Media Helping Media

More than 120,000 people visit B92 online each day, making it the most visited website in the region.

They return in growing numbers for B92’s news coverage of the latest developments in local and global news and politics, social life, sports, business, culture and entertainment.

They come to read and to comment by adding their views to every article published on the site or in the B92 discussion forums.

The aim is to engage the audience in the development of news articles.

In order to take this to the next level, B92 introduced the B92 VIP Blog. In the last couple of years, several blog sites appeared, but feeble content meant that their impact on Serbian society was insignificant.

When I thought about developing a blog service, I knew the B92 Blog had to be unique in order to be influential.

From the start, it was clear that a blog gathering a huge number of anonymous individuals for the sole purpose of huddling together in one place and having the opportunity to write something in public was not the answer.

We were keen to gather people around ideas and a system of values that we would like to see evolving in Serbia.

In order to achieve this we had to create standards and a framework for discussion. We also needed to establish a core community offering high-quality contributions. We needed to maintain a structured growth without compromising quality.

I decided to take a plunge into the unknown and told my associates to invite their friends and acquaintances from Serbia’s public life to form the initial core of the B92 VIP blogging community. The key to the invitation was that they had to share the values that B92 promotes.

I remember some people questioning why successful and prominent members of our society would want to commit time to something like this, especially when there was no financial gain.

Initially, I was worried about this too. However, I believed in the highly contagious nature of online interaction with a massive audience and I also had faith that there were still people whose ideals were above material interests and that the combination of the two would get the ball rolling.

We sent invitation emails to 50 people. Of those invited, 90 percent accepted to join immediately. Our exhilaration was complete when the bloggers started posting.

Each day we had between five and 10 interesting articles with a fantastic response from a constantly growing community of visitors interacting with the authors.

In the past year, the B92 VIP Blog community has been discussing the key issues that impact on Serbian public life.

These included the attitude towards the conflicts of the last decade, war crimes, Kosovo, the referendum in Montenegro, corruption, elections and assassination attempts on journalists.

The discussions following the contributions were passionate, but intertwined with these were knowledge-packed discussions among pundits and consumers about culture, movies, literature, sports.

The B92 VIP Blog quickly became an established medium, cited on a daily basis by TV networks, radio stations and print media.

This comes as no surprise when the list of authors includes a minister in the Serbian government, several ministers and officials from the government of the assassinated Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, the most popular actors, musicians and entertainers in Serbia, scientists and journalists – who filled the public in with everything they could not officially print in the newspapers they worked for.

It also became clear that a plethora of public figures chimed in with anonymous nicknames, spilling out information they thought was of relevance to the public without compromising their positions.

Each day, the eyes of all the important institutions and media outlets are fixed on the B92 VIP Blog, anticipating information that cannot come out through official channels.

A new platform for disseminating news and information has appeared in Serbia, still burdened by pressure on the media, coming primarily from financial moguls and political power-holders.

This new medium is unpredictable and intractable. Information is unmediated, hence there is no one to filter and censor it before it trickles out online.

The only imaginable way to carry out a repressive influence is to ban the medium altogether, which is highly unlikely given that we are in the 21st century and that the times have definitely changed in Serbia as well.

Dejan Restak is the director and acting editor in chief of www.B92.net and was responsible for the development of the website.

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