Whatever happened to Tanjug? Re-loading memory for an understanding of the global news system

Tanjug’s continuing relevance

For close to 70 years, Tanjug, the national news agency of Yugoslavia and brainchild of Marshal Josip Broz Tito, President of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1943–1980), who was also first Secretary General of the Non-Aligned Movement (1961–1964), has played a major and nonconformist role in the global marketplace of information and the breaking of historical news events, in a manner that, at least up to 1990, had a strong claim to representation of the perspectives of the non-aligned world.

Even from the perspective of conventional principles of western journalistic practice, Tanjug played a pivotal role by being the first to break news of events such as the last day in office of the first legally elected Prime Minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, before his assassination in 1961; the US ‘Bay of Pigs’ invasion of Cuba that same year; the US-aided military coup d’etat against Chile’s Popular Unity government and its democratically elected President, Salvador Allende, in 1973; the US bombardment of Tripoli (that allegedly killed Libyan leader Muammar Ghaddafi’s infant adopted daughter) in 1986; and the overthrow of the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu in Romania in 1989 (Aksentijević, 2003; Lukić, 2003; Mirić, 2003; Pudar, 2003; Tomić, 2003). Tanjug’s work foreshadowed by over 20 years the 1970s debates leading to UNESCO-endorsed calls for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO). Tito articulated the need for a non-aligned news agency perspective in 1955 (five years before the foundation in Belgrade, 1961, of the Non-Aligned Movement [NAM]), and formed its information nexus around Tanjug as the coordinating agency of the Non-Aligned News Agency Pool (NANAP) in 1974 (Rafajlović, 1993; M Konstantinović, ¹ 15 September 2010, personal communication), which today continues to exist as the Non-Aligned News Network (NNN) centered in Kuala Lumpur. Despite differences in size between Tanjug and the major international agencies, Tanjug invested a significant effort in the gathering and distribution of original foreign news. Between 1944 and 1993, it maintained 237 international correspondents in 22 European countries, 15 Asian countries, six South American countries, 14 African countries, the US and Australia) (Avramović, 1993). Unlike some other alternative news agencies such as Inter Press Service (established in 1964) and the features service Gemini News (1966–1988 [now Panos]), that have striven to represent the interests of the developing or emerging economies, Tanjug sought to represent countries of the Non-Aligned Movement specifically, and among these it had sympathetic purchase on the perspectives and struggles of the socialist countries.

Few scholars have examined the significance, legacy and relevance of Tanjug for the globally networked system of national, regional and international news agencies, mainstream and alternative, since Robinson’s 1977 seminal analysis. (A master’s thesis by Aguilar [2010] is a welcome exception.) Rantanen and Boyd-Barrett (2002) have lamented the dearth of studies of news agencies that are in whole or in part owned and/or financed by governments, arguing that although these may not comply with certain western expectations of journalism this does not mean that they are unimportant. Since Robinson’s initial examination, Tanjug has (1) contributed to ongoing debate and practice concerning the potential and direction of news agency operations in the developing world, (2) changed the landscape of global news dissemination, (3) experienced an existential crisis during the transformative years of Yugoslavia’s breakup and (4) evolved a new business model, downsizing and ‘mainstreaming’ the organization more in conformity with other national news agencies, while continuing to offer what it claims is an alternative news perspective. Tanjug once represented, in Gertrude Robinson’s words, a ‘startling innovation in media organization and programming’ (1977: 1). It belonged to that small category of what Boyd-Barrett (1980) described as ‘intermediate’ between world and national news agencies, serving both a national but also a significant international market, reporting the latter from a broader perspective than that of domestic interest. Today Tanjug represents a survivor of geopolitical upheaval and political disintegration, and provides lessons to be learned while remaining relevant to the conversation on alternative news in the global information marketplace. Resurrecting Tanjug from the historical memory hole, however, does not simply replenish memories of potent debates about the role of news agencies in the construction of global information environments. It also raises critical questions as to what kind of ‘third way’ did Yugoslavia’s system of ‘autogestion’ contribute to the struggle between western capitalism and Soviet command economies, and why has the country, and its news agency, slipped so easily down the memory hole?

Alternative news agencies in the global news system

An important contextualizing component in any assessment of the significance of news agencies – such as Yugoslavia’s Tanjug – that have purported to provide a different or ‘alternative’ perspective on political, economic and military events in international affairs relates to a broader history of the major international news agencies, the countries that nurtured them, and the durable international news system whose infrastructure they have sustained for almost 180 years. The central nodes of this system have been Agence France Presse (AFP) and its predecessor Havas, headquartered in Paris; Associated Press (AP), headquartered in New York; Reuters, today Thomson Reuters, headquartered in London; and Wolff, the now defunct news agency of pre-Nazi Germany, headquartered in Berlin (e.g. Boyd-Barrett, 1980; Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen, 1998).

