The European Journalism Observatory will soon expand, offering five new Eastern European languages.

This October marks the beginning of EJO’s integration of Albanian, Czech, Romanian, Serbian and Ukrainian languages, which will soon join the current operating roster of English, German, Italian, Latvian and Polish EJO versions. We expect to have the new platforms up and running by early 2012, at which point readers will have access to analyses and articles on the latest developments in mass media and journalism available in 10 languages.

This tremendous new development has been made possible thanks to the SCOPES (Scientific Cooperation between Eastern Europe and Switzerland) research program, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). The SCOPES initiative, designed to increase scientific cooperation between Switzerland and Eastern Europe, has generously agreed to support the EJO with 240,000 CHF for the next two years.

In the words of Professor Stephan Russ-Mohl, Director of the Observatory, “In a period during which journalism is the victim of strong economical pressures and radical changes due to new technologies, quality journalism is increasingly endangered. Initiatives like ours aim to safeguard it, providing new instruments to enable those in the media sector to avoid compromise in terms of quality and independence.”