Dimitrovgrad: Critical reporting is undesirable in local media competitions.
The editorial team of FAR, a bilingual internet portal from Dimitrovgrad that publishes information in Bulgarian and Serbian, is primarily funded through foreign donations, as our projects do not succeed in local and national competitions due to our critical reporting, said Danijela Apostolov Videnov, a journalist for the portal.
“We therefore bypassed local competitions this year, as we have been applying to them in vain for years. Our editorial team primarily deals with local issues, and we are constantly facing pressure from local authorities, which has intensified recently due to the ongoing protests in Serbia,” she said at a panel in Dimitrovgrad.
Danijela Videnov, who is also the commissioner of the Independent Journalists' Association of Vojvodina (NDNV) in Dimitrovgrad, emphasized that they have recently been experiencing very unusual targeting, as the FAR editorial team is being labeled as the initiator of reports on misconduct in local businesses and institutions through anonymous letters.
“It happens that we receive anonymous letters at our address, indicating some irregularities in local government and reports that have been filed as a result, which we do not publish because we cannot verify them. However, following such letters, which someone evidently sends to other addresses as well, the municipal authorities accuse our editorial team of having sent various inspections to check local institutions or private companies of local officials,” she stated.
Nonetheless, as she added, the portal receives support from the community; citizens reach out to them because they trust that they will report objectively on their problems.
“This means a lot to us because otherwise we have a thousand obstacles that we overcome daily, but we continue to fight,” Danijela Videnov conveyed.
Local journalists in Dimitrovgrad spoke with media law expert Veljko Milić from the Independent Journalists' Association of Vojvodina, program director of NDNV Dinko Gruhonjić, and editor-in-chief of the Autonomija portal Branka Dragović.
Source: NDNV