From the first half of the 19th century these institutions were covering news from most parts of the world, distributing news to most parts of the world, through all time-zones, all of the time. These early ‘24/7’ operations, embedded at the very core of 19th- and 20th-century empires, constructed corresponding information hegemonies. The classic global news system of the 19th and 20th centuries was made up of interdependent but also unequal news processing organizations. In this system, Reuters, Havas and Wolff enjoyed pre-eminent status and operated overtly as an international cartel up until the 1930s, in alliance with some other significant but second-rank agencies including AP (until it rebelled in the 1930s, protesting its own ‘alternative,’ anti-imperial agenda) and KK Telegraphic Correspondence Bureau, the news agency of the doomed Austrian-Hungarian empire. These majors exercised disproportionate influence on the news agendas of smaller, mostly national news agencies and their clients around the world, whose local information the majors digested for their international services – the same services on which the national agencies were dependent for their accounts of international affairs. The major agencies had distinctive ties, direct and indirect, to the national media markets of the countries in which they were headquartered (UK, France, Germany and the US) and with their respective governments, never less than when those governments were at war.

The hegemony exercised by the most powerful agencies has frequently generated resistance, both within national and across international markets. From early on in the news business, therefore, we find examples of hegemonic, subaltern and counter-hegemonic agencies (Boyd-Barrett and Boyd-Barrett, 2010). The global cartel established initially through a series of agreements between Reuters, Havas and Wolff parceled out the different territories between these core members, partly but not exclusively on the basis of imperial interest. Within each of these territories, a privileged but unequal relationship was established between the respective core or hegemonic agency and local, generally national (subaltern) agencies. Subaltern agencies fed local news on an exclusive basis to the core agencies and in turn (and on payment of a fee) they received the global news service of their respective hegemon. Subaltern agencies were granted exclusive ownership of the hegemon’s news service within their local market and this went out alongside the subaltern’s local service to an exclusive membership list. Counter-hegemonic news agencies emerged in response to the constraints of this system in a variety of ways. Local media that were denied access to the local subaltern service of national and global news were motivated to join with other clients, perhaps in partnership with counter-hegemonic global agencies, to establish rival services. Powerful publishers might decide they could provide a more relevant and cheaper service for their own news properties without going through either the hegemonic or the subaltern’s service. Media groups, or other powerful clients, including national governments, might determine that the news services provided through the cartel were biased in ways they did not care for and then set up their own (sometimes government funded) alternatives. In this latter category we can place Tanjug, in its capacity both as national news agency of Yugoslavia but also as the news agency of the movement of non-aligned nations that emerged in the Cold War. Such initiatives might be inspired not just by a desire for independence in news, but independence of the empires that were represented, directly or indirectly, by the hegemonic agencies. A subaltern agency, finally, might turn on the hegemon, in partnership with government, media and other clients, establishing an alternative, possibly in partnership with a rival to the hegemon.

The Tanjug, NANAP and the NWICO debate: The remarkable history of an alternative news agency amid geopolitical upheaval

By the time US-originated ‘free flow of information’ discourses became a central focus of critique during the NWICO ² debates of the 1970s, news agencies had accomplished a great deal to improve upon at least the quantity of information exchanged between nations (Boyd-Barrett, 2003a, 2003b), even if the balance of this exchange greatly favored the West. The emergence of newly independent states in Africa, Asia and the Middle East prompted the search for ways to correct the imbalances of news supply after years of reliance on the local branch offices of international news agencies, based out of the countries of former imperial rulers and exercising substantial gatekeeper control both of global news flowing inwards and of the representations of ex-colonial and ex-client states on international news agency wires for their media clients globally.

UNESCO’s International Program for the Development of Communication (IPDC), established in the wake of the 1980 McBride Report (UNESCO, 1980), aimed to assist in the formation or strengthening of news agencies in non-aligned countries through such means as tariff concessions, journalism training and equipment supply (UNESCO, 1985). Frustrations shared by developing world agencies dependent on Reuters, AFP, AP and United Press International (UPI) were voiced at UNESCO and NAM-sponsored events throughout the 1960s and 1970s (Boyd-Barrett and Thussu, 1992, 1993), and had sparked the argument for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) as a prerequisite to the accomplishment of a New Economic Order (NEO). But long before this agenda evolved into the NWICO debates, Tanjug had already perceived the fundamental conundrum: why would news agencies of newly independent countries expect to be well served by a global information environment controlled by corporations of the ex-imperial powers?

NANAP, often referenced as an outcome of the NWICO debates, was in fact more a contributor to them, and a primary model for cooperation between developing country news agencies, owing its gestation to a framework laid by Tanjug in the preceding two decades. It played a remarkable, principled and often misunderstood role in the development of a distinct third world press. Unlike the weakly NANAP structure (see Boyd-Barrett and Thussu, 1992), which always struggled to attain significant client use and resources, the Tanjug model was premised on the presumption of a robust coordinating role, played by an experienced, reasonably well-resourced and ideologically compatible national agency. Often cited as the primary voice of NANAP, Tanjug in reality represented far more than that. The agency also represented the genesis and guiding vision of a new model of alternative news that challenged the bilateral hegemonic perspectives of the world being written by the entrenched news agencies of Britain (Reuters), France (AFP), the Soviet Union (TASS) and the United States (AP and UPI). Tanjug’s experience contributed directly to the terms of the NWICO debates.

