Press Freedom Foundation (Serbia) is an independent newsroom committed to promoting and protecting human and minority rights and democratic values, reporting for the Hungarian minority-language audience. Their project during IPI’s Transition Accelerator was to develop a safe and secure way to collect and disseminate investigative journalism. Here’s what they learned along the way:

As an independent media that is a thorn in the eyes of the authorities, we often feel like the home of Asterix and Obelix in the French comic books: the ‘indomitable village’ which is surrounded by the Romans but not captured by them. Being able to meet other independent magazines and newspapers from across Europe as part of the accelerator, and sharing our experiences with them, gave us great strength and energy. 

When we joined the accelerator, our plan was to develop ways to solicit reader messages and information, to explore and deal with issues that directly affect our community. As Hungarians from Vojvodina – a minority – there is often no opportunity for anyone to deal with these problems, due to political reasons and the lack of human resources.

Since we successfully launched this part of the project, a total of 16 letters were received and we made an article out of eight of them. 

Unfortunately, we found that the majority of people in the Balkans are afraid of retort or revenge and are reluctant to send information to the independent press. 

It is important to point out that the project was bilingual; the articles prepared based on the received information were published in Serbian as well as Hungarian on the Slobodna Reč portal, and therefore it was possible to open up to the national majority and show the problems affecting the minorities.

We also decided to use the support provided by the accelerator more broadly, to explore innovations in other parts of our work.

In Vojvodina, Serbia, subscription-based revenue models are not yet used as much as elsewhere in Europe, and although we have a subscription site, unfortunately, we have only a small number of subscribers. Our organization is currently working on potential changes which could encourage more supporters, but already our readership has increased greatly since our participation in the accelerator., We currently have 1.2 – 1.4 million page downloads per month. This shows that our work and the independent press are needed in Vojvodina, and readers are looking for independent news. 

Perhaps the biggest thing we’ve learned is to dare to change and to question our methods, and how to reach readers.

We published a survey to understand more about our reader base, and from time to time, we ask our readers more interactively regarding their preferences, their expectations and what we could improve on. We are currently actively working on this, and by changing the questionnaire and the subscriber model, we hope that our readers will be able to support us more committedly. 

Thanks to IPI, we have the opportunity to work with people who would otherwise not be able to reach us.

The Transition Accelerator is part of the Media Innovation Europe (MIE) project, co-funded by the European Commission. The programme is led by the International Press Institute, and implemented in collaboration with Thomson Media, the Media Development Foundation and BIRN and is intended to empower media outlets as they navigate the digital transition, giving them journalistic tools and skills in diverse products and business structures in order to reach audiences and bring sustainability.