Pištaljka Reporter Receives Honourable Mention from EWI
Date Published: 29 May 2025
Original article Pištaljka's Snežana Djurić Receives Honorable Mention from the European Whistleblowing Institute, published 6 May 2025
Pištaljka journalist Snežana Đurić (Kovačević) has been awarded an honorable mention by the European Whistleblowing Institute (EWI) for her academic work “Publicity as a Mechanism for the Protection of Whistleblowers” defended at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Belgrade. This special recognition was presented to her in early April in Brussels, at the closing of the European Whistleblowing Conference – Paths of Cooperation to Integrity.
Snežana Đurić applied the experience she gained working in Pištaljka for more than a decade through the testimonies of whistleblowers and research into their reports in the preparation of the study, which set her work apart from most studies in the world. Her work is one of the few academic studies at the global level that relies on the practice and experience of whistleblowers.
The research, which focuses on the relationship between the media and whistleblowers, was conducted as part of a master's thesis that Đurić defended in 2022 with the highest grade at the Department of Journalism and Communication Studies, Faculty of Political Sciences in Belgrade. Her education at the master's degree in communication studies was funded by Pištaljka.
The master's thesis concluded that being in the public eye makes whistleblowers feel safer and that publicity is important and necessary for the protection of whistleblowers, because whistleblowers perceive retaliation as a systemic attack, and the media and journalists as a powerful tool in the fight against retaliation. Whistleblowers who shared their personal experiences on the importance of media reporting include Borko Josifovski, former director of the Belgrade Ambulance Service, Milenko Jovanović from the Environmental Protection Agency, and Tomislav Veljković, former caretaker of the municipality of Rača.
The European Whistleblower Institute awarded the Lewis Master Thesis Award for academic work in the field of whistleblower law and policy for the first time this year, to encourage and recognize student research in the development of whistleblower law and policy.
This year’s first prize winner is Egle Vaizgelaite from Vytautas Magnus University in Lithuania, who researched the Lithuanian Criminal Code and the European Union Whistleblower Directive in her work.
In addition to journalist Snezana Đurić from Pištaljka, the recipient of the honorary mention is Rea Drikou from Panteion University in Greece for her work “Whistleblower Protection in the Light of the EU and National Jurisdiction”.
Snezana Đurić is the author of over a hundred research articles, a significant number of which have been noted and reported in domestic and foreign media. She is a co-author of Pistaljka’s publications “Media Buying: The Impact of State Advertising on the Public Information Market in Serbia” and “Public Procurement: Pistaljka’s Case Studies”, while she participated as a researcher in the publications “Public Enterprises” and “Two Years of Protection: Whistleblower Testimonies”.
She is the winner of the European Union Prize for Investigative Journalism for Young Journalists in 2016 for a series of articles on the income and assets of local officials published as part of the Whistleblowers project "Municipal Radar".
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