Serving Up Multi-Lingual, Local Journalism in One Serbian Municipality
“Local issues have no nationality”
Bujanovac is a small town in Southern Serbia with a multiethnic, multilingual population of approximately 40,000 Serbs, Albanians, and Roma. Located close to Kosovo, the area around Bujanovac saw some of the last fighting of the Balkan wars, as ethnic Albanian fighters with a secessionist agenda fought with Serbian police.
The fighting ended when a peace agreement was brokered by the international community in May 2001, but conditions in this part of Serbia remained dire. Trust between ethnicities had broken down and economic opportunities were scarce, with high unemployment and significant brain drain owing to emigration.
Bujanovac is energetic and diverse with new buildings, numerous small shops, and bustling streets. But, if you look beyond its promising exterior, you might develop a different impression. Small, illegal landfills dot the outside of the town. Traffic often slows to a crawl as long-stalled construction continues to block lanes.
“Welcome to Bujanovac, but we are not sure you’ll find a parking space,” was the greeting I received from my hosts, Nikola Lazic and Jeton Ismaili.
They may be coming from two different ethnic groups, Serbian and Albanian, but these two devoted and experienced journalists share the same sense of humor, especially about their town’s two on-going sagas of poor waste management and the prolonged asphalting of local streets.
Nikola is the editor-in-chief and a founder of the Bujanovačke online portal. He is an experienced newsman, having worked for both local and national outlets. Born in Bujanovac, he decided in 2015 to establish Bujanovačke to provide his hometown with media coverage of their community. Bujanovačke is the only Serbian language portal in Bujanovac, but the quality of its journalism and its local focus helped make it popular even with native Albanian speakers.
“I established Bujanovačke mostly as a hobby and continued to go to work for the media outlet I was working for at the time. In 2017, I realized I needed to be here all the time, every day, if I wanted to have a reliable local media outlet. You cannot be a journalist if you don’t know people and they don’t know you,” Nikola explains.
The popularity of this local portal did not go unnoticed by USAID, which has been working with media outlets around the country to develop new strategies and business models, empowering them to become more independent and to establish closer connections with their audience.
During the last few years, negotiations between Serbia and Kosovo over long unsettled issues of recognition and territorial sovereignty and the increasing interest from his audience inspired Nikola to expand the role of Bujanovačke to provide timely coverage of the talks in Serbian. With USAID assistance, Bujanovačke hired a translator and an Albanian-speaking journalist, allowing them to build a media monitoring and media analysis subscription service, with news and analysis translated from Albanian into Serbian. Thanks to this support, Bujanovačke established cooperation with the Government of Serbia’s Coordination Body for this part of Serbia to provide a paid service for news cycle analysis and translation on a weekly basis.
“Working with USAID helped us understand the power of numbers and analytics,” says Jeton, the Albanian speaking journalist with a long background working for local TV stations. “We learned how we should monitor data and numbers daily so we could understand what to do next, what works for us and what doesn’t. The mentoring they provided helped us understand our product better, and helped us position ourselves even better on the media scene in South Serbia and confirm trust among readers.” After receiving positive feedback from their fellow citizens, they launched an Albanian version of the portal at the beginning of this year.
“I thought we needed one portal in two languages and not separate portals — as is normally the case in Serbia in mixed communities. Citizens living in this town — being Serbs, Albanians, or Roma — face the same problems every day. Local issues have no nationality; poor waste management, too slow paving of the streets or problems with public lighting are the same for all ethnic groups. I believe in journalism for the public interest, for the interests of citizens,” Nikola says.
With the launch of the Albanian page, Bujanovačke nearly tripled their audience from 45,025 to 130,979 pageviews in just one week.
The pandemic only reaffirmed the need for timely local coverage. As COVID-19 restrictions took effect, local pageviews of the portal continued to grow steadily, from over 187,000 pageviews in May, to over 290,000 pageviews at the end of July. These impressive numbers brought new advertising opportunities and long-term contracts with local and national companies. The Albanian version of the portal attracted advertisers within the Albanian business community not only in Serbia but in neighboring countries and in the European diaspora as well.
Citizen engagement was also critical to the portal’s success. Reporting on traffic and landfills increased citizen reliance on and trust in Bujanovacke. Local readers soon started suggesting new topics to cover. “Citizens come to us because local institutions are not responsive or working properly, but all we can do is try to hold local authorities accountable by writing about it on the basis of facts,” Nikola says.
Nikola and Jeton now have their sights set on unexplored opportunities. “We are constantly thinking about the future and our next steps. We will be working on a smartphone app, we plan to hire a younger journalist to cover sports and other topics relevant for younger audiences. We plan to tap into the Bujanovac diaspora community, as they have shown great interest in what is going on in their hometown and are willing to help. There are many opportunities, but we need to take one step at a time,” both agree.
Many years have passed since the ethnic conflicts ended in 2001. Today, the citizens in Bujanovac live peacefully, and recognize the commonality of the challenges they face, from providing for their families to staying safe from COVID-19. Nikola and Jeton remained committed to telling these shared stories.
“Don’t watch the news on national TV too much. They usually exaggerate and you will get the wrong picture about Bujanovac.”
“It’s all politics, not real life. People here from different ethnic groups live peacefully with each other.”
Both Nikola and Jeton shared this friendly advice as we were having coffee at a downtown café, on a sunny autumn day. I believe in their optimism, and I hope Bujanovac and the south of Serbia will see better days.
About the Author
Jelena Popovic is the Development and Outreach Communications Assistant and Translator at USAID’s Mission in Serbia.
