Nova.rs staff protest 48-hour ultimatum from new owners

Employees of the Nova.rs news portal are calling a protest outside the newsroom at Zorana Djindjica Boulevard 8a in Belgrade, scheduled for tonight, October 14, at 6 p.m. The trigger was a memo that the new management sent to staff on Tuesday, October 13, at 7:40 p.m. It confirms the appointment of Marko Stjepanovic as editor in chief and gives employees until Thursday, October 15, at 7 p.m. to choose between working under his leadership and leaving with extraordinary severance pay.

The call was published on the portal by Nova.rs journalists and staff, and it is addressed to citizens, journalists’ associations and non-governmental organizations. Executive editor Bojana Andjelic repeated it in a statement to N1 and added that the newsroom is currently running a survey to establish a common position to take to the new owners. It all unfolds 11 days before the parliamentary elections, scheduled for October 25.

What does management offer, and what does the newsroom demand?

According to a statement from the company’s Management Board, employees have two options, and in its call Nova.rs describes the memo as an ultimatum:

• continue working under the new editor in chief, Marko Stjepanovic
• apply for severance by 7 p.m. Thursday and leave the newsroom
• severance equals two thirds of a monthly salary per year of service, which the Management Board describes as double the legal minimum

In the same address, the Management Board says the portal’s coverage of its shareholder has been mostly negative and one-sided, questions the accuracy of some reports and criticizes the selective disclosure of information from an internal meeting. The statement offers no independent confirmation of these claims.

Nova.rs journalists and staff reply that no ultimatum can be fair. In their call for the protest, they write:

“No ultimatum can be fair. That is why we are calling on you to come tonight and support free and independent journalism outside the Nova.rs newsroom at 6 p.m.”

What do the deputy editor and the executive editor say?

Deputy editor in chief Ratko Femic told N1 that the appointment, together with the 48-hour deadline, is pressure on the newsroom right before the elections. In his words, management ignored the will of the vast majority of employees and imposed Stjepanovic and his deputy, Ivana Mastilovic Jasnic, who both come from Blic. Femic said:

“It is cynical that the owners invoke European standards of media freedom in their letter, while telling journalists in practice that they have two days to accept an imposed leadership or leave. That is not dialogue. It is an attempt to break the newsroom and to stifle resistance to editorial control.”

Femic announced that the newsroom will consult lawyers, take legal and other measures to protect labor rights and editorial independence, and notify domestic and international media freedom organizations about the case. He added:

“The new owners did buy the company, but they did not buy our professional principles, our integrity and our right to report freely.”

Asked how the newsroom views the obligation to respond to the offer within 48 hours, Andjelic returned to the question of the memo’s form. She told N1 that it arrived only about 20 minutes after the news was published on the N1 website and that it was not written on company letterhead, but only carries the Nova.rs logo in the header. Her answer:

“There is no need for me to comment on that at all, because it is something that, first, is not legally valid. Second, it is outrageous that we learned about an offer being made to us and about deadlines being set for us because it was published first on the N1 website.”

Femic told N1 the same sequence of events: the official email, he says, arrived only after N1 had published the news.

What does the new editor in chief reply?

On the evening of October 13, Stjepanovic answered N1’s question about why the deadline is so short. He said:

“I think the offer is fair and the deadline is reasonable. This change of ownership is not new, and I believe the vast majority of colleagues in the Nova.rs newsroom already have a firm view on whether they want to keep working with the new leadership.”

He has no estimate of how many journalists might accept severance and does not want to speculate. In his words, “it is an individual decision of every employee and it is important that everyone can make it independently”. Asked how he would run the portal if the number of journalists drops sharply, Stjepanovic said he spent almost his entire editorial career in Swiss and German media houses, and that here, too, everything published will have to be “written accurately, fairly and professionally”, even if there are fewer texts at first. In its call, the newsroom describes him as the longtime editor in chief of Blic.

What came before the memo?

Stjepanovic and Mastilovic Jasnic were introduced to the newsroom on October 8 by Pedro Vargas Santos David, chief executive of Alpac Capital and director of United Media Digital. United Media, which includes Nova.rs, N1, Danas and Radar, has partly passed into his ownership. Vargas then invited employees to cooperate and said that coverage should be neither pro-government nor pro-opposition, and that the changes were a result of heavy financial losses.

Employees asked for the changes to be postponed until after the elections, which Vargas refused, explaining that the newsroom currently has no one in the editor in chief’s seat. The same day, Femic said that the vast majority of employees oppose working with Stjepanovic and that in an anonymous survey not a single respondent supported his appointment.

The protest begins tonight at 6 p.m., the employees’ deadline expires tomorrow at 7 p.m., and the newsroom is going before the new owners with a position it is still establishing through the survey.