Journalism and journalism: written press and big uproar

Gutenberg: Main "censor" the press is, in a way, an economy?

Alef: The money followed the audience - and the audience went digital. Change is global and inexorable. In the United States, more than half of marketing budgets already go to digital, and estimates for 2024 speak of over $300 billion. Television fell to 20-30 percent, while print was reduced to single-digit percentages, mostly in luxury or specialized segments.

In Western Europe, the trend is similar, but somewhat milder. Digital accounts for about 50-55 percent, television 20-30 percent, while print generally records low or only double-digit percentages for prestigious dailies and magazines.

In Serbia and the region, according to estimates by IAB Serbia, digital has not yet reached Western proportions, but it is growing rapidly - to about 20 percent of the market. Television is still dominant, with more than half of the pie, while print has fallen from the former forty percent to low single digits. The former pillar of income - classified ads and classifieds - has completely disappeared and moved to the Internet. In short: advertisers haven't disappeared, they've followed audiences and technology. Digital has become the primary channel, television has maintained a strong share, and print has lost its status as a major ad market.

TV INFOTAINMENT:
Gutenberg: Describe the flow of money from the press to TV infotainment, especially in Serbia.

Alef: Falling circulation pushed big brands onto national television channels. Entertainment and reality programs guaranteed mass viewership, so television in Serbia today takes more than half of the market. The money that fed serious newsrooms ends up in prime-time spectacles. Advertising revenue continues to flow into national television, which is more attractive to advertisers because of its mass audience. Thus, in 2023, RTS achieved an income of around 125 million euros. In the same year, the private Pink Media Group generated around 80,6 million euros, which is between 40 and 45 percent of the television advertising pie in the country, and made a net profit of over 16 million euros.

GOOGLE KIDS THE CHEESE:
Gutenberg: Advertisements used to fund newspapers, and today they finance platforms like Google and Facebook. How did it come about??

Alef: Ads were the backbone of the newspaper business model. The sections "I buy, sell, rent an apartment, offer a job" brought constant income, and because of them, people bought newspapers every day. Advertisers were confident that their offer would reach a wide audience. Today, this function is taken over by digital platforms, primarily due to precise targeting and measurement of effects. On the Internet, the advertiser knows to whom the advertisement was shown, how many times and whether it led to a purchase. In print, it was incomparably more difficult to determine and depended on an estimate of the circulation.

In addition, capital is consumed by new formats: programmatic advertising, i.e. automated purchase and sale of ads through software instead of direct agreement between people; retail media, ads on e-commerce platforms - ads you see while shopping on Amazon or similar sites; as well as connected TV, i.e. ads on smart TVs and streaming services, which is a combination of television and the Internet. Decline in circulation destroys the value of print. As reading habits move to mobile phones, the newspaper page loses market value and becomes an expensive and ineffective option.

Gutenberg: What is the digital advertising market like in Serbia??

Alef: Since the 2010s, digital platforms have been taking over a larger share of the cake. According to IAB Serbia, digital now accounts for about 20 percent of advertising and is growing year by year. According to iPROM data for 2023, total investments in digital advertising in Serbia amounted to around 103 million euros, which is a 27,6 percent increase compared to the previous year, but most of that money goes to Google and Meta, while only a small part ends up with domestic portals.

Gutenberg: How much exactly??

Alef: The exact share of Google and Facebook in total digital advertising in Serbia has not been publicly announced. It is clear, however, that these platforms dominate the digital market, just as they do in most countries. Most of the money in digital goes to global players, while domestic portals get a smaller share of the pie.

Gutenberg: How it looks in more developed markets?

Alef: In the United States, Google and Facebook (Meta) together held sixty to seventy percent of digital advertising until around 2020. Today, their share is smaller, because Amazon has taken a significant part of the pie. The latest estimates for 2024 say that Google and Meta together hold approximately fifty percent, while print is reduced to single-digit percentages. In Germany and Western Europe, the trend is similar, albeit somewhat slower - digital occupies the majority of the market (fifty to fifty-five percent), television is still strong with twenty to thirty percent, while print has generally fallen below ten percent, except for prestigious dailies and magazines where it is still at a double-digit level. If we look back at Serbia, it is clear that the same pattern will be repeated sooner or later: the global giants will take the biggest part of the digital cake, while the domestic media will have to look for niches and new models of survival.

