| Type | Daily newspaper |
|---|---|
| Format | Tabloid |
| Owner | Ringier |
| Editor | Veselin Simonović |
| Founded | September 16, 1996 |
| Headquarters | Kraljice Marije 1/IX, 11000 Belgrade, Serbia |
| Official website | www.blic.rs |
Blic is a tabloid daily newspaper in Serbia owned by Ringier AG group from Switzerland.
Started in 1996, it has gone through a slight format change during the mid 2000s to include more in-depth coverage, but it is still, as its name aptly suggest, a paper devoted to quick, concise, attention-grabbing news form. Blic has at times had circulations of 250,000, but now it is closer to 220,000.[1]
Contents |
Ringier controls Blic through its local subsidiary, Ringier d.o.o. (formerly named Blic Press d.o.o.) a limited liability company.[1] The company's current CEO is Jelena Drakulić.
Vienna Capital Partners (VCP) previously had a stake in the company.[2]
Blic has since its founding expanded to publish several newspapers. These are Blic-Europa (discontinued May 31, 2006), Blic Žena, Blic Puls, Euro Blic (the issue for Republika Srpska) and variously themed supplements to Blic newspapers.
The newspaper was founded in 1996 by a group of Austria-based businessmen that included Peter Kelbel and Aleksandar Lupšić, who simultaneously bought Bratislava's Nový čas. At the time of his investment in Blic, Lupšić had strong ties to Milošević's wife Mira Marković and her party Yugoslav Left (JUL). The first issue of Blic appeared on September 16, 1996 thus becoming the 10th daily newspaper to be published in FR Yugoslavia at the time (the other nine being Politika, Borba, Dnevnik, Pobjeda, Narodne novine, Večernje novosti, Politika ekspres, Naša borba, and Dnevni telegraf).
Prior to that, the same group took over a Prague newspaper where they gained valuable publishing experience which encouraged them to go on further. For their Serbian operation, the owners got seasoned journalist Manojlo "Manjo" Vukotić to be the editor-in-chief.
Just like many other media operations in Serbia from the 1990s and beyond, Blic's ownership structure was murky as well. It was controlled by an entity called Blic Press d.o.o. - a limited liability company registered in Belgrade in March 1996. Blic Press' owners according to the Serbian Business Register were listed to be Milorad Perovic, a resident of Belgrade (51%) and Liechtenstein-based company named Mitsui Securities Eastern Europe Fund AG (49%) whose owners were not listed.[3]
Starting out, Blic was a typical stripped-down tabloid with short and simple stories, as well as a lot of entertainment content. Its first issues were circulated in 50,000 copies per day with the price set at 1 dinar. It also ran a havily advertised sweepstakes with the grand prize being a Volkswagen Polo Classic car and DM30,000. As a result of the sweepstakes, the paper's circulation increased by 30% within only a couple of weeks of the first issue.[3]
In November 1996 local municipal elections were held in cities and towns all over Serbia. Serbian opposition headed by DS and SPO parties made big gains at the expense of Milošević's SPS party, which got beaten in many municipalities. Milošević refused to recognize the results, thus sparking a huge outpouring of street protests. Blic capitalized on this to further its position on the market through fair coverage of the events ignored by the Milošević regime-controlled media. The decision turned out to be the winner in the short term – circulation rapidly grew to 200,000 copies a day - but it also drew the ire of the regime.
In the circumstances when state media made virtually no mention of the protests and the reporting of the independent media was insufficient on the subject, Blic made a gutsy decision to devote a sizable part of its paper every day to the protests. Expectedly, the Milošević regime lashed back immediately – it restricted Blic's access to print and distribution facilities as the state printing house refused to print any more than 80,000 copies of the paper. The problem first appeared when it came time to print the November 29th, 1996 holiday 4-day issue (FR Yugoslavia at the time still celebrated the old SFR Yugoslavia's day of the republic) as state owned Borba printing facility informed the Blic staff that it's not able to print the holiday issue in the requested 235,000 copies "due to technical reasons" and instead offered to print about a third of that. The holiday issue still appeared on newsstands in projected circulation as some of it got printed at Borba and the rest in privately owned ABC Produkt. However, the issue that appeared was a complete whitewash, abandoning the paper's new concept and going back to entertainment and frivolity. Forty three journalists employed at Blic immediately publicly distanced themselves from the issue, and editor-in-chief Manjo Vukotić and his deputy Cvijetin Milivojević resigned in protest. Probably the most controversial part of the issue was a regime-friendly op-ed piece titled "Nećemo da podstičemo nasilje" (We don't want to encourage violence) signed by Peter Kelbel who wrote it claiming to represent the paper's owners. In the piece he criticizes the protesters and indirectly supports the regime, saying among other things that "Yugoslavia needs people who create and not wolves who follow the wolf-leader and hunt in packs" - a veiled reference to opposition leader Vuk Drašković whose first name Vuk means "wolf". Clearly, since certain influential individuals within the state apparatus were unhappy with the paper's reporting, Blic made guarantees to decrease reporting on the protests and to decrease circulation for the time being. Blic publishers caved in under state pressure and drastically reduced the number of political pages.[3]
Blic owners faced a lot of criticism due to their decision to give in to the regime. The move was criticized by many of its journalists and editors along with the Serbian opposition. As a response, in December 1996, the journalists and editors formed their own newspaper Demokratija that had the support of opposition Democratic Party (DS).[4] Still, Vukotić and many of the staffers that originally distanced themselves from the paper returned to Blic shortly and for a few months put out a stripped-down version of the paper with only 60,000 copies printed each day.
