Information

The Association of Independent Electronic Media (ANEM) is organizing online consultations on project writing and calls for project co-financing of media content on Thursday, March 26, from 1 PM to 4 PM.

The system of project co-financing for media content, which is intended to ensure media pluralism and the production of content in the public interest, has, in practice, become one of the most controversial mechanisms for distributing public funds in Serbia over the past few years. Instead of supporting professional journalism, numerous competitions increasingly end up as a model of political allocation of funds, where the fate of hundreds of millions of dinars is decided by a small group of people who appear year after year in dozens of competition committees across the country.

The tenth training session for writing media projects was held at the premises of the Association of Independent Electronic Media (ANEM) in Belgrade.

To date, 137 local governments, the Vojvodina Secretariat, and the Ministry of Information and Telecommunications have announced competitions for project co-financing of media content for the year 2026.

In the interest of public awareness, the citizens of Vranje have contributed over one and a half million euros in the past decade to finance projects for two media groups – well-known local propaganda outlets. The favoritism shown to these media by the authorities and competition committees is further evidenced by the fact that the media in third place on the top list of the ten "most awarded" in local competitions has received a total amount fifteen times smaller for projects over the last 11 years – approximately 100,000 euros.

In the last eleven years, the municipality of Novi Bečej has allocated almost 50 million dinars of public funds for media projects (49,630,000 dinars from 2015 to 2025).

The wave of local media establishment has swept through Serbia in the past month, making the media landscape "richer" with 11 new portals founded by the same company, "Zaple Media Group." These media outlets even share the same editor, and according to media expert Veran Matić, they will serve to confuse the public as they will contain the same propaganda content. Some of these media have emerged in cities where local elections are anticipated, but one was also established in Niš, even though elections are not announced there. This is the portal "Snaga juga," which was founded as the last in the series, just one week before the media competition of the City of Niš, which this year is allocating as much as 100 million dinars to media outlets. 

In 2015, local governments distributed funds to the media for the first time under the new law using a project co-financing model.