World Press Freedom Day through the eyes of Oradio

Respecting the citizens who pay the subscription to Public service of Vojvodina (RTV), and in order to rightfully inform our audience, Oradio (Youth radio) with deep regret has to announce that we are forced to change our concept and reduce our radio programme after two and a half years of work. These changes are a repercussion due to the fact that the management of RTV had decided to cut the number of our employees in half.

A year after the finale of RadioBattle and our win in the same international competition organized by the italian radio RAI, the young radio duo, Sofija Balać and Vukašin Kartalović, doesn't work on the best radio station in Europe anymore, even though they brought that title home from Italy, to all the citizens in Serbia. In the past year, our collaboration with five more vital contributors to our programme has ended. These five young women were mostly still students of journalism or they have been in their finishing year of studying and they were the epitome of a generation that Oradio wanted to speak to. They were the main force of our team.

We also lost from our team the experienced journalist Igor Mihaljević, who wrote articles that were the most read ones on our website. Every single one of these people joined the team of Oradio through a public application for their jobs, where they have been evaluated as the most qualified and the best among a tough competition. Almost every decision about any of our collaborator's canceled work engagement has been made without any consultations and knowledge of our Editor in Cheif, including the case where, unfortunately, the popular radio duo Daško & Mlađa won't be there to wake up our audience with their morning radio show Alarm like they used to. After two and a half years of hard work that we have put into developing a quality media for the youth of Serbia, we are forced to continue without the half of our contributors.

Respecting the rules of our profession and ethical standards, lead by the idea of nourishing the right values and pointing out the right examples of young, succesful individuals, Oradio was on the road to accomplish its mission – to become  the virtual gathering for young people. We believed that the title of European Youth Capital, which Novi Sad has been awarded to last year, meant that Oradio was obliged to work even harder and even better, but because of these recent events, all of our plans went to the drain.

Considering the fact that the collegium of the General manager and the whole steering committee of RTV have approved the programme and all of the activities of Oradio, and then fired half of our team, the accomplishment of goals that we have set is now questionable. Unfortunately, the quality and the quantity of our programme won't be like the one you are used to. We hope that you understand this and we believe that this situation could have been played out differently.

Oradio employees