The genesis for what eventually became NANAP took root toward the end of 1954, when Prime Minister Nehru was interviewed by Yugoslav journalist Boza Rafajlović in Delhi. Two main points emerged from the interview, which occurred in the context of Nehru and Tito’s joint remarks at the first Socialist Conference of Asian Countries. First, that the storm of conflict between the superpowers was making dangerously high waves within world geopolitics. Second, that riding those waves the rest of the world was in the same boat and in danger of drowning unless everyone began to row together to overcome the high swells produced by that conflict (Rafajlović, 1993). During Tito’s stay in India he and Nehru issued a joint statement on 23 December 1954 explaining for the first time the meaning of the policy of non-alignment (Stanković, 1967). Upon returning to Yugoslavia, Tito remarked to Rafajlović that he had ‘waited a long time for Nehru to say something about rowing together in the same boat’ (Rafajlović, 1993: 119) and had taken the opportunity to bring it up during the Rangoon speech. Tito then said that Yugoslavia needed to send more journalists to India and countries like India to report what was happening daily in the developing world. Five years from this conversation, the first conference of ‘outside the bloc’ ³ countries met in Belgrade on 1–6 September 1961 (Rafajlović, 1993).

The fourth of these Non-Aligned Movement Summits (in Algiers, 1973) proved pivotal in establishing the issue of information and communication in the conversation on global economic imbalances (Crain, 2009). At this conference, the definitions of domination were expanded to include cultural and social imperialism, establishing the threat of ideological domination to the developing world (Lakshmi, 1993). In January 1975, news agencies in 12 NAM member countries agreed to establish the Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool, often simply referred to as ‘the Pool’, to serve as a method for the multilateral exchange of information (Ivačić, 1978a, 1978b). Officially, NANAP was formed at the Conference of Foreign Ministers of Non-Aligned Countries held in Lima in August 1975; by the July 1976 conference in New Delhi the statutes were drafted, and adopted at the August 1976 conference in Colombo (UNESCO, 1985). Throughout this cooperative effort, Tanjug became the news agency leader in coordinating the collection and redistribution of news and information among NAM member countries (Crain, 2009).

NANAP was one of several cooperative models that developed in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. News cooperatives such as IPS (Inter Press Service), PANA (Pan African News Agency or PanaPress), NANAP and CANA (Caribbean News Agency) helped change the way in which news is covered in the developing world (Boyd-Barrett, 2001; Boyd-Barrett and Thussu, 1992, 2010). Many of these ventures continue to this day with varying degrees of success. Since Boyd-Barrett and Thussu’s (1992) analysis, all but IPS have encountered significant challenges related to ownership structures, content focus and quality, their use of news services and revenue sources. IPS – a journalist-run cooperative serving the third world (particularly Latin America) with a strong focus on developmental issues – was financed by media as well as (significantly) UN agencies and NGOs invested in its success, and remains an alternative voice in the global news agency market (Joye, 2010). Perhaps the strongest survivor, IPS has had also experienced a turbulent economic history. PANA has fared less well, due to structural and financial woes. PANA’s reliance on intergovernmental funding proved insufficient, and the cooperative’s news product has not been picked up globally on a large scale, leading to a significant restructuring in the 2000s with a view to more entrepreneurial activity. CANA – a government–media initiative to foster a Caribbean-wide identity and alternative voice – has recently merged with the Caribbean Broadcasting Union (CBU) due to limited human and capital resources and free-market pressures (Boyd-Barrett, 2001).

NANAP proved reasonably durable in comparison to many of its contemporary cooperatives, benefiting from the backing of a national news agency (Tanjug) with a reputation for independence, substantial state funding, cooperative state–media structures, a UNESCO and NAM-backed international news-exchange system (albeit members who were national and government-owned news agencies) and most significantly, a long history of providing news products about nations of the non-aligned and developing world. While NANAP’s model worked, there is little evidence of a strong use of the pool’s stories in developed world markets, and it was barely able to survive the disintegration of one of its core pillars, Tanjug, during the Balkan wars. As NANAP positioned itself as the voice of the non-aligned nations framing news from the perspective of those nations, Tanjug had positioned itself as the pre-eminent voice of NANAP (perhaps more vigorously than another NANAP coordinator, the Press Trust of India, PTI). Tanjug was more than the Pool, however. While it played a pivotal role in the establishment of an alternative news model, Tanjug’s reports proved that developing world journalism was a major contributor to the global news market. Again and again, Tanjug was the first to report on major world events, asserting a voice in the news agency market with perspectives looking beyond the Cold War constituencies that would not go unnoticed.

