The Independent Journalists Association of Serbia (IJAS) has launched “On The Line”, an online resource hub for journalists and newsrooms to address online harassment and smear campaigns in Serbia.
The hub, available online since last week, is drawn from IPI’s Newsrooms Ontheline hub and adapted it to meet the specific needs of journalists and news outlets in Serbia. IPI’s measures were developed following best practices collected in working visits to over 40 news outlets across Europe and video interviews with several other experts.
The platform includes measures for freelancers and adopts a gendered approach with a specific section on women journalists that features interviews with several female reporters on how they combat gender-based online harassment.
Online attacks and disinformation campaigns targeting independent journalists, especially women reporters, have long become the new normal. IPI and IJAS’s “On The Line” platforms aim to help provide journalists and newsrooms with the support, tools, and resources to better withstand these attacks.
IPI welcomes IJAS’s initiative and looks forward to a continued cooperation to implement these measures across newsrooms in Serbia.
- Visit IJAS’s “On The Line” platform here: Za bezbednost novinara na internetu – Nuns
- Visit IPI’s Newsrooms Ontheline hub here: Homepage – Ontheline (ipi.media)
The IPI protocol for newsrooms for addressing online harassment has been translated into a total of seven languages: English, French, Portuguese, Slovene, Spanish, Turkish and Serbian.