PRESShub România

About the network

Freedom House Romania is an NGO that develops projects dedicated to promoting human rights, good governance, and independent media.

One of the most important FHR projects is a network of 40 local media outlets, covering 70% of Romanian territory, and presshub.ro, a central media platform. The aim is to develop collaborative journalism and business partnerships among journalists.

The PRESShub is also a platform for the contemporary skilled professionalisation of our journalism community. In acknowledging the dire situation of the local media, PRESShub constantly sought to (re)populate local and regional media with a type of journalism that goes back to its roots.

Through all the funding obtained, they aimed to empower local media outlets to produce independent content, focused on their readers’ informational needs through local news coverage. The model relies on the power of exposure: they bring local issues to national attention, increasing the political pressure as a means to an end: solving community problems.

PRESShub has a widespread local press network in Romania, and is currently the only network of its kind in the country, which allows them to bring local information and stories to the national and even European levels.

The network also includes the only publication in Romania that appears in a village, Gazeta de Stâlpeni.

The editorial staff is made up of journalists with a strong ethical record, a good knowledge of how the Romanian press works at local and central levels, and how to identify the pressures on the editorial teams.
The network also has the role of protecting local journalists under pressure. Both Freedom House Romania and its PRESShub network have a long experience of acting when the freedom of speech is threatened (as a reference: the Gachi case, and the Gebaila case).

Projects

During the past five years, PRESShub published articles about human rights protection as part of projects such as “Stop Human Trafficking” Awareness Campaign or “Journalists against Organised Crime”. They also focused on anti-corruption and good governance.

Over the years, they ran projects like Fact not fake, The Lie Detector or No Hate, in a bid to fight against fake news, propaganda, and disinformation through media and social media.

From 2024, Freedom House Romania is a partner in a project called “Fostering Artificial Intelligence Trust for Humans towards the optimisation of trustworthiness through large-scale pilots in 16 critical domains”, within the HORIZON grant programme. The project is focused on measuring, optimising, and counteracting the risks associated with AI adoption and trustworthiness in critical domains, namely robotics, education, media, transport, healthcare, active aging, and industrial processes.

PRESShub also has a dedicated section for the Romanians from abroad (Diaspora), to reconnect with Romanians who succeeded in other countries and give a subliminal message that consolidated democracies allow people to fulfil themselves (the project Connecto).

In January 2024, the network started the Hub for Data Journalism, which brings together freelance journalists, students, and journalists from other media outlets, to develop skills in data-driven-journalism investigation.

To promote collaborative journalism, PRESShub set up a virtual newsroom where journalists of the 40 network members regularly meet and discuss obstacles to overcome. This virtual newsroom has been working for 5 years.

Contact

Website: https://www.presshub.ro
Email: office@freedomhouse.ro