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Celebrating Radio in our Lives
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Photo: Sergio Santimano - for UNESCO
All over the world RADIO has been celebrated before, on and after February 13, World Radio Day. Stories of change, celebrating the role community radio can have in the lives of people in a distant rural village, in the lives of people living in a new community and country, having had to flee from prosecusion; people living with disabilities; or people marginalised for locally determined reasons - or sitting in a queue on your way to work in a busy city - radio is increasingly recognized as a core information provider.
In Europe we have during the Covid-crisis - which has accentuated the urgency and power of COMMUNITY - seen how the community's media - community media - have gained recognition for being exactly that: adding languages overnight when needed, and receiving that recognition and trust that few media have these days of mis- and disinformation.
Lots of wonderful reasons to celebrate. And we have!
Below you receive your invitation to the February 22 celebratory closure of the New Neighbours project, which we have documented in these columns over the past year; you will read about the adverse reality in Hungary, where community media apparently are so trusted and listened to that the authorities have now closed the last community radio with an FM license. We share experts' take on what our digital rights will look like in 2030; and invite you to sign up for a video profile if you are a migrant in Europe between 18 and 25? And you can read about new research documenting the role of community media as platforms for peace in Cyprus - and much more!
We in CMFE look forward to receive your story of change, cooperation, and about how you make community media visible and struggle for legal recognition.
In solidarity,
Birgitte Jallov
CMFE President
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| Strengthening an enabling environment |
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| Hungary’s Last Independent Radio Station loses its license |
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Photo: Facebook/Klubradio
Following the Media Council’s decision not to renew its license because of alleged breaches in the law, Hungarian radio station Klubrádió, one of the few remaining independent outlets in the country, will only broadcast on the internet. According to Marius Dragomir, Director of the Center for Media, Data and Society at the Central European University, this decision “is completely political”. Dragomir said to Libération that “the goal is to drive off the air a radio station that does not follow the line of government propaganda.”
The Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR) has called on the European Commission to immediately engage with the Hungarian government to find a solution which will allow Klubrádió to remain on the airwaves after 14 February, at least until the ongoing legal dispute over the tender is resolved.
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| The Internet in 2030: Digital Rights Experts on the Decade Ahead; decisive also for our community media future |
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The internet is a constantly evolving technological platform. It’s unlikely that when the very first internet users who were logging on in the 1970s and 1980s they could fathom the transformative impact the technology would have over the next forty years. The advent of email, the world wide web, and eventually social media has changed the way people around the globe interact socially, politically, and economically.
Unfortunately, the past decade has not been kind to global internet freedom. According to Freedom House’s annual Freedom on the Net report, online liberties and internet freedom have declined every year for the past ten years.
At the same time, we have seen halting progress on some important issues, such as the expansion of internet connectivity and attempts from governments and private companies to secure privacy online.
As we head into the next decade, the Open Internet for Democracy Initiative reached out to digital rights luminaries from around the globe to get their take on how they hope the internet will evolve over this next decade. Below are their responses to our prompt:
What is your vision of the internet in 2030? What current challenges do you hope we will have solved by then?
Read the answers here:
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| Visibility of Community Media |
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| New Neighbours Online Webinar |
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| Media professionals are coming together to share what it means to work on intercultural media projects during the
New Neighbours online Webinar. Over the past 24 months, the
European Broadcasting Unionand its project partners
CMFE – Community Media Forum Europe,
COMMIT,
COSPE Onlusand
MDI – Media Diversity Institutehave been implementing
good practices of promoting direct participation of migrants and refugees in European media productions. Now the time has come to look back and ask: what has worked well? What surprised us? And what would have needed more time to fulfil our expectations?
Some answers and lessons learnt will be shared in a 90-minute online conference on Monday, February 22nd, 14:00-15:30 with people behind the EU-funded New Neighbours project. Journalists, community media producers, experts with a migratory background, campaigners and public service media professionals will discuss how to create successful intercultural media projects and why this is pivotal.
The Webinar Creating intercultural media narratives will be moderated from the European Broadcasting Union in Brussels by Jeroen Depraetere, EBU Project Manager, in cooperation with storytelling coach Beatrice Ngalula Kabutakapua, Milica Pesic, MDI Director, and Nadia Bellardi, CMFE Project Coordinator.
The event takes place on Monday, February 22nd, 14:00-15:30 and is free.
To attend, please register here – places are limited!