All in all, as a result of the ugly episode, Blic quickly lost half its circulation, as well as many of its journalistic staff who resigned in protest.
Blic then contracted a new printing house, resumed a critical line and soon increased its circulation to nearly 160,000.[5]
In April 1998, Blic experienced another fragmentation of its staff when due to disagreements with owner Aca Lupšić over revenue sharing, editor-in-chief Manjo Vukotić decided to step out on his own. Majority of the staff followed him. They then hooked up with another businessman Radisav Rodić (owner of the printing company ABC Produkt that printed daily issues of Blic and its offshoots) and under his financial backing started a new paper called Glas javnosti (the first five issues were called Novi Blic). Rodić thus entered the world of newspaper publishing.
After making a profit and consolidating the operation, Lupšić's group sold Blic to Swiss multimedia communications group Ringier in early 2004 (takeover finalized in October 2004) for twice the amount of their original investment.
In early 2006, Blic created a storm of controversy by claiming in its February 4, 2006 issue that January 11 arrest of Dejan Simić, National Bank of Serbia vice-governor (who was taken in red-handed at his apartment while accepting a €100,000 bribe from Vladimir Zagrađanin of SPS), actually had a completely different background from what the police and Serbian government authorities told the public. The newspaper alleged that Dušan Lalić, a NBS employee and deputy PM Miroljub Labus' son-in-law, was actually the one behind the bribing. The story further alleged that deputy PM Labus spent an entire night convincing Prime Minister Vojislav Koštunica not to prosecute his son-in-law.
And finally, the story also accused Serbian Interior Minister Dragan Jočić of stopping the police investigation from climbing up the chain of command and thus preventing the arrests of NBS governor Radovan Jelašić and the above mentioned Dušan Lalić, as well as SPS' Ivica Dačić who was present in the mentioned apartment minutes before the police stormed in. The paper voiced its fear that the minority coalition government, which held a shaky 5-seat parliamentary support at the time, would fall as Jočić's motivation for disrupting the thorough police action.[6]
All of the parties concerned (Labus, Lalić, Jočić, Jelašić, and Dačić) vehemently rubbished the story, with Labus announcing immediate legal action against Blic for libel.
On July 27, 2009, Blic published an interview with Ratko Knežević, former Montenegrin trade representative in Washington, D.C. and former close friend of Montenegrin Prime Minister Milo Đukanović (Knežević was the best man at Đukanović's wedding). The Blic interview came couple of days after Knežević gave a similarly explosive interview to Montenegrin daily Vijesti in which he effectively accused Đukanović and his associate Stanko Subotić of ordering the October 2008 murder of Croatian journalist Ivo Pukanić. Knežević also provided many alleged details of the decades-long cigarette smuggling operation, Đukanović had been involved in.
Conducted by journalist Nenad Jaćimović, the focus of the Blic interview was on cigarette smuggling operations through Serbia during the 1990s and its political fallout that continues to this day. In the interview, Knežević accused Đukanović, Subotić and their "cigarette smuggling cartel" of defrauding the Serbian budget of €300 million in unpaid taxes with the help of Jovica Stanišić, Serbian former state security chief and Milošević's second in command.[7] Knežević further alleged that since the regime change in Serbia, Đukanović and Subotić nedded a "friendly" government in Belgrade and to that end tried their best for years to reach a deal with Serbian president Boris Tadić and his circle. After allegedly getting nowhere with Tadić, according to Knežević, they then turned their attention to other players on the Serbian political scene such as Tomislav Nikolić and Aleksandar Vučić who met with Đukanović and Subotić during October 2007 in Paris' Ritz Hotel. Furthemore, according to Knežević, for this Đukanović and Subotić had the support of former DGSE intelligence operative Arnaud Danjean. Knežević also claimed that the cigarette cartel also poses a security threat to Boris Tadić and that even Croatian president Stipe Mesić gave Tadić documents during their meeting in Sofia on April 25, 2009 warning him of possible attacks on him.[8]
Through a lawyer, Subotić announced that he'll sue Blic for libel.[9] After Subotić wrote a press release that was distributed in Balkan print media outlets on August 11, 2009 in which he denies Knežević's charges and further questions Knežević's and Blic editor-in-chief Veselin Simonović's professional and moral credibility,[10] Knežević wrote a lengthy response saying that he stands by every word from his Vijesti, Blic and NIN interviews. In the same response, Knežević also provided further details of the murders of Radovan "Badža" Stojičić, Jusuf "Jusa" Bulić, Vanja Bokan, Goran Žugić, Darko "Beli" Raspopović, and Blagota "Baja" Sekulić (all of which he claimed are connected to cigarette smuggling with the murders of Stojičić, Bulić, and Bokan directly ordered and approved by Stanišić, Subotić, and Đukanović) by directly naming the individuals that carried them out as well as those that ordered them.[11]