Vladimir Mitev, Association of European Journalists – Bulgaria, 8 January 2025
This text has been published in the section of the website of the Association of European Journalists in Bulgaria dedicated to the summary of the past media year 2024, by various Bulgarian journalists. The text is mainly dedicated to the problems in Romanian journalism and the rise of small investigative media financed by Romanians’ donations. It also discusses some promising European approaches and genres – the culture of Polish journalists to turn their investigations into books and the practice of cross-border collaborations at European level.
International journalists are prone to develop a more complex identity because, by definition, we have, or should have, a foot outside national borders. And when the nations with which we interact are neighbors or from the same region, comparisons and contrasts sometimes help us to see more clearly. One of the things that some of our neighbors are better at in dealing with the media is the emergence of critical mass.
The Recorder phenomenon
In 2024, guests and viewers of the Perugia Media Festival had the opportunity to learn about the success of a Romanian investigative media organization with extraordinary influence and quality of work. Recorder has 809 000 subscribers on YouTube, and its videos are often viewed several million times in a few days. The media institution’s revenue for 2023 is €1.2 million, more than 90% of which is donations. These are signs of great confidence in the work of these journalists.
The media do video investigations that give the impression that there are no banned topics or people. We have seen how Recorder journalists have investigated Romania’s president Klaus Iohannis – several times – for flying on state visits in private jets, the costs of which he has classified; for the palace he is renovating and plans to live in after leaving office; for Romanians’ disillusionment with Iohannis’ ten years in office. The Recorder also does a piece on the Romanian secret services, which are perceived as the real rulers of the country, and manages to tell the story of the struggles within these services between different units. It exposes frauds at the Nordis construction company, involving the head of the legal committee in the lower house of the Romanian Parliament, and so on.
The Recorder material is an excellent school for getting to know Romanian society – how it works, what forces are at work in it, where the problems are. And I, as a Bulgarian reader and viewer, am often astonished by the extent of the capitalist forces unleashed in the financialized Romanian society. Recorder investigations – such as Nordis – deal with figures, financial interests, legal documents, but they also manage to show who are the people who are running a fraud or are harmed by it.
Finally, the Recorder raises, among other things, the civic culture of its audience. Rather than the endless personified bashing of Peevski, Radev, Borisov, Gergov or other businessmen seen in Bulgarian media, businessmen who reproduce the economic influence of their group into a political one, the Romanian investigative press goes beyond the facade and shows the mechanisms through which Romanian society moves. Because all our great businessmen and politicians, about whom we learn every day what they have told each other, are just that – a facade, while the real subject are the interests that hide behind them and about which our media speaks very little.
Romania’s investigative press
Recorder is part of a wider trend in Romania of the emergence of investigative journalism and the affirmation of a culture of investigative journalism. Earlier this year, Snoop.ro exposed the years-long sexual assaults of university professor Alfred Bulai. Context.ro, the media outlet of the well-known journalist Attila Biro, revealed during the presidential race that the former campaign manager of former NATO deputy secretary general Mircea Geoană had a joint business affair with a pro-Kremlin Russian propagandist. Press One’s Emilia Șercan has produced a series of articles and even books about the plagiarized doctorates of senior Romanian politicians – former Prime Ministers Victor Ponta and Nicolae Ciucă, Interior Minister Lucian Bode, Mircea Geoană, etc. The investigative show “I love you, Romania” filmed a 45-minute report on cross-border VAT fraud, interviewing the head of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, Laura Kövesi, the current head of the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office DNA, Marius Voineag, and even visited the city of Ruse, where it showed the offices of accounting firms where hundreds of Romanian films are registered, which do not carry out any real activity, but only serve to frame documents so that the alleged tax fraud can be committed. Other Romanian investigative media such as PublicRecord.ro, Dela0.ro etc. are also part of this trend.
These investigations have a public resonance. They are widely distributed on social networks. They are discussed. And they provoke the political system or the prosecution to react. For example, Alfred Bulai’s career is over. Mircea Geoană was the favorite at the beginning of the presidential campaign and ended up getting only 5% in the first round. Interior Minister Lucian Bode’s plagiarism case also triggered resignations.
Romanian society is somehow cleansing and renewing itself through journalism. And this has a healthy effect on society because it shows citizens that their opinion and their grievances matter. At the same time, this renewal gives courage, self-confidence and recognition to the press.
Romanian journalism in crisis
Despite the successes of Romanian journalism in the recent and recent years thus described, Romanian journalism as a whole is also in a crisis familiar to the one in Bulgaria. During Iohannis’ second term in office, a kind of Romanian stabilocracy was created, in which the two largest parties of the transition merged with the state. They did not control each other, but together distributed the state and the European resources they had access to. And they used party subsidies to tame TV stations and some major websites. Against this backdrop, the public and professionals in the field started to create their own small investigative media, usually funded by donations from citizens or European projects and grants.
