North Macedonia

North Macedonia ranks highly in the index largely due to the low number of actual incidents and attacks reported by journalists interviewed in the survey conducted in 2023/2024. The sample of 232 respondents is representative of the country’s overall population of journalists with the public service media and the national private TV stations comprising the largest sample segments. The composition of the sample had an impact on the country’s overall safety score, due to the more stable working and financial position of journalists employed in the larger media outlets. Comparatively, in other media sectors in this highly fragmented media system – especially in local and regional radio and TV stations and in the numerous smaller online media outlets – journalists face greater insecurities and risks. The Physical safety dimension has the highest score (92.42%), mostly because in the years after the pandemic, there have been virtually no arrests or detentions of journalists, female journalists reported insignificant number of cases of sexual assaults and harassment, and there have been few physical attacks overall. Nevertheless, more than a quarter of journalists, most of whom are women, expressed concerns about their physical wellbeing, which may be due to reasons other than the fear related to their physical safety. Digital safety also has a high score (92.35%), which is a result of the largest percentage of journalists (84%) reporting that they have never been subject to surveillance, nor have their social media accounts or websites been hacked or blocked. The dimension related to Psychological safety has a slightly lower score - 80%. A third of the surveyed journalists (34.4%), again mostly women, are concerned about their emotional and mental well-being, which seems to be largely related to stress at work, especially in understaffed newsrooms where each journalist has to cover many subject areas – 83% reported not having a primary beat or specialization. In public, journalist associations often complain about cases of hate speech and intimidation of journalists in the online domain. The survey confirms these concerns – interviewed journalists were often (15%) or sometimes (24%) exposed to demeaning or hateful speech. Other indicators in this dimension do not seem to pose a large problem for journalists: most of them have never been exposed to: stalking (92%), to legal actions against them (92%), to public discrediting (73%), or to other threats and intimidation (73%). The Financial safety dimension has the lowest score of the four (74.22%). The employment status is relatively stable for journalists working in the public service broadcaster, the state news agency and some of the biggest private media, but largely uncertain in the smaller local TV and radio stations and in the abundant online media outlets. Most interviewed journalists (77%) do have full-time permanent contracts, which corelates with the lower levels of their concern about losing their employment: the majority (75%), mainly from the public service and national private media, are not worried about losing their jobs. However, other journalists - most of them from smaller and unsustainable private media, where they are engaged with fixed-term contracts or types of insecure engagements (around 23%) - are in constant uncertainty about their future. And finally, but probably most importantly to emphasize here, is that the most serious problem is that journalism is underappreciated and undervalued profession - 70% of journalists have reported a monthly salary below 650 euros – country’s average at the time of the data collection. 33% out of the total number of respondents, have reported a monthly salary closer to the country’s minimum wage than to the country’s average, at the time of data collection.