Breaking news that defined an era

While smaller and newer than the traditional global news agency giants, Tanjug managed to be the first to report on events that defined an era, including many events critical to the struggle between capitalist and communist worlds. The fact that Tanjug was sufficiently placed to claim being the first to break international news events raises questions regarding what set this upstart news agency apart from its storied competition, and allowed the kind of access and perspective to take a leading role in the news and information market.

By chance on 2 December 1960, Tanjug’s Africa correspondent Mirko Aksentijević became the last journalist (and perhaps the last person) to talk to Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of Congo before he was ‘arrested and later liquidated’ in a Belgian and CIA orchestrated coup (Aksentijević, 2003: 12) – CIA Director Allen Dulles had given the assassination order. Aksentijević reported that he arrived to speak with Lumumba minutes before Defense Minister Mobutu Sese Seko’s soldiers arrived to capture him and secret him away until his assassination. He describes the scene as he was admitted by a calm cabinet chief to see Lumumba sitting alone at an empty table. He knew that the Prime Minister’s days in power were numbered, but was nevertheless confused and shocked when Lumumba reportedly stood and pleaded to the journalist ‘I am in grave danger. Help me. Save me.’ Aksentijević describes Lumumba’s desperation as being that of a drowning man reaching for a tiny straw of hope (Aksentijević, 2003). Tanjug was first to report on Lumumba’s fall. By the time of the Tanjug correspondent’s interview with Lumumba, military rebellions in the Congo had been accompanied by mass expulsions of foreign journalists (Aksentijević, 1993). Because those restrictions did not include Yugoslav media, Tanjug was positioned (in what we may anachronistically define as a ‘CNN moment’) as primary source of information about events surrounding the coup. Tanjug’s reports were picked up by the media from Japan, China, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to London and the non-aligned countries. This added to Tanjug’s reputation, and the agency soon initiated cooperative international relations with organizations that later facilitated development of the pool (Aksentijević, 1993). This positioning at the nexus of important geopolitical events may have been equal parts luck and professional instinct, but it became habitual for Tanjug journalists to be at the forefront of reporting international events in the developing and socialist worlds.

Tanjug enjoyed another exclusive scoop in Cuba on 19 April 1961 during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion by American supported and CIA-trained Cuban exiles (Mirić, 1993). On the morning of 15 April, the streets of Havana looked no different than usual, but within hours all communications with Cuba were severed. During this time, nobody was able to use either telex or telephone (Mirić, 1993). No word of the ongoing invasion attempt had been heard aside from vague rumors that ‘something was happening’ when the agency’s correspondent Jovan Mirić approached his contact Jorje Ricardo Masetti, the director of Prensa Latina and personal friend of Che Guevara, for information (Mirić, 2003: 20). For reasons that are still unknown to Tanjug, Mirić was called at 5 a.m. by a colleague at the Cuban newspaper Revolución to say that ‘The Commander and Chief’ (Fidel Castro) wanted to see him in front of the Revolución building immediately. While waiting for Fidel, Mirić sent Tanjug a message that the Cubans were ecstatic that they had almost completely thwarted an invasion. That information was disseminated by Tanjug to all European and American print media. While Castro did not show up, the correspondent and a group of army intelligence officers drove to the Bay of Pigs and witnessed the event that had been unfolding 200 km southeast of Havana for the last four days (Mirić, 2003). In this way, Tanjug’s 21:00 dispatch from Havana on 19 April was the first report the world received from the war zone. Tanjug’s professional reputation rose with the scoop on the Bay of Pigs invasion. The relationship between the agency’s correspondents and other national press agencies had allowed for unprecedented access to one of the era’s most infamous political fiascos. What is most compelling about Mirić’s report is the esteem with which the agency was held for the government of Cuba to choose Tanjug as what Lalić called Cuba’s ‘window to the world’ (2003: 22).

Tanjug’s correspondent Momčilo Pudar arrived in Santiago in November 1972 for the beginning of his second term in Chile. Upon arrival he reports being able to smell revolution in the air (Pudar, 1993, 2003). Conflicts were erupting on the streets and he had to dodge police water cannons and tear gas as he navigated the city from one day to another. The country was experiencing tremendous political flux and unrest between the Popular Unity government of President Salvador Allende and CIA-supported pro-business Christian Democrats (who sabotaged the nation’s transportation system) vying for control. By 10 September the following year, Pudar was expecting the immediate fall of Allende due to the atmosphere in the country’s capital. The next day, as he watched the chaos around the presidential palace, he called Belgrade to report that a coup was starting. His report to Tanjug’s office was the first news report on the coup, and resulted in his subsequent arrest on 26 November until petitions on his behalf secured his freedom and expulsion from the country four days later. Pudar recalls that he ‘saw Allende running into La Moneda while tanks began to arrive, airplanes began bombing and Allende began broadcasting a [last] dramatic speech over the radio’ (Pudar, 1993: 117) before he purportedly shot himself rather than yield, using a pistol that had been given to him in happier times by Fidel Castro (Raffy, 2004). Pudar’s position, just outside the presidential palace, therefore gave him the first glimpse of the end of Allende. His professional understanding of the political context in Chile, and subsequent prediction that a coup was imminent, allowed Tanjug’s correspondent an uncanny chance to break the news of the military coup in Chile that presaged the rise to power of the inglorious and brutal dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

