What is the cost of information?

No less than 11 media outlets per 75,000 citizens – four TV stations, four radio stations, one monthly magazine, two weekly magazines and one portal employing 135 journalists, technicians and administrators. To finance them, taxpayers, 8,500 workers, few donors and global benefactors pay 55.5 million dinars a year! At the same time, their final product is of low quality, even suspicious. This is the result of the media research conducted in poverty-stricken municipalities of Bujanovac and Presevo, inhabited by Serbs, Albanians and the Roma.

All information in this article has been collected by interviewing all of the nine media companies. In Bujanovac (which has around 43,000 inhabitants), these are the following: monthly newspaper Srpski Venac published by the company of the same name; weekly magazine Nacional, published by the National Council of Albanians; and the weekly magazine Perspektiva published by the Albanian cultural and artistic association Jehona. Bujanovac also has three electronic media outlets: private radio station Ema, which airs programme in Serbian language; private TV station Spektri, whose programme is in Albanian language; and the public company Radio-Television Bujanovac, which has three editorial offices and broadcasts programme in Albanian, Serbian and Romany languages.

In the municipality of Presevo (which has around 32,000 inhabitants) there are three media companies: the private web portal Presheva.com in Albanian language; private radio and TV station RTV Aldi, also in Albanian language; and the public company Radio-Television Presevo, which has an Albanian and Serbian editorial office, together with a small presence of donated programme in Romany language.

Behind all this, there is a workforce with 135 workers consisting of 82 permanently employed workers and 53 contributors: among them are 61 journalists (45%), 48 technical workers and 26 administrative workers. In the last three or four years, the number of employees has almost doubled, mostly thanks to two local public service broadcasters: RTV Bujanovac and RTV Presevo. Ruling political parties use them as a source of jobs for their own members. This is evidenced by the fact that the ethnic structure of the media workforce is very different from the national composition of the population: 101 Albanians, 28 Serbs and 6 Roma and others.

If the collected information is to be believed, the professional structure of the personnel is not so bad at all: it consists of 33 highly-educated workers (24%), 21 workers with higher education (15%), and 81 workers with high-school diploma or lower education.

The structure of radio and TV programme is a different story altogether. Programme aired by eight electronic media outlets contains 26 percent of their own, locally-produced content. The rest of the programme aired by their transmitters, which are active 24 hours a day, include illegaly taken content from other sources or computer-controlled music videos. Considering the quality of the news programme (which is not the subject of this article), it is more than certain that it could hardly be considered as satisfying even minimal professional standards. Regardless of the fact that in the first few years after the conflict, Bujanovac and Presevo had more journalistic schools than the rest of Serbia combined.

The same can be said of the print media, which publish yesterday's news, lack professional quality standards, and are characterized by amateurish graphic design. It can be said that the population of these municipalities receives more timely and higher-quality information from electronic and print media outlets from Belgrade, Pristina or Tirana, and which cost them much less than the local media.

Of course, money from the budget allocated to the media is given to local media outlets, but some receive more than the others. The local community in Bujanovac has a slight respect for some of the European standards and requirements and gives small sums to private media outlets – which are barely sufficient to formally say that the local budget participates in their financing. However, in Presevo, the old, communist manner of distribution is still in force. Actually, there is no distribution, because all of the money is given to the public company RTV Presevo, which was established by the local government and controlled by the coalition of ruling Albanian parties. It will be interesting to see what will happen after January 1, when project-based financing is supposed to begin, and when the presidents of these two municipalities – who control the municipal budgets – are expected to begin acting differently and pay more attention to efficient expenditure of taxpayers' money.

Should we say something about salaries as well? Journalists have an average salary that amounts to 30,700 dinars. Salaries of the technical staff and administrative workers are 21,600 and 20,300 dinars, respectively, which gives an average salary of 23,500 dinars. Salaries in the media are supported by two facts. First, international organizations and certain domestic donors have a lot of understanding for problems in these two municipalities and they have donated significant sums of money when it was necessary. Secondly, some of the directors, editors and managers in the two public companies, which are often aligned with the positions of political parties, receive a good financial support from these parties.

Radoman Iric

About the authors

MC Newsletter,
December 16, 2011