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| La Retirada - memories of migrations |
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Half a million people fled Spain after the fall of Barcelona to the Franco dictatorship in 1939. Known as the Retirada, whose 80th anniversary was commemorated in 2019, this exodus marked the history and culture of the Pyrénées-Orientales region in France.
Populations fleeing conflicts, persecution or misery, with their great diversity of causes, remain a sad constant in history. A network of community radios in the Occitane region – Radio FM+, Tadio Lenga d’oc, Jazzin and l’Eko des garrigues – have given the floor to descendants of refugees, writers, intellectuals, artists, association leaders and also to people who have risked their lives to reach France, sometimes on makeshift boats. By crossing these voices and expertise, they have tried to understand the exoduses of today that echo the 1939 Retirada. You can listen to the radio documentary (in French) :
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| Community Media method plants seeds of peace and democracy among youth in divided Cyprus |
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New research shows the strength of combining participation with peace-building
VUB researcher Dr. Derya Yüksek has developed a method to transform conflicts, by using participatory community media practices to unite young people of Cyprus, a still deeply divided island with a violent past. Dr. Derya Yüksek: "In a worldwide tendency to relapse back to politics of antagonism and aggression, we need processes and models that can constructively deal with the diverse make-up of our societies, and the conflicts this brings. We need tools to prevent conflicts from taking violent forms -be it hate speech, structural discrimination, physical violence, or war. The participatory-democraticcommunication model is an effective tool for such transformation."
In scope of this study, Yüksek, sponsored by the FWO Flanders research as part of the VUB’s Cyprus Community Media Research Programme supervised by Prof. Nico Carpentier, organised a research intervention involving a series of community media training and production workshops. The workshops brought together Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot school youth to collectively produce community media content. The research data, gathered through an ethnography of the workshops with 3 mixed production groups of total 24 teenagers, followed by participant interviews and a reception study of the workshop’s multimedia outputs, were then analysed using qualitative methods.
“Media-making is an interesting topic for youth, so it increases the willingness and motivation from young people to join the workshops, despite the odds. And the odds are very vivid, because education and mainstream media systems on both sides of Cyprus still propagate strong images of the others being enemies. Once participating in the community media production the youngsters, working together in a setting of co-decision, were thus enabled to view, and relate with, each other as team-mates and collaborators -rather than enemies”, Yüksek notes.
These participatory practices supported conflict transformation by fostering critical thinking, free self-expression and collaborative action on shared grounds. Yüksek: “The collectively produced community media outputs further enabled the youth to voice their ideas and perspectives on a variety of issues, facilitating thus their democratic participation, and extending the scope of conflict transformations to involve the audience.”
Yüksek sees the method, giving young people a voice that is actually heard in their own community, as a powerful asset to resolve long lasting conflicts: “While the political leaders pursue an aggressive race for energy resources in the region, the youngsters’ productions advocate care and bicommunal action for the environment -something they share regardless of their ethnic backgrounds. When it comes to the Cyprus conflict, they also question why the 50 year-old peace process has not yet produced a result, despite the mediation of international civil society and the UN, and why the young people from the two communities are still hostile towards each other.”
Yüksek’s PhD thesis titled "Transformations of Antagonism Into Agonism: Community Media as a Participatory Contact Zone for Youth in the Divided Cyprus", presenting the research and its findings, was successfully defended at the VUB on 12th of October.
Contact: Dr. Derya Yüksek Derya.Yuksek@vub.be
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| Action for Cooperation and Change |
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| Migration Matters - Identity and belonging in Europe |
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Photo: Twitter/MigrationMatters
As part of the EU-funded "I Am European: Migration Stories & Facts for the 21st Century" project, Migration Matters is looking for young migrants and refugees to participate in the next series on identity and belonging in Europe. The series will amplify the voices of migrants and refugees, using storytelling to introduce youth to various facets of migration and integration.
Specifically, Migration Matters is looking for 18-30 year old migrants/refugees from or in Germany, Slovakia, Poland, Czech Republic, Finland, and Estonia. Examples include a Pole in the UK, a Ukranian in Slovakia, a Afghan in Germany, or a Somali in Finland.
To apply, write to team@migrationmatters.me with:
✓ Your name & age
✓ Where you're from & where you're living
✓ Your job/what you're studying
✓ What makes you feel like you belong or don't belong in the country you live in? (max. 1 paragraph)
Deadline February 22.