In the highly competitive news marketplace, Tanjug was able to exercise significant global influence through its ability to report first on world events. To what degree this positioning was the result of the agency’s non-aligned status lending it legitimacy in covering Cold War politics, the cooperation and openness it received from other countries’ governments and journalists, its correspondents’ ability to understand the context of what they were witnessing and predict outcomes, or sheer luck to be located in the right place at the right time where news events were happening will never be known. What is evident is that Tanjug’s reputation as the leading voice of news from and for the non-aligned world, in a manner that more closely resembled the practices of western journalism than those of the Soviet Union or China, gave the agency a presence that far outweighed its size, and a reputation that garnered international respect.

Tanjug in the global context

Tanjug had quickly established a reputation and market position as the premier news agency of the non-aligned world. Its non-aligned perspective was coupled with a consistent dedication to western journalistic values and professionalism. This commitment to objectivity and accuracy was influenced in many ways by Tanjug’s inheritance of journalists from the Avala News Agency (founded in 1919 as an Agency of the Yugoslav Kingdom) and the liberal leanings of the agency’s first director, Mosha Piade (M Konstantinović, 15 September 2010, personal communication). Tito’s understanding of the importance of credibility on the global stage also deserves due credit for Tanjug’s years of influence in the news marketplace.

As early as 1968, Robinson noted that Tanjug’s position in the market had grown significantly. Her analysis of Yugoslavia’s national news agency credited this achievement as being through cooperation with other news agencies. In this way, Tanjug leveraged limited financial resources, a smaller technical network and a staff one-quarter the size of AP to become eighth in terms of news output behind the five global giants (Robinson, 1968). Unlike the five global agencies (Reuters, AFP, TASS, AP and UPI), which have superior resources to call upon in their positions as news wholesalers, retail news agencies like Tanjug traditionally engage in commercial and trade agreements with these giants for news products (Robinson, 1977). Despite these differences in size and resources, Tanjug continued to climb in prominence.

By 1980, the agency established a Bureau for Information in New York to carry information and news bulletins from the United Nations and from NANAP members to New York, enabling the rapid dissemination of news from the Yugoslavian perspective while UN meetings being reported on were still wrapping up (Bogunović, 1993). By 1982, Tanjug’s New York Bureau was chosen to be one of the primary information centers for the UN, together with Reuters, AFP, AP and Tass (Bogunović, 1993). On 28 June 1983, UN Undersecretary for Public Information Yasushi Akashi publically recognized that the cooperation between the UN and Tanjug was very successful (as cited in Avramović, 1993), and thanked the agency for its contribution to this success through its distribution of information to 84 non-aligned countries. By 1986, Tanjug was the third most used news agency product in the UN daily news bulletin, with dispatches making up 23% of the bulletin (UN, 1986). The UN evaluation went on to recommend that ‘every effort should be made to assure adequate representation for [Tanjug] dispatches on an ongoing basis’ (UN, 1986: 12), and Tanjug’s raw wire service printouts were being distributed thrice daily to UN departments.

Tanjug’s prominence in the news agency market and in UNESCO discussions on information policies was accompanied by the further development of information products of international interest. As part of their global product line, Tanjug released Focus in 1987, a twice-weekly English-language publication reporting on the political and economic developments within Yugoslavia for foreign embassies and non-governmental institution clients around the world (Avramović, 1993). Tanjug expanded on this product in 1990 with the production of Tanjug Press to provide a professionally translated daily bulletin providing a 24-hour reflection on global and domestic political and economic developments including political documents, resolutions, decisions and implementations (Bačić, 1993).

The news reporting model that Tanjug showcased was emulated internationally, and national news agencies throughout the NAM sent their journalists to learn their trade from Tanjug. Tanjug’s school of journalism was formed in 1947 as a one-year program for training correspondents (Radivojević, 1993). The faculty of the school included political figures, relevant departmental professors from the University of Belgrade and (interestingly) prominent cultural figures such as Nobel Prize winning author Ivo Andrić, who advised that ‘the inflation of words is like the inflation of money. The more words you have, the less their importance’ (Šotra, 1993: 26). Following Yugoslavia’s political conflict with the Soviet Union in 1948 (and especially following 1953), the country received significant assistance from the West, particularly western models for media and culture, which Tito embraced to demonstrate how liberal his regime was to the world (M Konstantinović, 24 February 2011, personal communication).