Gutenberg: If the press withdrew from "advertiser's jaws", how it survives in those niches? Does that mean he can still be saved??

Alef: Maybe, but in a different way.

Gutenberg: What trumps still keep the press alive?

Alef: First of all, two. The first is depth of attention - print readers remember the message better, as confirmed by studies by Nielsen, Media Impact and Lumen Research. The second is prestige and credibility - an ad in a serious newspaper has a "halo effect" of luxury and trust. But these are limited assets, insufficient for the mass press to survive on the market alone.

Gutenberg: Are there any indications that some advertisers are not leaving the press?, it even comes back to her...

Alef: The general trend is clear – there is no return of mass advertising in the press. What survives are symbolic, reputational and specialized campaigns. Print survives as a prestigious channel in niches: luxury, B2B ads aimed at business audiences, political campaigns and local business.

Gutenberg: Therefore, no return of the press?

Alef: On the macro level – none. Massive press budgets have irretrievably disappeared. It can no longer rely on mass advertising – digital has taken over. But the press still survives as a prestigious and credible channel in certain niches.

A once powerful industry is turning into a cultural relic. The press is kept alive more by tradition, habit and government subsidies than by its real power to shape public opinion.

Gutenberg: What do you say?, Liberal, that the press survives because of state subsidies!? Does that mean the press should be left to die out in the open, while the owners of Facebook are getting rich in the cacophony of the wild market, TikTok and TV infotainment tycoons - superficial information with light entertainment?

Alef: That's the problem. The market is an objective arbiter in terms of the distribution of resources, but it does not guarantee the survival of space for serious public speech. This is precisely why the press survives - thanks in part to subsidies. There will be more to say about this tension between market logic and public interest later...

WHY ARE YOU ASKING FOR MONEY WHEN YOU DON'T PAY:
Gutenberg: Why ask for money when you can use millions of texts for free?

Alef: Because the text itself is not knowledge. Free articles exist, but collecting, vetting, and linking them meaningfully is not done alone. What is left after the editorial work is paid: a reliable and proven fact.

Gutenberg: In practice, it seems that it is not paid?

Alef: Correct. In other words, Gutenberg's paradigm — that reliable information is paid for because it requires investment — has been seriously shaken in the digital age. The data show that in Serbia the paradox is even more obvious: the audience wants serious news, but according to the OSCE (Report on Digital News in Serbia) survey, only about five percent of citizens have paid for news at least once, while 55 percent of those surveyed claim that they would eventually be willing to pay if the content is important to them. That huge difference between declarative willingness and real subscription best shows what the problem is: most audiences still expect news to be free.

SERBIA - DECLINE OF CIRCULATION AND THE PROBLEM OF DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTIONS:
Gutenberg: How reliable is the estimate that about 670 people read newspapers in Serbia today?.000 ljudi?

Alef: Only partially reliable - the number is derived mathematically, with a multiplier of readers per copy. More realistically, the press is regularly followed by 4-7 percent of the population, about 300-450 thousand people.

Data from the Association of Newspaper Publishers of Serbia and market estimates show that the total sale of daily newspapers has fallen by more than 60 percent in the last 15 years.

For example, "Politika" and "Večernje Novosti" have circulations that today are measured in tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands as in the nineties.

Tabloids still have the highest sales, but their figures have also halved compared to ten years ago.

The Media Ownership Monitor shows audiences halved between 2016 and 2022. Official RZS data from 2023 records 1.747 serial publications, of which 11,7 percent are newspapers – print has not disappeared, but newspapers make up a relatively small segment.

In 2000, the press reached 55-60 percent of the audience in Serbia, 72 percent in Germany.

By 2022, the share fell to 10-12 percent in Serbia, while in Germany the press still reached about 40 percent.

