with algorithms
Over the past two decades, the advent of largely unfiltered social media and of algorithms picking and ranking news based on their shock factor and potential for clicks and profits have diminished the role and capacity of media desks and of editorial teams. These are now playing catch-up with these faster and flashier competitors.
Media outlets struggle to compete, be more “likable” to the algorithms and publish news based on unchecked social media posts at high speed, media experts say.
Croatian journalist and editor Maja Sever, also president of the European Federation of Journalists, told BIRN that she still believes that people are interested in quality reporting.
But quality news has become harder to produce and promote, as “it is hard to penetrate the algorithms that impose profits”, she says.
She laments a chronic lack of political will in Balkan countries to educate audiences on. how to recognise original content.
“Unfortunately, readers have learned that they can get anything they want online for free – and most of them are not asking who the journalists who made that content are, what their working conditions are, and so on,” she says.
Sever adds that, by working in smaller and weaker newsrooms, over time, “workers have lost the power to unite and organise themselves to advocate for all they need”.
Another big problem, she says, is that employers increasingly hire freelancers whose rights are completely unprotected, “and so we are weakening the position and strength of the profession”.
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The original article: belongs to Balkan Insight .