Tanjug became an institution of note within the national news agency marketplace and challenged the bifurcated Cold War view of the world framed by the global news agency giants. The agency demonstrated that a national news agency could move beyond being a redistributor of wholesale news products and produce a significant amount of relevant news and information products through a new model of cooperation and innovation. The importance of Tanjug’s demonstrable success at elevating an alternative news perspective into the global conversation formed the backbone of cooperation between non-aligned news agencies and helped raise the profile of non-aligned countries on the world stage. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the geopolitical changes sweeping the world, Tanjug seemed to represent a symbol of success that would long outlive the Cold War context of its development.

National news agency without a nation

During the late 1980s, Tanjug was still breaking news and remaining relevant in the news agency market. Tanjug broke the news about the 1986 nuclear accident in Soviet Chernobyl, the American bombardment of Tripoli in 1986, Chinese unrest in 1987 and the overthrow of Romania’s leader, Ceauşescu, in 1989 (Avramović, 1993; Lalić, 2003). However, momentous conflict was brewing in Yugoslavia that would leave the agency in pieces. Tanjug’s position as a pan-Yugoslavian news agency, with staff pulled from throughout the former Yugoslav republics, complicated its role in reporting the events surrounding the disintegration of the country, and made it a headache for nationalist leaders of the various republics. As a national voice, the agency was tasked with providing news and information throughout the federation without privileging one republic over another. In reality, however, the nationalisms of individual staff members and pressures from warring political leaderships were pulling the agency apart.

Tanjug’s organizational leadership was made up of a director and editor-in-chief appointed by the federal government and approved by the employees. In the fall of 1990, a new editor-in-chief appointment by the Federal Premier was vetoed by the staff at Tanjug as the agency continued its efforts to provide professional coverage of events such as the 1991 street protests in Belgrade (Thompson, 1999). Efforts to undermine control of the central Belgrade office for a more pro-Serbian bias continued and chaos emerged within the organization. A staff referendum on 25 December 1991 against the editor and director moved forward despite threats made by the Yugoslav Secretary for Information and the editor-in-chief (staff voted 308 to 182 against the director and 403 to 87 against the editor-in-chief), making their concerns for the continued professional credibility of Tanjug and desire to operate independently of the government known to the political apparatchiks running the agency (Zupan, 1993). Dušan Reljić, former editor-in-chief of Tanjug, identifies 9 March 1991 as the pivotal moment in Tanjug’s professional decline when the agency’s leaders refused to issue reports of the army’s confrontation with demonstrators in Belgrade until the images had already been shown on television for two hours (as cited in Thompson, 1999). Ironically, Reljić is remembered by staff at Tanjug at the time for his own role in censorship and his insistence that reports from the war zone in Slovenia and Croatia contain strictly balanced opinions regardless of the reality on the ground. Staff expressed the opinion that these misinforming reports were ‘on the soul of Dušan Reljić’ (Zupan, 1993: 254).

Tanjug’s role and credibility was under siege on other fronts as well. The agency’s Zagreb office was dissolved and replaced by the newly established HINA ⁴ in 1990, with Tanjug’s serving Zagreb bureau chief, Mirko Bolfek, then becoming editor-in-chief of HINA (Thompson, 1999). Military attacks on Tanjug’s offices in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Hercegovina were also being reported (Helsinki Watch, 1992) and Tanjug’s Sarajevo correspondents were complaining of their reports being censored by the Belgrade office before dissemination (Thompson, 1999; Zuban, 1993). Tanjug’s staff became increasingly concerned about the treatment of colleagues in Croatia by the Zagreb authorities and the number of staff members in Croatia and Slovenia who left their posts to write propaganda for political parties (Thompson, 1999). They were also concerned about the uncritical coverage of the political environment and the move toward propaganda in news from local journalists throughout the republics of the former Yugoslavia (Avramović, 1993; Thompson, 1999). Staff became critical of the failures of Tanjug’s various branch offices to adequately report events happening to the world. In addition to the Croatian nationalist stance taken by the Zagreb bureau, the Kosovo desk became very pro-Serbian nationalist in its reports and the Sarajevo desk adhered to the traditional anti-nationalist position of the League of Communists until the outbreak of war there (Thompson, 1999; Zupan, 1993). During this period many journalists felt that patriotism and professionalism within journalism could be achieved side by side, but the realities facing the agency were proving otherwise. Nationalism, the ugly side of patriotism, proved far too destructive to Tanjug’s credibility.

The combination of political involvement in Tanjug’s agenda and the high profile of the Yugoslav crisis in the international media dramatically impacted the news and information products that Tanjug was producing. When Tanjug was formed in the mid-1940s, news content was 60% domestic and 40% international (with 30% of the international content originating in Eastern Europe). By 1972, the content became 50% domestic and 50% international. By the middle of 1993 it had reverted to overwhelmingly domestic content (Milošević, 1993), and the agency was experiencing an internal struggle to keep that domestic content objective and professional (Thompson, 1999).

