Journalists covering EU member countries and EU aspiring countries are invited to apply for grants to produce investigations shedding light on critical social, political and economic issues.
Selected journalists will receive grants of €1,140 for the production of their investigative stories (the grant lasts a minimum of three and a maximum of six months), as well as mentoring support from BIRN editors/mentors to help them produce their stories. Read more and apply HERE by February 28th, 2026.
Please note: this is not a collaborative grant. Only individual journalists may apply, and each journalist can propose one investigative story.
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Across the Western Balkans and Turkey, governments are reshaping the digital landscape, often in ways that test the balance between state power, platform accountability, and fundamental rights. A new series of policy papers by BIRN explores these developments, offering in-depth analysis and recommendations to advance democratic resilience and digital freedoms in the region.
“Digital legislation and policies emerging in the Western Balkans and Turkey are not isolated technical matters. They are deeply political choices that will shape human rights, public discourse, and accountability for years to come,” says Megi Reçi, BIRN’s Digital Rights Lead Researcher and editor of the series. Read more.
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On November 27, BIRN Montenegro held an Anti-Corruption Forum called “Corruption in Transport”. At the forum, BIRN Montenegro presented its report on the spending of state-owned transport companies, which showed that most of them operate non-transparently.
BIRN Montenegro’s executive director, Vuk Maras, said the majority of state-owned companies continued to withhold business information even after the change of government in 2020.
“All of this leads us to suspect that political corruption established by the previous regime is still present in practice. The former government used state-owned companies’ resources in various ways to buy votes, and the extent of abuses has only expanded with the arrival of the new authorities,” Maras said. Read more.
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Stories that deserve a second look
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Balkan Insight is BIRN’s flagship English-language website and it provides daily news, as well as analytical insight and investigations.
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Nebojsa Vujovic was posted to the Yugoslav embassy in Washington in 1990, on the eve of Yugoslavia’s bloody demise. In an interview with BIRN, he recalls a palpable sense of history being written, as well as Slobodan Milosevic’s ‘big mistake’ on Kosovo.
He participated in the 1995 Dayton peace talks aimed at ending the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. By then, he was practically persona non grata on the diplomatic circuit, frozen out of embassy receptions and government events. It was a reflection of the pariah status of the regime he represented, for fomenting war in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“You know, if they threw me out the door, I’d go in through the window; if they threw me out of the window, I’d go in through the chimney,” Vujovic recalled other diplomats saying about him. Read more.
This interview is a part of BIRN’s ‘Dayton: 30 Years On’ Special Edition.
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Every visit to the Homeland War Memorial Centre in Vukovar, which around 40,000 schoolchildren from all over Croatia visit annually, ends with a “school of peace”.
The programme of visiting Vukovar, where the bloodiest battle of the Croatian war of independence was fought, was initiated by the Ministry of Veterans' Affairs, which finances the visits from across Croatia as part of school history lessons.
“We want all the children who come to Vukovar to leave with a message of peace. We have been through what we have been through. The younger generations need to know what happened, but also see that life has continued in Vukovar,” Marija Rusnov, marketing manager at the Memorial Centre, tells BIRN. Read more.
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Envisaged as a platform that empowers creators to connect directly with subscribers, OnlyFans is seeing a growing number of third-party agencies managing models’ accounts – some of which face allegations of exploitation and human rights abuses.
In June last year, a desperate email landed in the inbox of OnlyFans customer support. The subject line: “STOLEN ACCOUNT”. The sender, referred to here as Lenny*, claimed that the agency managing her OnlyFans profile had locked her out and was using her photos, videos and name to make money without her consent.
Although Lenny asked the agency to stop, it continued posting her content. OnlyFans responded quickly and helped her regain access to her account, but “what I found there broke me,” Lenny recalls. Read more.
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When dozens of banks from Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Moldova joined Europe’s Single Euro Payments Area, or SEPA, in October, the executive arm of the European Union, the Commission, hailed it as an “historic development”. It would make euro transactions between the bloc and these four states “more reliable, faster, and cheaper”. Membership of Europe’s SEPA could save individuals and businesses in Kosovo millions of euros every year.
However, more than two decades since the country began using the euro domestically, and a year since it filed the ‘pre-application documentation’, Kosovo is still awaiting Constitutional Court approval of three required laws before it can formally apply to join SEPA. Read more.
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Prague’s support for Israel has been on full display since the October 2023 attack by the proscribed terror group Hamas. It has also remained virtually constant, despite the growing global backlash against the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza.
One of Israel’s most vocal backers in the EU, Czechia has dismissed any move to recognise the state of Palestine for now. But there’s a catch: it might’ve already done so. Some experts have done a bit more digging: they found that Prague’s pro-Israeli credentials may not be as straightforward as they might seem and that the recognition of Palestine by communist Czechoslovakia more than 35 years ago could complicate things. Read more.
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Our Winter Guide
What to read, listen to and watch.
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📰 Article:
The Sound of Freedom: Why MTV was Beloved in the Balkans: MTV is shutting down its European music video channels, which were once symbols of freedom for many young people in the Balkans and the former Eastern Bloc. Around 1990, Lida Hujic was only 20 when an illegally-erected satellite dish on the roof of the building where she lived in Sarajevo brought MTV into her world. Little did she know that MTV would literally change her life in return.
📽️ Movie / Series:
All Her Fault. A 2025 TV miniseries follows the struggle of a mother, Marissa Irvine, who arrives to collect her son Milo after a first playdate with a boy at his new school, only to be greeted by a stranger who has no idea where Milo is. In an instant, her world tilts into a parent's worst nightmare. Marissa and her husband, Peter, launch a frantic search for their missing son, even as the threads of their family life begin to unravel.
🎧 Podcast:
The House at Number 48. When Antony Easton’s mysterious father dies, he looks through his Dad's suitcase, which is full of strange clues: neatly stacked German money, a family tree he does not recognise, and books filled with messy notes. He also finds his father’s birth certificate, but it has a different name.
Facing his dad’s double life, Antony embarks on a ten-year search to uncover the truth. Bit by bit, he learns about his family’s troubled past as he tries to get back his grandfather’s property and art business, and reveal the robbery and murder of his relatives. Antony is determined to find the families of those who stole from his family, and still use that money today.
📘 Book:
A Girl’s Story (Mémoire de fille) by French author and 2022 Nobel Prize Winner Annie Ernaux. In the summer of 1958, when Ernaux was eighteen, she agreed to what a certain man wanted. After he left, she felt lost and without direction. Fifty years later, she realises that she can look back on those years and revisit the young woman she once tried to forget. In facing the shame, humiliation, and betrayal she felt back then, as well as her journey toward self-discovery and independence, she finds the beginning of her life as a writer.
🎵 Music:
1979. A song by the American alternative rock band Smashing Pumpkins. It was released as the second single from their third studio album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1995). On November 21, the band released the 30th Anniversary Edition of this album.
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