1000th Issue of Armenian bilingual weekly newspaper, Agos, hit the shelves. Yetvart Danzikyan, Editor-in-Chief of Agos, said “Agos uncovered Turkey’s history and paid a price but gained a seat in history of the republic.”
The Croatian journalists Unions published a press release on the allarming deterioration of the working conditions of independent journalists in Croatian media.
The Macedonian TV channel Telma was awarded with the silver lion at the Cannes Lions international festival on creative communication. Telma's campaign "Red Telephon" denounces the pressure of power on media and the slow destruction of freedom of expression in Macedonia.
The programme director of the Bulgarian National Radio (BNR) has been fired, while journalist keep on protesting against pay cuts planned by the radio's management.
Serbia scores 1.8 out of 4 in the Media Sustainability Index, declining form the previous year's position. The negative rate is due delays in the new media legislation, censorship on social networks, attacks on websites, threats and attacks to journalists.
In this article the columnist analyses the repression that is taking place in Croatian media space more and more as the parliamentry elections approach. In a very short period two of journalists were disenabled in doing their work for unaccetable reasons, for example one of them almost got fired because he published controversial information about the leader of the main oppositional right-wing party. The columnist points out that this is only the begining of the repression that this right-wing party will carry out if it wins the elections.
The effective development of the European media requires EU assistance but also the willingness of publishers to unify and work together for the same aim. The EU has sustained the transformation of a variety of sectors, such as steel and textiles. The media would also need to get this opportunity as they are one of the pillars of democracy and represent an important source of employment.
The representatives of the Macedonian institutions regulating the media sector debated about the ways to reform the public broadcasting service, Macedonian radio - television. MRT is criticized in international reports and by the domestic media organisations as biased and favor orientated towards the government.
In the latest report, Freedom House considers Macedonia as a country with "hybrid regime". The media independence is ranked with the lowest score ever, 5, and the organisation is alarming that freedom of the media in the country is deterioring.
