Nova.rs portal executive editor and journalist Bojana Andjelic said on Wednesday that, following receipt of a memorandum on Tuesday evening confirming the appointment of Marko Stjepanovic as editor-in-chief and offering employees a buyout paired with an enhanced severance package, the Nova.rs newsroom is currently voting in an internal poll to establish a unified stance before confronting the site’s new owners. Andjelic called on colleagues, members of the public, journalist associations, the NGO sector, and anyone who believes implementing a media blackout in Serbia is dangerous to assemble Wednesday evening at 6 pm for a rally outside their newsroom in Belgrade.
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When asked for her thoughts on the strict 48-hour deadline given to accept the buyout offer, Andjelic said she would not comment on it.
“There is absolutely no need for me to state a position on that, because first of all, it isn’t legally valid. Secondly, it is scandalous that we only learned about this offer and its strict timeline after it was published on the N1 website. A formal email from the management, that is, the executive board, only reached our newsroom about 20 minutes later, they even wrote that Nova.rs is notifying us that they had selected Marko Stjepanovic as editor-in-chief. At that point, they even cited French law and legal precedent, claiming they were being generous enough to offer us a severance package double the legal minimum required in Serbia,” Andjelic said.
She emphasized that the memorandum is not a valid corporate document, noting it was not written on official company letterhead but simply featured the Nova.rs logo stamped onto the header.
According to Andjelic, the journalists at Nova.rs have maintained a unified front from the start, driven by a shared desire to keep doing their jobs - namely, “to report to the public on everything the government wants to hide.”
“We want to work in the public interest. That is our choice, and we know that working in the public interest carries a certain price in the country we live in, but we are ready to pay that price,” she said.
Andjelic thanked colleagues at N1, Forbes, Nova TV, Vreme, Insajder, and all other outlets tracking the situation for their support.
“We simply refuse to just stand by and let someone take over a website we spent the last six years building, only to watch it turn into something that already exists in Serbia - pro-regime media outlets that fail to serve the public interest,” she emphasized.
Andjelic said the owners’ conduct reinforces suspicions that they want to bring Nova.rs into line with the government’s agenda ahead of the elections.
“It’s clearly extremely important to them that we don’t report on everything that will happen on October 25, 26 and 27, on election day and afterwards. They want to stop us from reporting through a website that, before Mihailo Jovicevic was removed, ranked third in Serbia. We were getting more than 500,000 views a day. Do you realize what that means? That’s a massive achievement for such a young digital outlet. Their goal is to prevent us from using our platform to get the truth out to the public,” she said.
Andjelic added that the owners had arrived “with a list of journalists we were supposed to hire from the pro-regime tabloids Novosti and Alo.”
“We can also talk about the fact that Pedro Vargas Santos David (the CEO and founder of the investment firm Alpac Capital, and the chairman of the Euronews Board of Directors) was even involved in falsifying the personal data of N1 TV News Director Branislav Sovljanski. That is a criminal offense. Not just in Serbia, it’s a criminal offense in Europe where he comes from - meaning within the European Union. There is absolutely no justification for that. These are actions that require real accountability. I don’t know if criminal charges have been filed against him yet, but I certainly hope so,” Andjelic said.
Pedro Vargas Santos David recently acquired a number of media outlets formerly operating under United Media, a portfolio that includes the Nova portal and newspaper, N1, Danas, and Radar.
Teme