Two and a half years of good journalism. Support us!

It’s time for The Reporter Magazine to celebrate. At the end of January 2017, only 30 months after launching its first issue, Reporter scooped two Czech-German Journalism Awards. This is a testament to Reporter’s commitment to quality reporting on the issues that matter and a testament to the work of the small team of dedicated journalists that makes the magazine possible.

Reporter won the prestigious Milena Jesenska special award for its February 2016 story by Dora Kapralova about the Syrian refugee and writer Aboud Saeed living in Berlin. Reporter also triumphed in the ‘Text’ category with Lucie Sucha’s May 2016 story about the Upper Saxon town of Tröglitz that has seen the arrival of significant numbers of refuges but also anti-refugee riots. Refugees have been the most important and controversial issue in European politics as well as Czech-German relations in in the last year. Reporter has been there to make sure that these important stories get told.

What is The Reporter Magazine

The Reporter Magazine is an independent media outlet founded by a former Editor-in-Chief of the Czech Republic´s best-selling national quality daily newspaper MF DNES, Robert Casensky. He resigned from MF DNES in 2013 when the paper was bought by Andrej Babis, a billionaire who would later become the country´s finance minister, deputy Prime Minister and whose political party is expected to win the Czech Republic´s general election planned for October this year.

Casensky assembled a team of committed, professional journalists – some of them also left MF DNES as they didn‘t want to work for an oligarch, all of them wanted a platform for quality writing and independent journalism. Together they started working on the concept of a new, independent media outlet that would focus on quality journalism, investigation, in-depth stories, literature and reporting from abroad – particularly from Central European countries which are often not properly covered by many Czech media organizations facing layoffs and staff-cuts.

The team has been working hard to stay true to the principles it was founded on. In 2015, an in-depth report on Czech soldiers serving and dying in Afghanistan was recognised in high-profile contest organized by the Open Society Fund. The following year, Open Society again awarded Reporter a prize, this time for an investigative story on Russian business in the Czech Republic.

In addition to prizes, Reporter makes an impact in other ways too. One of the Czech Republic´s best known investigative journalists, Jaroslav Kmenta, has been on the team since the magazine was founded. Kmenta digs into the past and uncovers the presence. His investigative stories contributed to the resignation of Czech Prime Minister Stanislav Gross in 2005. With Reporter, Kmenta has published stories explaining the rise of the media-owning oligarch – and probably next Czech Prime Minister – Andrej Babis. Kmenta showed how he used various police contacts on the path to wealth and power and how his rise depended on and benefitted a number of politicians and government officials. Such stories cannot be seen in many other media outlets as Babis has succeeded in neutralizing them being their owner.

The work of The Reporter Magazine is supported by the Reporter Foundation and this is how you can support us. Your donation will help ensure the survival of independent quality journalism in the Czech Republic – and beyond – at a time when it is sorely needed.