Lazarevac will not announce a new competition for project co-financing of media this year.
The City Municipality of Lazarevac will not announce a new competition this year following the suspension of the competitive procedure, as the Ministry of State Administration and Local Self-Government has issued an opinion that city municipalities are not units of local self-government and are not obligated to announce a competition for co-financing media projects under the Law on Public Information and Media, according to the response from the Administration of the City Municipality of Lazarevac to the inquiry from the Association of Independent Electronic Media (ANEM) regarding whether a new competition will be announced in 2025.
As a reminder, the Council of the City Municipality of Lazarevac suspended the previously announced competition for co-financing media content in August, explaining that "the commission did not submit a reasoned proposal for the decision on the distribution of funds within the prescribed deadline."
For this purpose, the municipality's budget allocated 5,100,000 dinars.
In 2025, there are still competitions to be completed in six local governments, while the municipality of Surdulica is the only one that has not yet announced a media competition. In response to ANEM's inquiry on September 8 regarding when this will happen, an answer has not yet been received.
Although the deadline has passed, funding for media projects has not yet been distributed in Sjenica, Preševo, Vrbas, and Gadžin Han. In Bujanovac, a new competition is underway after the previous one was canceled following a budget rebalancing, and in Čačak, a second, supplementary competition is still ongoing since not all funds allocated in the budget were distributed in the first competition.
The head of the municipal administration in Gadžin Han, Aleksandar Ranđelović, recently stated in a written response to ANEM that they requested an extension of the deadline for the implementation of the competition from the relevant ministry due to a lack of available funds.
"All available funds in the municipality of Gadžin Han are being redirected to address water supply issues, which is why a state of emergency has been declared across the entire municipality. The Ministry of Information and Telecommunications has approved the extension of the deadline, and the municipality of Gadžin Han will conduct the competition and other activities related to the competition within 90 days from the date of the cancellation of the state of emergency, in accordance with the approval from the ministry," the response from Gadžin Han states.
More information can be found in the ANEM database of media competitions.
A list of organizations that received the most funding in competitions in 2025 is available at THIS LINK.
A list of record holders by the number of project evaluation committees is available in THIS TEXT.
The project of the Association of Independent Electronic Media "Participatory Monitoring of the Implementation of Co-Financing Projects" is supported by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs through the MATRA program. ANEM is solely responsible for the content, which does not necessarily reflect the official views of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
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