Tanjug 2010

Tanjug quickly disappeared from the world stage during the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. Its credibility damaged and its branch offices suffering a fate similar to the ‘Balkanization’ of the nation, the agency was soon relegated to a historical footnote representing a bygone era as the world’s attention moved to the next big story. However, despite the transformation of many of its branch offices into new national news agencies of former Yugoslav republics, Tanjug continues operating as the national news agency of Serbia.

Comprehensive political restructuring in Serbia has had a significant impact on the agency’s business model. Tanjug has survived a monumental move from almost complete dependence on federal subsidy and control to a mixed model that combines some state funding, entrepreneurship and accountability to a multiple party parliament. In this respect it conforms to the experiences of many other national agencies that have previously relied solely on government funding but are today moving toward greater financial independence (Boyd-Barrett, 2010). The changing regional media market has also allowed for former opposition media such as B-92 (Serbian broadcaster) to count among Tanjug’s largest customers. These customers augment government subsidy, resulting in a far more diverse budget for the agency. According to information disclosed by Miloš Konstantinović (Tanjug’s international relations editor), close to 60% of Tanjug’s current budget is subsidized by government and 40% is income generated from media clients, up from 90% and 10% respectively in 2008 (M Konstantinović, 1 February 2011, personal communication). This radical change in funding has been accompanied by a change of focus and rearticulation of the agency’s responsibility to the public. Tanjug continues to provide low cost content to rural areas of the country as a public service (one of the most important justifications for subsidized national news agencies worldwide), but the comprehensive international presence of former years has been reduced to a more regional focus (M Konstantinović, 15 September 2010, personal communication). Today Tanjug distributes 400 stories and over 100 photographs, video and audio recordings daily (Tanjug, 2011).

Tanjug has adapted to survive, and many of the changes, says Konstantinović (pers. comm.), have made the agency stronger. Severe personnel reductions have left the staff much leaner in comparison with the relatively bloated administrative staff of the federal years (which is an experience replicated throughout the agencies of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; cf. Boyd-Barrett, 2010). The agency’s reduced global presence has prompted Tanjug to mobilize its smaller staff resources strategically to cover fewer international bureaus more thoroughly so that a smaller staff can still be positioned to be first on the scene to report on events. As with demographic changes throughout the news agency marketplace, Tanjug’s new staff is much younger and an informal review of current reports indicates a fresh perspective that is not bogged down by frameworks of a conflicted past. Tanjug’s budget took a near crippling hit in the postwar years, but is experiencing a financial rebound after decades of hardship. In 2010 it saw an 80% rise in budget over the previous two years, although this incorporates buyouts of 30% of the workforce. M Konstantinović (15 September 2010, 1 February 2011, personal communication) claims that this leaner workforce has resulted in a more focused media product serving the agency’s client needs. The agency continues to have correspondents in most of the capitals of the ex-Yugoslav republics, as well as 10 full-time and 30 part-time correspondents within Serbia.

Tanjug retains good relationships with former members of NANAP. Coordination of NANAP passed through the hands of Indian and Iranian news agencies in the 1990s before falling dormant, but was resuscitated by the Non-Aligned Movement as the Non-Aligned News Network (NNN) in 2005, subsidized by the government of Malaysia, and hosted and coordinated by the national news agency of Malaysia, Bernama. No longer so much the voice of nations struggling for independence from the Cold War powers, the network now presents itself as a news agency for countries of the former third world. Tanjug’s own role in the Pool had been significantly affected by the Balkan wars.

With the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Tanjug went from being the founding member of the Pool to an observer. The agency still leverages relationships with other Balkan agencies, and cooperation between these agencies is aided by the fact that most of the news agencies of the former Yugoslav republics are headed by former Tanjug employees. Tanjug has news exchange agreements or relationships with each of the regional agencies (Croatia’s HINA, Bosnia-Hercegovina’s FENA, the Serbian Republic’s SRNA, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’s Magfax and Slovenia’s STA) as well as Albania’s ANA, Bulgaria’s BTA, Romania’s Agerpress, Greece’s ANA/MPA, Moldavia’s Moldpress and Anadolu from Turkey. Tanjug also has relationships with Reuters, AFP, Dow Jones, AP, ITAR-TASS, RIA-Novosti, Xinhua and many other agencies from the third world. The agency currently retains membership of the European Alliance of Press Agencies (EANA [of which Tanjug is a founding member]), the Association of Balkan News Agencies – South East (ABNA–SE), the Organization of Asia-Pacific News Agencies (OANA), the Alliance of Mediterranean News Agencies (AMAN) and the Black Sea Association of National News Agencies (BSANNA) (Tanjug, 2011; M Konstantinović, 1 February 2011, personal communication).

Competition from national news agencies in the region is limited due to Tanjug’s subsidized ability to provide free or discounted information to Serbian markets. Newspapers in Serbia pay for content, but the price depends of the economics of the newspaper. Newspapers in minority communities, as well as poor or underdeveloped regions, receive the content at reduced cost or for free. The same holds true for radio broadcasters. For example, a director of a regional FM station in southern Serbia recently told the editor, ‘You know, 100 Euros is a lot of money for us’ (M Konstantinović, 1 February 2011, personal communication).

