Balkan journal 2

 by Chris Braithwaite

When I helped found this newspaper almost 25 years ago, two questions seemed pretty fundamental:

Could we gather and report the news of this community well enough to convince readers to buy our paper?

If the answer to that one was yes, would our circulation convince businesses to switch at least some of their advertising budget to the Chronicle?

Two years ago, feeling restless, I applied for a Knight International Press Fellowship.  The idea is simple.  Veteran U.S. journalists are sent to share their experience wherever in the world they are invited.  I was ready to go just about anywhere when I applied.  But, not wishing to seem completely feckless, I suggested Central America.  When the call came from Washington in February 1997, it was an invitation to a place I'd never heard of, called Slovenia. 

I got there in November last year, thinking my assignment would be pretty straightforward.  I would offer my services as a consulting reporter and publisher to papers all across the six republics of former Yugoslavia (Slovenia is one of them).  If there were any takers, I would work with them to answer those two fundamental questions I had confronted a quarter century ago.

• • •

Saban Sarenkapic publishes a magazine called HAS in a narrow one-room office on a narrow street in the city of Novi Pazar. The city’s name means Newmarket in English.  Novi Pazar is the major city in a region of southern Serbia called the Sanjak, where the great majority of people are Muslim.  These are not Albanian Muslims, like the people in nearby Kosovo.  Like the Muslims in Bosnia, to the north, they are the descendants of Slavic people who converted to Islam during the centuries the region was ruled by the Turks. 

Saban is a small man with a drooping mustache and sad, poet's eyes.  His monthly magazine does not thrive.  It has a circulation in the hundreds, can only be found at five of the scores of kiosks that sell newspapers and magazines in this city of about 80,000, and carries no advertising.  Like several of the papers I worked with, HAS survives largely through the financial support of private non-government organizations (NGOs in the jargon of the business) and branches of western governments that seek to help the nations of former Yugoslavia through their transition to free-market democracies.

Saban is isolated because he does not use his newspaper to support the ruling Socialist Party of Serbia, the party of Slobodan Milosevic.  He is isolated because he does not support the opposition parties, either.  He is isolated because he is a Muslim in a Christian country.  And he is isolated from the local Muslim majority because he does not support a society whose laws require compliance with the moral edicts of any mosque or church. 

I left him with a brief report of my findings, which started out like this:

HAS is a very small magazine with a very large mission. In the midst of a complex and sharply divided mix of cultures and religions, it is dedicated to the evolution of an open, civil society based on mutual respect and tolerance.

HAS seeks to maintain a fair and objective stance in a society where people tend to identify strongly with their religion, their culture, and their political party.  The media is widely expected to champion the interests of a particular group, and to value those interest above the simple truth.  The magazine's position in the middle of so many conflicting interests is thus a rather lonely one.  HAS seems to be ahead of its time, and perhaps the central question for the magazine is how to survive until the economic and political climate catches up with it.

Milan Petrovic publishes Sedmica, a monthly magazine in Smederevo, a steel town on the Danube River about 30 miles downstream from Belgrade.  The whole town, its local government, its major media and its industry, are dominated by the same Socialist Party of Serbia that runs the country.  Milan started the paper in September 1997 after the party stepped into the local radio station and fired him as director. 

He and his staff are total outsiders to the local establishment.  They are not informed of, or invited to, press conferences at city hall.  They can't get the simplest questions answered anywhere in local government or in the big steel mills that dominate the local economy. 

Advertisers who use his paper run some risk of upsetting the wrong people and getting a visit from the “financial police.”

Nobody can do business perfectly legally in Serbia, one young businessman told me.  There are just too many laws, and some of them contradict each other.  Everyone does business with the uneasy knowledge that, if they are instructed to do so, the financial police can find something they're doing that's against the law. 

In the report I left with Sedmica I summed up Milan's dilemma this way:

The paper's founder brought many years of experience in local radio journalism to Sedmica, and enjoys good relationships with some of the most progressive businessmen in the community. The paper has a small but dedicated staff of journalists, and maintains a sharp focus on the affairs of the community. Its production equipment, while far from lavish, is at least adequate for a weekly of this size. Production relies heavily on the part-time efforts of an extremely talented self-taught computer expert.  The editor places a premium on producing an attractive product and, though currently hampered by the shortage and high cost of paper, Sedmica is one of the best looking independent papers in Yugoslavia.  

While advertising is not currently sufficient to support the newspaper, it runs as high as 20% of each issue, an impressive percentage by the standards of the press of this region.

 By any objective standard, these are the ingredients of a successful community weekly.  In a normal world, Sedmica should be headed for steady growth of circulation and ad revenues.  That is the good news.

