While we wait for the City of Belgrade to soon announce which media projects it will support with millions from the city budget this year, it's an opportunity to review one of last year's biggest winners. This refers to Informer, which received 10.5 million dinars from the City in 2025 for three projects: "Active Child – Healthy Child" (2 million dinars), "Without Appointments" (5 million dinars), and "With Culture from an Early Age" (3.5 million dinars).

We searched for articles on Informer’s website that indicated they were created "in collaboration with the City of Belgrade" during 2025. These are relatively short articles consisting of a few sentences with rare interlocutors, discussing topics that can be discovered within minutes of googling – such as why it is important for children to engage in physical activity or what can be seen at the Museum of Illusions.

One of the articles published under the project "Active Child – Healthy Child" is a good illustration of commonplaces:

"An active child is a healthy child, and Belgrade is full of opportunities for children who want to move, explore, and have fun. Whether parents are looking for a sports activity, educational entertainment, or an opportunity to be in nature, our capital offers a wealth of content for all ages," begins the Informer journalist.

The article then simply lists common-sense items about what exists in the city: sports schools, swimming pools, parks like Kalemegdan, Košutnjak, and Avala, cycling paths on the Sava Quay and Ada Ciganlija, libraries, and schools for dance and acting. Superficiality is a characteristic of other articles that Informer has published under the co-financed projects about children and culture in Belgrade.

However, this is just one part of the story about poor journalism.

Plagiarizing Others' and Their Own Texts

As if it were not enough that the texts, funded by millions, are shallow and banal, in some cases they are also cobbled together from others' sentences – journalists have plagiarized others' work and presented it as their own. In some instances, they copied sentences and paragraphs from other websites, in others, they paraphrased others' texts, and in some cases, they took others' statements without citing sources.

For example, in the article "Parents, Beware – More and More Children Have Curved Spines, This Is the Only Cure" from August 10, 2025, Informer takes parts of the text from the portal Glas zapadne Srbije, published a year earlier. They even copied a statement made by a doctor to Glas zapadne Srbije, but this is not mentioned anywhere. They did not even bother to correct the typos from the original text.

Read the entire article with examples at Cenzolovka.rs