HE WHO SURVIVES WILL WRITE
Ruthless Battle for Readers
AIM, Belgrade, September 23, 1996
The Serbian market of daily papers is becoming increasingly crowded: there are already nine dailies in Belgrade. If we put aside the two sports dailies (Sports Journal and Sports), as much as seven papers compete for the attention and trust of increasingly poor and resigned readership. In these pre-election times this does not represent only market competition between papers, but also a struggle over the political orientation of future voters.
Only a year and a half ago there were four "political" dailies in Belgrade, offsprings of the major newspapers: the "Politika" and the "Politika Ekspres" from the building in Makedonska Str. 29 and the "Borba" and the "Vecernje novosti" (Evening News) from the Pasic's Square 9. After that the authorities have decided to revoke the privatization of one-time state paper "Borba" and in an extremely dubious procedure managed to place that paper under full control. More precisely, the state got something called the "Borba", which only by its name resembled what that name meant to the readers till then.
That is why the readers got a new daily the "Nasa Borba" (Our Struggle), a kind of a successor of the up-to-then paper. This daily, property of Dusan Mijic, a businessman from Novi Sad, is the first daily in Serbia without a cent of state or "social" money invested and thus truly state-independent paper of this kind. After that appeared the "Dnevni Telegraf" (Daily Telegraph) of Slavko Curuvija, a well-known journalist who had, together with Momcilo Djorgovic, previously made a market boom with the weekly "Telegraf" (today "Weekly Telegraph").
The latest (for the moment?) fresh blood in this particular segment on the press market is a tabloid the "Blic" (Blitz) - which was a weekly till recently - and which gathered around it an envious number of journalists and launched a fierce advertising campaign aimed at attracting the attention of potential readers. When the "Blic"appeared free copies were given away generously in the first days so as to immediately and directly let the people know that a paper of such profile came into being.
Thus the general war for the market could begin: after prices of all dailies were levelled (two dinars), a glamorous and large, but thin by volume and content, "Daily Telegraph" hit the stands and Curuvija proved once again that he knew how to make large circulations and money and sell attractively and sensationalistically packed agency news as the latest achievements of exploratory journalism, and all that for a dinar and a half. After that came the "Blic" and lowered the price to only one dinar (around 30 pfennigs). The first man of the newly-launched daily Manojlo Vukotic says that the "Blic" does not have the intention of "being so serious as the "Nasa Borba" nor so frivolous as the "Dnevni Telegraf"." Still, the "Blic" is revolving around the Telegraf's formula of bombastic reselling of facts and "facts" which more serious papers treat with greater discretion. In the meantime the "Nasa Borba" was forced to raise its price to three dinars, which has probably seriously slowed down its apparent circulation growth, which is a natural consequence of a substantial improvement of the paper's quality.
Unfortunately, the Serbian-Montenegrin market is not large enough to be able to keep so many dailies (in addition to the Belgrade ones, there are those from Novi Sad: the "Dnevnik" and the "Magyar Szo"; the Podgorica "Pobijeda" and the "Bujku" and "Jedinstvo" from Pristina, and the Nis "Narodne Novine") if all those mentioned are forced to live from their circulation and sale of advertising space. The FRY population numbers (still, ten million people is not so small a figure) are not so much the problem as a dismal purchasing power of a large part of the population, as well as the lack of basic reading habits in many, only formally literate, people.
That is why we are witnessing a start of a ruthless battle for readers under the slogan "a small pond with many crocodiles": two newly launched tabloids are natural market rivals to papers such as the "Novosti" and the "Ekspres", but in practice they are snatching a part of "Nasa Borba"'s audience on an insufficiently developed market; for its part, the "Nasa Borba" is striving to enlarge the circle of its readers despite a specific, political as well as market-monopoly motivated boycott of major distribution networks of the "Politika" and the "Borba" houses; the paper "Politika" is trying to maintain its firm position of a powerful national institution and a paper which sells well even when there is nothing in it to sell (the "Politika" also lived well under Zivorad Minovic when there was nothing worth reading in it); the "Novosti" are still boasting of being the daily with the highest circulation and rank high as a mouth-piece of the (lumpen) proletariat which grow tired over texts longer than two columns and more complicated than the formula "we are the good guys and they are the bad guys"; the "Ekspres Politika" subsists in a strange (para)ideological vacuum as an informal organ of the "SPS hard patriotic line", the one which was pushed to the margins after Dayton and the JUL offensive.
The state "Borba", a paper with so "great" circulation of sold copies that the editorial office could afford it to personally deliver the papers to all its readers (several hundreds of sold copies are mentioned), made a surprising move by which it joined the market competition: the paper returned to its earlier large format from 1991, and the price was halved. Seemingly, no one is interested in investing in such a paper, but the rich and powerful JUL needs a fully reliable organ in its offensive approach. It is noticeable that in the last few months the "Borba" started to loudly boast of its "leftist" traditions.
Now the "Borba", along with the "Blic", is the cheapest daily in the FRY. A chaotic newspaper market necessarily results in a chaos and the absence of all meaningful criteria on the journalistic stock market. Consequently, it happens that journalists of renown dailies and weeklies go over to newly established tabloids because of fabulous earnings (according to local standards); that is a phenomenon hard to explain to a professional from a well organized state, because it rarely happens for someone who has made a name in the "Times" to defect to the "Sun" or "Daily Mirror" irrespective of the amount of money they offer. Simply, these are different journalistic and newspaper categories which do not intermingle much. Same as they are read by different social groups, journalist of different profiles write for them. In that sense, for example, in professional terms the left-liberal "Guardian" and the conservative "Daily Telegraph" are closer than any other high quality daily could be with a tabloid of a similar political orientation.
It is unrewarding to predict further development of the situation on the market, more so as in Serbia it is not conditioned by only economic situation and professional competencies of editorial teams, but also by a political diktat which discreetly(?) channels a major part of the market in the "desirable" direction, towards "fit" papers.
For the forthcoming elections it could be expected that the "Politika" will maintain its rather snug "central" position of a pro-regime paper which has been trying, and lately succeeding, to demonstrate its political orientation with less noise and primitivism than other state-"social" papers, and to keep at least some elements of serious professionalism (foreign affairs, culture); under any regime the "Novosti" will remain a reliable paper of "that Serbia which is tired of reading"; the "Nasa Borba" will probably manage to stay firm and hold out in this wind-swept field as a reliable and serious daily forum of liberal Serbia.
Others will have to fight over the market cake left-overs and the feathers will surely fly. Naturally, that will be good but on condition that more or less equal conditions are secured for market and professional competition. So, he who survives will write...
(AIM) Teofil Pancic