Whatever happened to Tanjug?: Re-loading memory for an understanding of the global news system

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2012

Publication Title

International Communication Gazette

Keywords

alternative news, international news, NANAP, national news agencies, NWICO, Tanjug

Abstract

What became of Tanjug, the once celebrated Yugoslavian news agency, first coordinator of the Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool, and major point of reference for the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) debates of the 1970s? The authors explore a service that offered alternative perspectives to those of news agencies of the major powers. Tanjug’s alternative service prefigured the NWICO debates by two decades. It achieved news coups of considerable relevance to the narrative of Cold War conflict. Tanjug’s history prior to and in the wake of NWICO is insufficiently registered in media scholarship. It continued to provide an alternative news service up to the disintegration of both the Soviet bloc and of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. The agency has survived even these setbacks, successfully accommodating the more limited and in some ways more conventional options available to a national news agency of a fairly small country.

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