Migration Matters is a non-profit organization in Berlin, Germany dedicated to making the debate on migration more nuanced and evidence-based through free, educational video. Find information here:
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| All that you did not know you might be missing... |
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| C L A S S I F I E D S |
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| New Neighbours - final webinar |
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New Neighbours final Webinar: Monday, February 22 from 14:00-15:30, online, with producers and participants from all project activities! For more information follow @newneighbours1 on Twitter or check out:
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| WEBINAR by OBC Transeuropa |
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| Data protection in journalism: practical tools |
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The European legal framework on personal data protection is constantly evolving and the issue of citizens' privacy is increasingly central to the public debate. The Horizon 2020 project PANELFIT, together with the European Data Journalism Network, offers a webinar targeted to journalists with practical advice on these topics.
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| Prague Media Point - Rewatch the 2020 Conference |
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| If you missed the Prague Media Point Conference, you can catch up with its sessions online – for example the panels on
Diversity and Journalism, covering Reporting on Central and Eastern Europe's LGBTQI+ Communities, Roma issues and gender.
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| NECS Online Lecture Series 2021 on Media and Migration |
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NECS – the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies - is co-hosting its first Online Lecture Series in 2021, on the topic of Media and Migration. The Online Lecture Series is open to all. A specific focus on methodology will be common to all lectures and will be articulated in connection to fields as varied as ethnic media, diaspora, migrant audiences, digital technologies and border regimes, as well as postcolonialism and gender.
The confirmed speakers and dates for the series are:
— 28 January 2021 – Radha Sarma Hegde (Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University)
— 25 February 2021 – Sandra Ponzanesi (Professor of Media, Gender and Postcolonial Studies, Utrecht University)
— 25 March 2021 – Martina Tazzioli (Lecturer in Politics and Technology, Goldsmith University)
— 29 April 2021 – Kevin Smets (Assistant Professor of Communication Studies, Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
— 27 May 2021 – Myria Georgiou (Professor of Media and Communications, London School of Economics)
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| EFJ Online seminars on “Improving media reporting on Muslims and Islam” |
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The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) is organising a series of three online seminars (around 2.5 hours per section) on “Improving media reporting on Muslims and Islam” in cooperation with DG Justice.
They have 30 spots for journalists from EU and candidate countries.
The seminars are expected to take place from the end of March or beginning of April 2021.
If anyone is interested, please email the EFJ at laura@europeanjournalists.org
About the online seminars:
The seminars will address the current state of Islamophobia in the media, including unintentional discrimination and the role of images in misrepresentation. Also, the role of self-regulation and ethical standards in journalism shall be discussed. Existing good practices and tools will be examined and an exchange among participants facilitated. Journalism experts and representatives of Muslims and Islam will be invited to the seminars to exchange views and foster understanding.
The ultimate goals are to gather a group of committed journalists who will act as influencers among their peers by sharing their gained experience and to promote ethical journalism to avoid uninvited political influence and bad media regulation.
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| Migration and Media Awareness 2021 |
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CMMA2020 has been postponed from its original 2020 programme plan due to Corona.
In 2021 the conference theme remains: “Looking Back, Thinking Ahead” and will focus on the importance of inclusion, diversity, and participation.
CMFE is happy to be a core partner of CMMA 2021.
Save the date!!!
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| Job opportunity at Global Forum for Media Development |
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GFMD is looking for a Membership and Engagement Manager, responsible for managing GFMD’s membership and engagement-related tasks, as well as overseeing GFMD’s membership activities. Deadline for applications is March 15. For more information, see https://gfmd.info/gfmd-membership-and-engagement-manager/
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| Forum on Information and Democracy – Call for contributions |
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The call for contributions concerns three main topics:
- Good practice from for-profit and non-profit independent news media.
- Regulation favouring an enabling environment for the sustainability of journalism.
- Recommendations for off market policies.
The contributions received will enable the Forum's working group on the sustainability of journalism to draw up recommendations for governments, international organisations, digital platforms, and media organisations. This call for contributions is open until 28 February 2021. Contributors will appear in the final report, if they so wish. You can send your contribution to contributions@informationdemocracy.org or submit here.
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| Seven tips from EJN for journalists covering pandemics |
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The Ethical Journalism Network has compiled a list of seven tips for journalists covering pandemics. The Covid-19 crisis has underscored how essential accurate and factual news is, and conversely the damage that can be done by the spread of unethical and inaccurate information. These points are offered by the Ethical Journalism Network, in a similar format to previous infographics to support journalists faced with reporting on hate speech or covering migration issues, here:
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