The decline is faster in Serbia due to the economic crisis and the tabloid model, while Germany amortized the losses with subscriptions and resources.

Digital: The biggest problem is that readers in Serbia are not ready to pay for online content. According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2024, less than 10 percent of the audience in Serbia has ever paid some form of online subscription, which is significantly below the European average (around 17-20 percent). The audience expects free content, and payment habits through cards and apps are developing more slowly.

Gutenberg: Compare that to the region. (similar countries)!

Alef: Croatia and Slovenia are doing somewhat better: "Jutarnji list", "Večernji" and "Delo" have active digital subscriptions and are building audiences, but even there the share of subscribers does not exceed 15 percent.

In Hungary and Bulgaria, the situation is similar to Serbia - tabloids dominate, while more serious papers barely survive and rely on donations, grants or hybrid models (free + donations).

Gutenberg: Western Europe and more developed markets?

Alef: The situation is not much different although the scale is larger. Even in countries like Germany, France or the USA, only 10-20 percent of citizens pay for digital news. Norway is an extreme example with over 40 percent of subscribers, but it is an exception. The most successful are global brands like the "New York Times" or the "Financial Times", which invest billions in content, technology and marketing. Most of the rest live off a combination of small subscriptions and advertising money that is increasingly going to digital platforms.

The models there are more successful because there is a tradition of paying for content, a developed subscription system, greater purchasing power and a clear differentiation between quality and free content.

Serbia is closer to the Balkan average, where circulations are collapsing, and digital subscriptions are difficult to break through. The difference compared to more developed countries is that the audience there is already used to paying, so digital editions at least partly compensate for print losses.

Daily press in Serbia 1945–1991.

...

After four years of occupation and war, in which quisling papers, freaks of propaganda and sporadic bulletins of NOB and, more rarely, some groupings of the king's army in the homeland survived, we reached the autumn of 1945, when 15 dailies with 672.000 copies were recorded in the entire territory of the new Yugoslavia, which were distributed and sold as much as possible. The new and absolute feature of the press was the one-party command and strict control of the Communist Party. A few exceptions, which were soon abolished, confirmed the rule that issuing a non-party paper meant the same thing as going straight to prison (...)

Bad luck and good luck in 1948: At the end of June 1948, the worst thing happened to the country - Resolution IB and the best to the press - an explosion of circulation.

The Soviet and satellite divisions on the northeastern borders, the opening of the thickly upholstered doors of the Central Committee, the disclosure of the names and channels of defections from the highest floors of the political hierarchy set off a wave of convulsive curiosity and circulation jumps in the daily press; they can only be caused by those events that concern the skin of each individual.

Statistics for 1947 and the first quiet half of 1948 speak of 750.000 copies of daily newspapers sold; the second half of 1948 ends with 1.120.000, and 1949 with 1.466.018 dailies sold. The circulation eruption erupted from rotations in a crater with a diameter of 250 meters from the "Politika" building along Konda Street to the "Borbe" building. "Borba" touched heaven with a daily circulation of 664.000 (1947 - 232.000), which is still an unreached Yugoslav record, and the neighboring "Politika" jumped from 163.000 to 287.000. The answer to the question why exactly "Borba" and not "Politika" broke the record remains in the area of ​​conjecture. As an organ of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia then physically and architecturally connected to the building of the Central Committee, "Borba" also had that surplus of information that meant quality and all the more reason to buy it. After all, although most of it was printed in its home in Belgrade (a far smaller part in Zagreb - in Latin), "Borba" can only conditionally be subsumed under the nomenclature of the Serbian press. In this case, it does not change the essence, which is that "Borba" in 1949 represented 48,2 percent of the total circulation of the daily press in Yugoslavia and 66,2 percent of the republican, Serbian press.

The IB-hysteria lasted in decrescendo until 1955, until the historic reconciliation between Tito and Khrushchev, so the circulation began to decline.

