Abstract (eng)
Introduction. This thesis is about the rise of the new independent and critical journalism in times of crisis in East and South Europe. The purpose of the paper is to map and analyze these new forms of independent and critical journalistic initiatives in countries like Spain, Greece and Romania, which arose out of the distrust in the local traditional media and support the freedom of speech, the main key of democracy, and the value of journalism as a public good. The topic of this thesis is therefore of big relevance and actuality because these new forms of journalism developed as a consequence of the European crisis in the media sector. Methods. For a comprehensive understanding and profound analysis, the design of this research is based on three different pillars: desk review (theories about media governance, press freedom, journalism and neoliberalism, the crisis of the mainstream media, crisis as a chance and about several non-mainstream journalistic genres), background and historical research (the media context from Spain, Greece and Romania) and field work (interviews with the owners/editors/journalists). Results. The media crisis generated the dismissal of thousands of journalists among whole Europe, but mostly in the crisis countries, such as Greece, Spain and Romania. Hundreds of media outlets were closed down and the circulation of newspapers declined a lot. The social cohesion is broken and therefore, there is more pressing need to address social issues. These new independent critical journalistic initiatives basically support the democratic public sphere, they close the gap between the ones in power and the civil society and come with critical reporting on those in power. All initiatives are independent of any private interests and are uncontrolled, are critical and investigative and have a sharp focus on social change. They are close to the society - journalists cultivate and implement a dialogical culture engaging with citizens, but always concerned about the truth and an accurate, non-distorted approach to reality. They are constituted in form of cooperatives and are self-managed. They have horizontal hierarchies, innovative funding and at the moment rather small teams. They do investigations on economic and political issues, they discuss the crisis in all different facets, unveil corruption cases, address social problems and issues of freedom of the speech. Therefore, their orientation is towards civil societies, of which the mainstream press does not write about and they consider themselves watchdogs of those in power. In this sense they have managed to retrieve their democratic identity and to revitalize the field of journalism, which was sentenced to fall apart. The philosophy of these initiatives is similar to the one of the slow journalism movement.