Leading Romanian journalists and the public also identify other problems in Bulgaria. For example, the perpetuation of so-called lazy journalism and churnalism, where articles are simply translated on an artificial intelligence conveyor belt from media outlets into foreign languages without editorial intervention and thought in translating them into Romanian, or the reprinting of press releases. Romania also has ‘hybrid’ TV stations which are used for all kinds of smear campaigns or practice of cheap populism.
But even here, the existence of problems sometimes seems to give rise to viable solutions. For example, the regional media crisis in Romania has led to the emergence of PressHub, a media published by Freedom House Romania, which publishes in one place the material of a network of regional media from different parts of the country and thus gives them greater visibility.
There are also more clearly defined civil society media in Romania, such as Buletin de București, which focuses on news, commentary and investigations on the realities of the Romanian capital, or the media of corporatists (big banks and other Western companies in Romania that have funded media and other projects as part of their corporate social responsibility policy). One such media institution, for example, was Decât o Revistă (dor), a magazine and website that offered socially engaged material – long texts and stories – and was very successful, but decided to cease its activity in 2022. In March 2025, the dor team will revive The Power of Storytelling conference, which until a few years ago brought together Pulitzer laureates, visual artists and other creatives in Bucharest each year to share their experiences in journalistic writing and other forms of storytelling.
The critical mass
Comparing the Romanian reality with the Bulgarian one, I can’t help but notice that in Romania somehow a critical mass of people from different fields manages to emerge, a community appears, and from there on things get easier. I don’t know, for example, whether in Bulgaria there are newsletters with thousands of subscribers dealing with social issues – domestic violence, health rights or debunking false information, as happens in Romania. In Bulgaria, many people complain – especially in the early stages of their media and communication efforts – that there is no resonance, there is no engaged audience, there are no mentors and independent authority figures in one field or another to communicate with, and therefore it is difficult to grow. But this should not necessarily perpetuate a sense of discomfort or inferiority in Bulgarian journalism.
In my opinion, for example, Bulgarians should be strong in cross-border media because our own identity is mixed and often based on the bridge archetype. Romanians may be strong in forming “media churches”, but north of the Danube the notion of Romanian identity as “an island in a sea of Slavs” is still popular. That is, Romanians may form a critical mass among themselves, but Bulgarians may be better at forming a critical mass with other peoples – in journalism and in general.
In my view, the media year 2024 should encourage more in our country to go beyond Sofia and Bulgaria and seek media partnerships with colleagues in other countries. The European journalistic collaboration network Pulse, developed by n-ost, could be a step in this direction. JournalismFund grants for cross-border journalism are another possibility.
A third idea that I personally find interesting is to think more about how our media product can have a longer life – for example in the form of a book, a .pdf document, a presentation, a Substack newsletter, a podcast, etc. In Poland there is a culture of turning journalistic investigations into books, as it happened, for example, with this investigation into pedophilia in a prestigious boys’ choir in Poznan (an interview with the author of the investigation can be read here). Or with this investigation into how coal from the Donbas was sold to the EU, although it came from Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory.
In Romania, on the eve of the protests 11 years ago against the media’s gold mining project at Rosia Montana, Mihai Goțiu’s investigative journalistic book Afacerea Rosia Montana was published. Emilia Șercan, in her turn, has published in book form her investigation into the plagiarized doctoral thesis of former Prime Minister Victor Ponta.
I don’t think people today only read short reports and don’t have the patience and desire for something longer. On the contrary, it is in the personal and public interest of each of us to increase our reading culture and to consume higher quality, i.e. more complex texts. As long as there is a market for such investigations in Romania and Poland, the Bulgarian public should over time develop an affinity for their equivalents.
And I see a fourth way forward in speaking simultaneously to audiences in different countries. French cross-border media voxEurop translates and publishes its articles in nine European languages. Cross-border Talks, based in Poland, publishes in English, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Bulgarian and Czech. These are all different attempts to work towards a European public space. If we would be part of such a space and if we have experience in our region or in the EU, our experience and potential would increase significantly, and our European belonging would not only pass through the national networks in which we are integrated.
Lack of time and resources is indeed a major obstacle to developing cross-border partnerships, slow journalism or multilingual writing. But my feeling is that a bigger problem is that we have a lack of focus/awareness and that we are immersed in our daily professional and personal tasks. When living in Sofia, it’s tempting to remain anchored in this world of experience and relatively abundant resources, and less likely to bother yourself by breaking into certain spaces and trying to charm people from other regional capitals or cities. But the cross-border experience is transformative. And perhaps Media 2025 will more often challenge us to expand our horizons through friendship bridges and cross-border conversations.
The critical mass is out there somewhere!
Photo: (source: The Bridge of Friendhsip)
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