This is where the decline of "Borba" and the rise of "Politika" begins, because six years later, in 1955, "Politika" moves to the top of the morning press league with 217.000, and "Borba" falls to second place, and then lower (...) It is difficult to assume that the incomparably more modest growth of press circulation in the rest of Yugoslavia during those disastrous IB days was a sign of disinterest. It was, above all, a consequence of the absolute political centralism anchored in Belgrade - which naturally reflected on the information of other newspapers from the interior. After all, "Borba" in Latin was read in those years in Zagreb more than the local press! The reader, even when he is a local patriot, unfailingly chooses better information in stand-up situations.

(Press in the Federal Republic of Serbia 1945-1980. Sergije Lukač, Two centuries of Serbian journalism in 1992)

Sergije Lukač: Šund in periodicals of the 1970s

...

In the period from 1966 to 1972, the constellation in the press of the SR Serbia had a real eruption of a type of periodical that was as legitimate as it was unexpected, and yet even today it has not received an adequate name in the theoretical field. Common jargon calls it "tickling", "pornographic", "sexy press" or simply "shund press". Even in the world media nomenclature, there is no firm name for the American forerunner of this press, the famous "Playboy" magazine and its American and Western European counterparts, and we have also seen our epigones (...)

In the second half of the seventh decade, several "tickling" illustrated magazines appeared in Belgrade under the challenging titles "Adam and Eve", "Magazine for Men", "Chik", or with more romantic ones, such as "Sanja". The names were different, the topic was always the same - sex, and the goal was profit. They reached high circulations ("Adam and Eve" over 200.000 in 1971; "Chik" 276.000 in 1971) and were in all cases the offspring of publishing houses that had balance sheet difficulties, such as "Ež" or "Duga".

The era of their flowering was relatively short. After the ideological-political and ethical-journalistic analyzes of these magazines and the shunt phenomena in mass culture, the production of gramophone records, for example, the Assembly of the SR of Serbia amended the Law on a special republican tax on the sale of products and services in circulation on December 28, 1972, so the republican and municipal authorities were given the authority to tax these publications highly. The commission of public, cultural workers in the Secretariat for Culture of the SR of Serbia decided whether a paper would remain within or outside of the value assessment of special social importance (...)

High taxation brought about a doubling of the selling price and one by one these papers were extinguished. The authors who analyzed the numbers of this type of magazine after taxation determined the "urgent dressing" of nude texts and photos with the aim of having the commission, which gave the papers "correction deadlines", remove the "shunda" label and curse the ficus. The newspaper "Adam i Eve" was published for a time in symbiosis with the "pure" "Duga", in the expectation that it would be freed from the tax anathema at the same time, while retaining the old, mass audience of "Adam i Eve". Since such a game of names and surnames, with a reminder of the original "best-sellers" did not bring results, "Duga" completely rejected the supplement "Adam and Eve" and replaced it with a part called "ABC of Life" (the second part was titled "Feljton"), which concentrated the refined erotic content of the former "Adam and Eve".

"Chik" (belonging to the house of "Hedgehog") in the style of "the king is dead, long live the king" began his metamorphosis of becoming more serious than "Adam and Eve": he called himself first "Novi chik", then "Zum", then renamed himself "Zum-reporter", becoming exempt from taxes in 1975. The magazine "Dvoje" (also a publication of the house "Hedgehog") is unequivocally classified as a type that expects from the reader that the title motto "life and love" will be understood as "sex and pleasure". Of the 26 non-editorial members of the "Dvoje" Publishing Council, 20 of them are doctors or psychologists, which gave this popular textbook "for happiness for two" an authoritative council and, naturally, a more scientifically based popular erotic-educational content than the previous edition...

(Development of the press in SR Serbia since 1945-1980. with reference to the Yugoslav press: doctoral dissertation / Sergije Lukač/FPN1982)

To be continued...

In the next issue of "Vremena":

• Archivist of the modern Borges World Library Aleph (fictional personalization of artificial intelligence, ChatGPT) on newspaper documentation as part of the culture of memory

• About the crisis in printing houses 2025. and incentives for the sustainability of the press in Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden and Denmark

• Documentary contributions about the press in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, communist press 1930-ih, and about twilight party press 1941. in 1990-ih