Bozic: News desks focusing on online content

“News desks are increasing the number of their staff working on their portals and social networks because it’s clear that the traditional media audiences are dropping in number every day,” Bozic said at the conference organized by Nova Ekonomija magazine.

He said that 60 percent of N1’s TV audience is over the age of 45 adding that polls showed that young people are aware of N1 even though they don’t watch TV. “Even though TV is still the dominant source of news in Serbia, I believe that news and sports channels will switch to on demand platforms,” he said and recalled that the rewind option has been in place for the past 5 years… On normal days when nothing out of the ordinary is happening, it’s clear that viewers will watch the news when they want to,” he said.

According to Bozic, N1 started placing its content on TikTok which, he said, “wasn’t clear” to him at first. “I saw it similarly to Instagram which I also did not understand at first until I realized that my teenage daughter knew about the speech of the American president through that social network. Young people are predominantly being informed about political trends in this way. You can no longer keep up with all channels of communication, it’s impossible to cover them all,” Bozic said.

He said that the needs of the audience directs the media industry and that is one of the reasons why N1 focused on national issues after starting by covering the entire region. “The regional service disintegrated because of the audience which was not interested in things that are not crucial to their lives. Viewers want regional content but only what affects them personally,” he said.

Bozic said that most of the public focuses on tabloid headlines and a “conspiracy theory approach” which seduces even that part of the public that wants to learn new things. “The key question is how do we stand up to that. There is a flood of tabloids, a series of portals with the same approach. The Gemius (audience research service) shows that the N1 portal has 2 million users and some portals no one every heard about have even more,” Bozic said.

The conference was organized by Nova Ekonomija magazine with the support of the OSCE, USAID, GMF, Serbian Information and Telecommunications Ministry, VISA and United Media.