Q&A: Financial Times reporters Dan McCrum and Stefania Palma on Wirecard and pressures on business journalists
Dan McCrum and Stefania Palma, business reporters for the Financial Times, spent years investigating German payments company Wirecard and revealed in a series of articles that the darling of the stock markets and the German tech scene faked its accounts. When it filed for insolvency in June 2020, Wirecard owed creditors billions of dollars, and…
Journalist Patricia Devlin on working in Northern Ireland: ‘I feel vulnerable and I feel threatened’
Over the past two years, crime and paramilitary and sectarian attacks have risen in Northern Ireland, fueled by economic stagnation, a power vacuum in the regional government, and the fallout from Brexit, according to news reports. In this climate, journalists are also increasingly at risk: freelance reporter Lyra McKee was killed in April 2019, and…
Hungarian journalist Csaba Lukács on covering COVID-19 amid attacks on independent media
In 2018, a group of conservative journalists opposed to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his right-wing government launched Magyar Hang, an independent weekly magazine. Since then, government officials and their supporters have repeatedly harassed employees of the magazine, calling them “traitors” for opposing Orbán, accusing them of spreading fake news, and threatening them with…
Slovenian journalist Blaž Zgaga on facing off against a government fighting COVID-19 coverage
Blaž Zgaga is a freelance Slovenian investigative journalist and a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists who covers national security and defense. In his reporting, he has uncovered corruption and written about arms trafficking in the region.
Q&A: RAI journalist Stefania Battistini on covering Italy’s coronavirus outbreak
Stefania Battistini, an experienced reporter for Italian public broadcaster RAI, has covered terrorist attacks, earthquakes, and Syria’s civil war for the channel’s news program. Now, she is confronting the biggest challenge of her career: the coronavirus pandemic that is ravaging Lombardy, northern Italy, one of the hardest-hit regions in the world. Battistini, who is based…
‘I was the first to lose my freedom’: How police protection impacts Italy’s investigative reporters
Explaining the sudden presence of two grim-looking bodyguards in a way that wouldn’t scare her children was never going to be easy for Federica Angeli, a reporter for la Repubblica. So when Angeli returned home with police protection for the first time in July 2013, she tried to turn the situation into a game. “I…
For Turkish journalists in Berlin exile, threats remain, but in different forms
For Can Dündar, sitting in the audience of a theater performance near Dortmund in Germany in May was an emotional moment. In an interview with CPJ, he recalled how during the premiere night, he watched the main actor on stage playing a journalist as he was imprisoned in Turkey, had his house searched, his books…
‘It should not be accepted as normal’: Female journalists on harassment, intimidation in the Netherlands
The Netherlands is generally considered to have a positive press freedom reputation, but when the independent Dutch Association of Journalists released the findings of its survey of over 350 female journalists in May, over half said they had been subjected to intimidation or violence in their work and around 70 percent said these threats were…
Albania’s journalists tread fine line when covering organized crime, politics
The intersection of organized crime, corruption and politics in Albania is impacting the country’s press. During a joint mission by a coalition of press freedom organizations to Tirana in June, CPJ Europe Correspondent Attila Mong spoke with journalists about challenges including threats, attacks, political interference, and legal harassment.