Conference paper
Croatian News Agency (Hina)- What Follows after 15 Years?
Mirko Bolfek
Abstract
The new legislative on Hina from the year 2001, guaranties to the institution its financial and business sovereignty, which is the basis of the editorial independence. The new legislative, coordinated with European standards, is an important step forward in financing Hina. Instead of financing through government support, the financial relations between Hina and the government are now based on contracts for the group subscription on informative services.
However, uncertainties continue to exist even with such market positioning of Hina. They also exist in other news agencies of smaller European countries, especially in countries with a small media market. The primary task of Hina is to fulfil basic informative needs of the Croatian public functioning as a Public news service. This task can not be reduced or financed by the commercial criteria. The dramatic media commercialisation keeps the expenses of serious agency information high, while their commercial value lowers.
Hina has a legal obligation to promote media pluralism, which means that Hina can not charge its product and services equally in all market segments. Another uncertainty is in the question what to do with other specialized informative services that other media and users need and demand? Hina started a dozen of those services, but the imperative of rising the professionalism of the Public news service, made it impossible for Hina, with its staff and financial potentials,
to develop to a profitable level. Some of those “dead capitals” are: data basis EVA which now contains only Hina news, and could have developed to a complete medium – monitoring; Hinaweb with all its comparative advantages can grow into a news-web, photo-service, OTS, multimedia services. These activities based on the new market needs, new technologies and commercial potentials should be a part of the market. Future legal and business Hina organization can, therefore, be organized in two parts: non-profitable, with the existing legal and organisational frame, and profitable, open to new business partners which would be willing to invest their knowledge or finances into the project.
Keywords
Hina; market position; non-profitable media service; profitable media service
Hrčak ID:
22962
URI
Publication date:
20.6.2006.
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