"The results of the research conducted in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Turkey suggest that the key determinants for the future of our media and democracies are the following:
• The poor socio-economic status of journalists and their exposure to
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pressure and attacks, coupled with modest support mechanisms, cripple the ability of journalists to promote the public interest, report on key issues of public interest, and hold power to account. In the most extreme cases, the pressure involves imprisonment, interrogation, surveillance, and lawsuits aimed at silencing journalists.
• The lack of consistent monitoring and registration of cases of Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP) in the region, with dozens of lawsuits against journalists filed by political officials and their affiliates.
• A growing number or media outlets, but a declining number of journalism students, highlighting concerns about the future shrinking of staff numbers in media newsrooms and about the growing automatization of journalism. The most drastic drop was in North Macedonia, with the number of journalism students in 2023 amounting to only 11% of the number from ten years ago and 50% of the number from 2000.
• The number of media outlets is growing, mostly in the online sector, while print media outlets are becoming increasingly endemic.
• A worrying trend of overt concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few media conglomerates, often tied to national or foreign governments, that takes a toll on media freedom and pluralism.
• The dominant instrumentalization (through ownership and funding) of media (including private and public) for particular political and/or business interests limits the space for editorial independence and integrity.
• Non-profit media are still a rarity in the region, with only a few non-profit radio broadcasters in some countries, and an unknown number of online platforms of civil society organizations with a community-focused mission.
• Lack of transparency of the media sector, particularly a lack of accessible and reliable information concerning the media industry and the media market.
• Advertising is the main source of revenues in the media sector, with the total revenues ranging between EUR 12 million in Montenegro and over EUR 4 billion in Turkey.
• Although it is declining, the TV sector is still dominant in terms of its share of advertising revenues, while social media’s share is increasing, and in Turkey it amounts to as much as 45.7% of advertising revenues.
• The tech giants such as Google and Meta are an increasingly dominant competitor for media outlets in the region, jeopardizing the future sustainability of national and local media outlets and potentially curbing political pluralism in public communication.
• Public funding for the media, including funding of public broadcasters (declining in four out of seven countries), grants, and subsidies for media outlets and government advertising, amounts to several to dozens of millions of euros per country, taking up an important share of media revenues, but without proactive transparency, effective guarantees of editorial independence, well-defined purpose and evaluation, the opportunities to make public funding for the media an important instrument of media democratization remain under-used.
• The representation of different age, gender, ethnic, religious, and other groups in media content and in the newsrooms’ staff is limited. In multiethnic communities some policies promote ethnic diversity of media content, while other identity axes are largely neglected and pluralism in public communication is very limited. Women are an important, and in many countries even dominant, workforce in the media, but remain underrepresented in managerial posts." (Executive summary)
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