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This report was co-funded by the European Commission ; Two versions available: English and Lithuanian

What are the major trends of media change in contemporary Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)? How do these media transformations relate to economic, political, social and cultural currents in the region? After a decade of democratic optimism from the early 1990s to the 2000s, why did democratic media regimes in the region become recently so vulnerable? Why would the level of media freedom and pluralism in the CEE region remain significantly more limited than in Western Europe, despite supposedly shared European values and policies, and EU membership of the countries in the region? What explains variation in the level of media freedom within and across the former communist countries? What are the direct and indirect effects of the global financial crisis on the trends of democratization vs. authoritarianism in CEE? How could eminent newly democratized countries in CEE backslide dramatically to semi-authoritarian hybrid regimes that we usually find in former Soviet Eurasia? How do semi-authoritarian regimes control media in different CEE countries? Also, how could media studies of the region be reinvented to reflect on the shifting geopolitical balance of power, especially the emergence of BRICS, the growing influence of Russia, and the war in Ukraine? What could comparative post-communist media studies add to our analysis and understanding of the new CEE realities? These were some of the questions tackled by a recent public roundtable discussion entitled "Media, Democracy and Authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe", held at the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication at the University of Copenhagen on April 24, 2015.

"This Chapter concentrates on the key factors determining professional practices of media reporting on European matters, namely, it identifies internal organisationalspecifics of the Brussels news site and shows the challenges that journalists face in the process of becoming familiar with this news environment; it discusses the priorities according to which news are selected when reporting an European matters and assesses the press-politics relationship from the perspective of journalists' communication with political sources. Chapter 4 also explores the contradiction between globalism and localism, emerging in connection with the hierarchies of news values and newsworthiness criteria guiding professional practices." (author's abstract)

The current study explores the perceived integration of the internet inside European newsrooms. The authors carried out a survey with 239 journalists working for 40 of the most-read outlets in 11 European countries. The study shows that journalists consider the internet a useful tool mainly for practical functions, rather than to enhance the core values and functions of their profession. However, news production continues to be based on direct interaction, and journalists' professional identity is still anchored to print newspapers. Moreover, a lack of communication between publishers and newsrooms emerges. Professional and personal profiles and nationality play a relevant role in the development of attitudes towards the implementation of the internet in newsrooms.