 The bad news is that this is not a normal world.  Journalism and politics are locked in a tight embrace in Yugoslavia.  For the journalists, this is not a matter of choice.  After years of history in which the press was assumed to be nothing more or less than an arm of government, independence is not a neutral position in the eyes of the politicians.  An independent press is viewed as hostile by the party in power, and as essentially useless by the parties in opposition. 

I wrote that in May of this year, and by then I was starting to figure something out.  Those two “fundamental” questions, the ones I had come prepared to help Balkan publishers answer, weren’t the right questions at all.  They were based on assumptions that, while entirely safe in this country, are foolishly optimistic over there.

Can a paper that covers the news well and objectively find enough readers to survive?  That assumes that in the marketplace of ideas there is a demand for the simple truth, and that newspapers are expected to provide it.  In Serbia, some of the papers that tell the biggest lies enjoy the largest circulation.

Will a big circulation bring in the advertisers? That assumes a highly evolved free-market economy where businesses buy advertising to tell people about the price and quality of their products.  Until that economy exists, businesses will see advertising in political rather than business terms.  They will use it to identify themselves with the media who share their political views. And no number of readers will induce them to advertise in a publication that does not. 

I was, in short, in a bit of a pickle.   It's not clear how one helps solve problems that one has never encountered before.  One runs the risk of joining the mob that one Serbian journalist described in a remarkable lament.  The wars of this decade, he wrote, "turned parts of the Balkans into a moonscape and an anthropological zoo for NATO soldiers and scores of semi-literate hacks, lousy geo-strategic experts, bankrupt philosophers and humanitarian general practitioners of all sorts."

In some despair I retreated to Ljubljana and tried to think.  Ljubljana is a good place for that.  It’s a comfortable sort of city with a very large, semi-wild park where one can take long, thoughtful walks. 

Was there any solid, practical thing to be done, in the face of the realities I had encountered in the Balkans?  There was not much to be done about the public's taste for truth.  It’s not simply a matter of getting the press to observe a universal ethical standard.   It’s rather a matter of changing that ethical standard, which still echoes the benevolent authoritarianism of Josef Broz Tito.  In that Communist society, a responsible newspaper was one that gave unquestioning support to the government’s quest for a more perfect society. 

But what about this advertising business?  People do advertise in the Balkans, both in newspapers and on television.  They don't do much of it, though, and what they do isn't very effective. 

Would it help to produce a simple little book telling businessmen why they should advertise in newspapers, and how to do it effectively? 

I decided to test that idea by looking for a local partner.  My first choice was Pavle Cirovic, the publisher of a weekly called Svetlost and the president of an association of regional papers called Local Press. 

Mr. Cirovic is an impressive guy.  When the Socialist Party of Serbia tried to take Svetlost over in the fall of 1996, he and his staff fought hard to preserve its new-found independence.  Mr. Cirovic, who had been elected director of Svetlost by its staff, was dismissed by the party. The staff responded by locking itself into the newspaper office for 40 days.  Finally evicted by the police, they joined Mr. Cirovic in establishing a new, independent Svetlost in an old warehouse on the edge of town.  (The city involved is Kragujevac in central Serbia, where Yugo automobiles were turned out of a vast factory in impressive numbers, before the war.) 

The new Svetlost outsold the party-dominated version and sold enough advertising to stay in business.  (Some businesses paid the money, but asked that their ads be left out of the paper.)  Meanwhile Mr. Cirovic, who is a lawyer, took the case to the supreme court in Belgrade, and won.  In February 1997 he and his staff triumphantly occupied their original office in downtown Kragujevac. 

When approached about the advertising book this June, Mr. Cirovic quickly agreed that Local Press should produce such a book, and his newspaper should produce it.  We got financial support from the Belgrade office of the U.S. Agency for International Development, and went to work in the middle of July, my last month as a Knight Fellow.  I left Kragujevac on August 1 with the book in hand. 

The trip to Sarajevo in September was something of an afterthought.  If the book was to be used elsewhere in the Balkans, outside the borders of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, it would have to be substantially modified.  To put it impolitely, it would have to be de-Serbed. 

In Sarajevo we found a collaborator in Sead Demirovic, who publishes the daily Vecernje Novine and heads the publishers association of Bosnia and Herzegovina.  This time the U.S. Information Service and the Paris-based World Association of Newspapers split the budget. 

When I flew out of Sarajevo on October 2 the book was ready for the printers.  I look forward to seeing it in print.  But I wait for it in Barton with the odd feeling that, when it arrives in the mail, it won't be like a project I was totally engrossed in less than a month ago. It will arrive like a message from another world. 

This is the second in a series of articles.