Weekly news magazine known for its willingness to tackle sensitive issues in Croatian society and resist government pressure printed its final edition on Wednesday.
The last issue of the Croatian political weekly magazine Globus was published on Wednesday, with publishers Hanza Media citing “market and business circumstances” as the reason for its demise.
Globus – admired in the 1990s and 2000s for its independent stance – appeared to be another victim of shrinking advertising revenue and collapsing print sales affecting the sector. A transition to online did not manage to save the outlet.
Globus was launched in 1990 by a group of journalists who used to work at iconic newspaper Vjesnik, as a political weekly modelled on British left-of-centre weekly newspaper The Observer. By the summer of 1991, it had a circulation of 100,000 copies, while 200,000 copies were printed of the Christmas issue during the first year of the war.
Over more than a quarter-century of publication, Globus focused on controversial topics and investigative journalism and was targeted with criticism and lawsuits as a result.
“In the late 1990s, the final years of [first Croatian President] Franjo Tudjman’s rule were particularly difficult for relatively independent media because of frequent lawsuits as a form of pressure, threats received by mail and telephone, and surveillance by secret services,” recalled journalist Slavica Lukic, who joined Globus in March 1998.
She recalled that during those years, Globus addressed serious topics such as investigations by the Hague war crimes tribunal into crimes against Croatia’s Serb population, how Croatian secret services were hiding war-crimes suspects from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and numerous cases of privatisation abuses during Croatia’s transition to a capitalist economy.
“My colleague Djurdica Klancir and I were working on a series about the biggest privatisation scandals when we received two packages at the porter’s office of the Vjesnik building, where our offices were. In her package was a dead cat, while mine contained spiders and other horrifying items. It was clearly meant as ‘congratulations’ for that series of articles,” Lukic said.
However, she acknowledged that Globus also had serious professional failings before her arrival, such as an infamous article entitled “The Witches of Rio”, which attacked Croatian women anti-war intellectuals.
“If anything can be said in its defence – and it is difficult to defend such professional disgrace – it is that the publisher later paid substantial compensation to the women who were named,” Lukic said.
She concluded that Globus has not been what it once was for a long time, and that the economic crisis, restrictions and issues with personnel policy had accelerated the sharp decline of what was once an important media outlet.
Source: BalkanInsight
