Conference paper
News Agencies, Professional and Market Challenges: Example of Slovenian News News Agency
Igor Vezovnik
Abstract
Slovene news agency (STA) was founded eon May 24, 1991 by the Republic
of Slovenia and a private company INI. STA was supposed to grow into a cooperative
owned by the Slovene media, but that did not happen. Today the state
owns STA entirely.
The foundation of STA was the fruit of the civil society efforts for changes in
than existing Yugoslavian mass communication space and the needs of the rising
Slovene state to offer their own and world public information on the events in
Slovenia.
Slovene media market is small and with its prices does not allow STA to survive
only selling services to the media. The agency is also disabled by the Slovene
government as a buyer of STA service. The government thereby blocks financially
week media to use STA services. The media support and financing STA should be
systematically solved, forming a special foundation for the needs of media publishers.
STA is not a rival of the other Slovene media, but some of them feel threatened
by the agency. With its quality STA enables smaller media to access the information
which they can not gather themselves, and thereby lowers the advantage of
the stronger media and intervenes in the media market struggle.
The fact that the agency is 100 percent owned by the government opens the
possibility of misuse of informative services for political interest of the actual political
authorities. To stop that from happening, the media and STA laws carry
rules that guarantee journalistic and editorial autonomy.
The rules are not enough of a guarantee that the work of the journalists and editors
will be independent and professional. The attitude of the journalists and the
editor is of greater importance. Professional association and scientific institutions
play an important role in the insurance of professionalism.
Keywords
Slovenian news agency; Slovenian media market; users
Hrčak ID:
22971
URI
Publication date:
20.6.2006.
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