Lorenzo Berardi

11th Oct 2019 - Two days ahead of the Polish parliamentary elections I was interviewed on Radio 3 Mondo on the possible outcome of the vote. Among the topics discussed live were the latest polls, the influence of the Catholic church on the elections, and the way public media reported the Nobel prize for Literature won by Polish author Olga Tokarczuk (from 9'45'' onwards).

27th Sep 2019 - Telefon Hírmondó was the first broadcasting station in the world and the brainchild of Hungarian inventor Tivadar Puskás. It started airing live music, news, cultural programs, and opera performances in 1893, well ahead of any other radio station in the world. Its uniqueness was that it could only be listened via telephone and it reached that way, thousands of subscribers in Budapest. This 'radio station before the radio' lasted for 52 years and was insrumental in paving the way for the birth of the Hungarian national radio.

7th Sep 2019 - Between October 2017 and April 2019 four reporters doing
investigative journalism were killed in Europe: Daphne Caruana
Galizia from Malta, Ján Kuciak from Slovakia, Victoria Marinova
from Bulgaria, and Lyra McKee from Northern Ireland. Their deaths
happened in different circumstances, but they were always related
to their profession. Given that investigative reporting is public
interest journalism, it should be safeguarded by governments.
However this is not always the case in Central and Eastern Europe.

8th Aug 2019 - Interviewed by Radio3 Rai regarding the strategies adopted by the Polish government to tackle the emigration of young Poles abroad. Among them, the exemption of all under 26s from income tax and the increase of the minimum wage. By acting this way, ruling party Law & Justice (PiS) hopes to get a more comfortable victory at the national elections that will be hold on 13th October. But the cost of such measures could affect local administrations and eventually the taxpayers.

12th Jun 2019 - From 8th to 27th April 500,000 Polish teachers from all levels of pre-university education went on strike. It was the longest national walkout in postwar Poland and the biggest in education since 1993. They asked for a pay rise and protested against recent changes in their collective agreement. Even though the government didn't meet their requests, the strike was suspended. It might restart at the beginning of the new school year, two months ahead of the general elections.

9th Jun 2019 - And now for something completely different...the bittersweet short story of Alan Pecan: an actor that was born to play always the same role.

1st Jun 2019 - Since 2011, when a new controversial media law came into effect, a score of independent media outlets have been ousted from Hungary. Some of them were shut down, others were purchased by entrepreneurs with close ties to the government and now mostly publish propaganda. While freedom of the press in the country is plummeting, there are a few independent media that fight back such as Direkt36, Atlatszo, Index, and 444.

29th May 2019 - A look into the way investigative reporters from the four Visegrad countries have been cooperating on stories and developing cross-border journalism overcoming difficulties to get their own space. Text originally published on Visegrad Insight and re-published by the Global Investigative Journalism Network.

24th Apr 2019 - A conversation with Polish reporter Wojciech Cieśla, co-founder of Fundacja Reporterów and Vsquare two projects focusing on in-depth investigative journalism in Poland and in the Visegrad Group.

3d Apr 2019 - An interview for the print edition of the Swiss newspaper Corriere del Ticino on the troubled relationship between the Polish government and the EU two months ahead of the 2019 European Parliament election.

28th Mar 2019 - What are the main challenges for independent media outlets operating in Hungary today? Find out the answer in this interview with Sándor Orbán, director of the Center for Independent Journalism (CIJ) in Budapest.

21st Mar 2019 - Less than a year after the assassination of investigative reporter Ján Kuciak, some of his former Czech and Slovak colleagues have founded the first investigative centre in Slovakia (ICJK) under his name. A double interview with the director of the ICJK in Bratislava, Arpád Soltész, as well as with Pavla Holcová who heads the Czech centre for investigative journalism in Prague and covered stories with Kuciak.

31st Jan 2019 - An interview for 'Kiosk' on Radio Beckwith recounting the story of 'Oggi in Italia' the radio station created by the Italian Communist Party and broadcasting from Czechoslovakia between the 1950s and the early 1970s. (from minute 22.07)

27th Jan 2019 - The story of the Oneg Shabbat group who gathered and catalogued diaries, photographs, realia, oral and written accounts to chronicle life in the Warsaw Ghetto between 1940 and 1943. Thousands of original documents that, partially dug out after WW2, are now reunited in the Ringelblum Archive. An invaluable collection of historical sources now available for historians, researchers and the new generations.

22nd Jan 2019 - 'Oggi in Italia' was a secret radio station created in Prague by the Italian Communist Party and operating between 1950 and 1971. It was manned by many political exiles who lived abroad under false identities. It broadcast its share of news and propaganda reaching out to millions of Italians. However, it also delivered journalistic scoops and host Radio Free Prague during the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968.