Information

Based on the competition for project co-financing of media content in Serbia for the year 2026, funds have so far been distributed to 28 local governments, amounting to a total of over 355 million dinars.

For three projects related to children, health, and cultural landmarks in Belgrade, Informer received 10.5 million dinars (approximately 90,000 euros) from the Belgrade budget last year. We scrutinized the content published under these projects: not only were the articles that cost millions short, superficial, and trivial, but in some cases, journalists "lifted" sentences and paragraphs from other media or their own older articles, and for the project on cultural landmarks in Belgrade (3.5 million dinars), they even plagiarized texts from the official city website. They were no less lazy when it came to sourcing interviewees, as they simply used quotes from other media for some articles without citing the sources.

Project co-financing of media content in Serbia has become a meaningless process in which funds are allocated only to a limited number of media outlets and non-governmental organizations. Participants in a two-day discussion on project co-financing of media, organized by the Association of Independent Electronic Media (ANEM), agreed that the members of the committees evaluating projects lack sufficient expertise and that the system for scoring media professionals is inadequate. Representatives from 40 local media outlets participated in the discussion.

The Ministry of Information and Telecommunications (MIT) confirmed today to the Association of Journalists of Serbia (UNS) that as soon as it determined that the candidates for members of the commissions for the evaluation of media projects, Slavoljub Ristić and Biljana Ratković Njegovan, had become public officials, it blocked the possibility for them to be elected to the commissions.

Pro-government media outlets such as Informer, Srpski Telegraf, Alo, Kurir, and Večernje Novosti, along with their associated portals, have received over 2.8 million euros for media projects from local governments, the Ministry of Information, and the Provincial Secretariat during a decade of project co-financing, according to research by Cenzolovka. More than half of this amount came from the budget of the City of Belgrade—approximately 1.5 million euros. With the funds that the City generously allocated to these tabloids, it could have provided 680,000 meals for users of the Soup Kitchen, purchased around thirty ambulances, acquired eight mammography machines, or built a small kindergarten.

In the 94 commissions established to evaluate media projects to date, only 43 different candidates have been selected, according to an analysis by the Association of Journalists of Serbia (UNS).

So far, 141 local government, the Vojvodina Secretariat, and the Ministry of Information and Telecommunications have announced competitions for project co-financing of media content for the year 2026.

When, in 2015, following the adoption of a set of media laws, the then President of the Independent Journalists' Association of Serbia, Vukašin Obradović, spoke about the pillars of project co-financing – public interest and strict control over the spending of funds – expectations were high. In theory, the system was supposed to ensure that public money went to the highest quality media projects, primarily investigative ones, while control mechanisms would guarantee the legality and purposefulness of the expenditures.

The Association of Independent Electronic Media (ANEM) has established a database of the results of the competition for project co-financing of media content for the year 2026, as well as a registry that allows tracking which candidates for project evaluation committees have been selected at which levels and in how many committees.