From 26 September till 02 October, 60 media makers from 12 European countries gathered in Belgrade to discuss various angles of journalism in digital era. The training included lot of lectures, panel discussions and games. At the panel discussion about online media participated Ana Vukovic from portal The Machine.
„There are plenty of challenges that online media are facing, but there are lot of privileges as well. One of the challenges is getting the audience to read you content, offering them something new and different. Then to have a successful online media you have to be online almost constantly, you have to interact with your audience, which also means that you get the feedback much easier than in traditional media“ , says Ana.
The Machine is an online left-oriented media infrastructure portal with the aim of continuous production of social criticism of current, and for general public important topics in the fields of economy, politics and culture. ”We are taking the side of the workers, in collective struggle against social inequalities, for better living conditions, for the development of the entire human potential, for political alternatives to today’s system.“ , says Ana.
Two assumptions from which the goals of The Machine were set are the question of the existence or rather the lack of public media infrastructure to support critical production with leftist positions, and the second assumption relates to the need to search for an adequate language of the left critique that would be understandable and accessible to the general public.
Since we discussed about freedom of the media in Serbia and media privatization at the panel discussion, we asked Ana to tell us something about it: ” I think that it is very hard to talk about freedom of the media in Serbia without getting all tangled in politics, and did we get here, and why are we in this position. I think that as far as traditional media goes we don’t have freedom, a great repretion is upon them“, says Ana. She also thinks that privatization of media is one of the main reasons why media are slowly but actively being less and less objective and freedom of opinion has been seriously jeopardized.
At the end, her advice for young journalists was to start with online media. „Then when you learn everything you can, try getting into a redaction, as just to do something in a local traditional media, for comparation. Never let anything jeopardize your oppinion and the freedom of you thought“.
The article is part of the outputs of the European Youth Press’ project “Making Twitter Length News: media literacy in digital media”. The article has not been edited and it doesn’t necessarily represents editorial policy of the EYP.
