cafebabel.com writers from Belgrade and Berlin attend Skopje ‘online copyright’ event
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by panel speaker Sebastien Vannier
To coincide with its third birthday, the Macedonia/ FYROM* based platform Mladiinfo organised a conference about online copyright laws between 4-5 November. Representatives from the organisation first met cafebabel.
com when five journalists from Germany, Poland, Montenegro, Albania and France were in Skopje this summer for the final instalment of the European magazine’s Orient Express Reporter project. (Read the special edition).
Pictured, Sebastien Vannier is a French journalist who is based in Berlin and is a part of the official cafebabel.com Berlin ‘babelblog’, which is run by the team of volunteers in the German capital
Mladiinfo invited a member from the cafebabel.com network to speak on a panel concerning European medias during the ‘Young Journalists and Protection of Authors’ Rights Online’ conference. As the country but also the subject interested me, I was the candidate representing cafebabel.com.
The conference was a follow-up to a seminar for young journalists from the Balkans. The first day - when I was still flying from Berlin to Skopje via Budapest – was consecrated to the legislative aspect of the rights of the authors. The second day was about showing examples and sharing the opinions of young bloggers and internet users. On the first panel, Amsterdam-based Marc Fonseca Rendeiro of citizenreporter.org and Jakub Gornicki from the international community platform Global Voices discussed very interesting themes such as the conflicting (or not) relationships between new and traditional medias, the importance of a blogger’s reputation and remunerating online journalists.
Pictured, Senka Korac of cafebabel.com Belgrade with contributor Milena Stosic (R)
cafebabel.com and Bulgaria’s europa.dvenvnik.bg were the two ‘example’ sites presented on the second panel. How to motivate young journalists to work online? What are a writer’s advantages – let’s say visibility, and being part of a network? What rules have to be followed? What’s hard about working and writing in an eternal ‘pan-European’ context? All in all, Mladiinfo did a great job at organising a good event. There was time to see the capital, run through the grand bazaar and learn about the pitfalls in the history of a country which seems passionate.