Despite the agency’s successes, Tanjug’s global reach and reputation have suffered substantially in the postwar years. Tanjug was split during the war years as bureaus were closed down. While the agency sat back and watched what happened, it was unable to continue providing the kind of reports on the war that would have maintained the agency’s reputation during the conflicts. Additionally, the impressive number of foreign postings occupied during the agency’s heydays has shrunk to include just Moscow, Brussels, Washington, Vienna and Sofia, with the planned addition of Beijing in 2011. Tanjug’s growth of funding from the sale of its media products will challenge the agency to find a balance between its public service provision of news to local markets and pursuing business from larger clients with deeper pockets. Indeed, the agency will have to confront the challenges of the influence on content from the political system to which it is accountable, and the pressures of its media clients.

Tanjug enjoys certain opportunities in the national news agency market. The agency maintains an archive of approximately 3.5 million photographs of historical events collected over the storied history of the news agency, providing a resource of immense value. Contemporary technological innovations in the news and information market are forcing news agencies worldwide to take a close look at the electronic-based media and how best to integrate social networking, and video and photo technologies with Blackberry/iPhone users. Tanjug sees itself as currently ahead of the curve in its internet delivery capabilities and considers that it has the staff expertise to continue in this direction. While reductions in resources have limited the legendary news and analysis of the Yugoslav years, the agency is currently not so much occupied in the analysis of news as it is in providing raw information to its clients. This is an area that is ripe for exploitation, and could provide a means for reaching the international respectability of years past. At the time of this article, only the satellite news agency Al Jazeera (and smaller, longer-established developing world agencies such as Inter Press Service) seems to be making significant global market inroads under the banner of alternative world news reporting/analysis. This is an area where Tanjug could parlay its excellent reputation into a global presence. The wide political range of media with which Tanjug cooperates provides another opportunity for the agency to leverage an alternative news perspective if it gains access to the funding necessary to re-establish the global reach it had during its leadership in the Pool.

Tanjug remains vulnerable to a variety of threats in the marketplace. The agency must now come to terms with the new sources of pressures on content that accompany the mixed government/entrepreneurship business model. Editorial pressures based on the market interests of media clients now drive the type of information Tanjug focuses on. Economic disincentives for gathering diverse news information that is of only limited interest to major clients will discourage the expansion necessary for recovering the agency’s former international reach. Wiki-news and citizen journalism models that are being explored in other markets are not developed enough in the Serbian market for the agency to realistically take advantage of these opportunities either. The agency considers that the lack of quality in existing citizen journalism limits its viability and would undermine the agency’s gains in re-establishing its reputation for credibility and quality. The agency will also need to address the challenge of making electronic media content profitable, an issue impacting news agencies of all sizes worldwide. The Balkan market, which Tanjug now primarily serves, is not big enough to support a comprehensive subscription-type model for internet news products and videos.

Conclusion

The history of Tanjug has significant parallels with that of many other national, intermediate and global agencies, inasmuch as its fortunes have been considerably impacted by political and economic forces over which it has no control, but also in its ability to adapt to and survive these changes, always provided that it remains embedded within the political, economic and cultural reality of a nation-state. Tanjug also represents another phenomenon that is persistent throughout the history of news agencies, a history that goes back to the founding of the French agency Havas (forerunner of AFP) in 1832: namely the existence of discontent with and resistance to a hierarchical global news system that has been constituted by the strongest powers. There have been many attempts at such resistance. Many fail. Some, like AP (which up until its bid for complete independence in 1932 had struggled against dependence on the European cartel, of which Reuters was kingpin), or TASS (which after the Bolshevik revolution of 1916 replaced the Tsarist ROSTA and was quick to renounce long-standing Russian dependency on the German agency Wolff) win their struggle on the basis of their affiliation with giant domestic markets, only to join the club of major architects of the global news system.

Tanjug is an unlikely resister, perhaps, whose sustained contribution was directly inspired by the unique vision of Josip Broz Tito and that provided a route to a robust but nonetheless socialist independence from the Soviet bloc, one we may even describe as ‘socialism with Yugoslav characteristics’ associated with Proudhonist anarchism. The third way that was and continues to be represented by the Non-Aligned Movement of which Tito was a founding father, provided the forum for Tanjug’s considerable international reach and influence. The agency’s additional adaptation of western practices of journalism and its competent application of these to a news portfolio that reflected the interests and concerns of non-aligned countries, as Robinson (1977) has shown, gave it an otherwise unexpected reach and durability. While this is a story that is tinged with considerable tragedy it is also one that deserves to be remembered, for it has many lessons for media that wish to both serve the public sphere and to survive financially, on behalf of clients, media and non-media, who value independence from the narrow visions and distractions of corporate, advertising-driven infotainment.