About Federal News Agency (FENA)

Federal News Agency (FENA)

Federal News Agency (FENA) — Federalna novinska agencija in the official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina — is the government-owned news agency of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH), one of the two entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is a public institution based in Sarajevo, with a second newsroom in Mostar, and it publishes an average of about 250 news items a day in the official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina and in English, together with a growing volume of photo and video content. FENA was established by a decree of the Federation Government on 19 October 2000 and began operating on 22 October 2001. It is owned by the Government of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina through the public institution JU Federalna novinska agencija FENA, funded directly from the Federation budget alongside its own revenue from service contracts, and it is the Federation's counterpart to SRNA, the entity agency of Republika Srpska. Its official website is fena.ba.

Created by merging BH Press and HABENA

FENA was created by merging the two former Federation-side agencies, BH Press of Sarajevo and HABENA of Mostar. BH Press had been the Sarajevo government's wartime agency, founded in 1992, while HABENA had served as the Croat-side agency based in Mostar. The decree of the Federation Government of 19 October 2000 brought the two together for the purpose of performing news and agency activities of importance to the Federation, and the merged agency began operating on 22 October 2001. According to State Media Monitor, the founding decree made FENA a public institution in 2002 and was amended in 2016. The merger's geography is still visible in the agency's structure: the head office is in Sarajevo and a full newsroom operates in Mostar, the legacy of the Mostar agency that was folded into FENA. In this way FENA's founding was an institutional attempt to give the ethnically divided Federation a single wire service, replacing two agencies that had each spoken for one side of the Federation's internal divide.

Headquarters, newsrooms and correspondent network

FENA's head office is in Sarajevo, listed at Ćemaluša 1 and Obala Kulina bana 16, and its Mostar newsroom is at Ante Starčevića bb in Mostar. It also has a correspondent office in Tuzla, and reference listings of its offices name Sarajevo, Mostar and Tuzla, with Brčko, Bihać and Banja Luka listed as planned offices. Its correspondent network is spread throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the agency publishes news from all over the country on a daily basis. That network is partly staffed through correspondents engaged under author contracts: the Federation Audit Office's follow-up report of September 2025 recorded KM 61,600 in expenditure on such correspondents, and noted FENA's position that limited budget funds made it difficult to find correspondents. The two-city structure, Sarajevo and Mostar, remains central to how the agency presents itself, reflecting the two predecessor agencies and the Federation's two largest urban centres.

News services and daily output

FENA publishes an average of about 250 news items a day. Its listed services include the general news service (Vijesti), event announcements, political-party activities, the FENA.BIZ business service covering the Sarajevo and Banja Luka stock exchanges, service, traffic and weather information, a photo service, a video service, FENA LIVE live video, and an English-language news summary. State Media Monitor summarises its offer as general and specialist news services in the official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina and in English, with photo and video items. FENA carries political parties' press releases in a separate section of its output, from whose content it distances itself — a practice recorded by State Media Monitor. In November 2025 the agency launched eu.fena.ba, a portal devoted to the European Union, alongside its main fena.ba portal. During the coronavirus pandemic, FENA launched two projects described by its then director general Elmir Huremović in an interview with the European Alliance of News Agencies: a special site publishing only pandemic-related news, with the content available to everyone through the agency's website, and the fena.live project, launched in cooperation with the country's leading telecommunications operator, which livestreamed major events, including health and government press conferences, with a minimum presence of reporters and media crews, delivering the material to all media outlets and streaming events through the agency's Facebook page as well.

Ownership, funding and governance

FENA is a direct user of the Federation budget, from which the founding decree provides for its financing, and it also earns its own revenue from contracts with users of its services. Its 2021 budget was KM 2.69 million (about EUR 1.38 million), against expenditure of KM 2.81 million, and it had 74 employees in 2021. Its Board adopted a rulebook on own revenues in 2023, and the director raised service prices on 31 December 2024. Governance is set by the founding decree: the Management Board has five members, appointed by the Federation Government for four years. The Board appoints and dismisses the director and deputy director after a public competition, with the consent of the Government, and the director and deputy director cannot belong to the same constituent people. The editor-in-chief is appointed by the director with the consent of the Board, and the director is accountable to the Management Board and to the Government. The Audit Office of the Institutions in the Federation of BiH gave a positive opinion on FENA's 2019 financial statements and a qualified opinion on compliance; its follow-up report of September 2025 found that eight of twelve recommendations had been implemented, and called for clarification of FENA's legal status, organisation and operating arrangements under its founding decree. The Government accepted FENA's report on its work and operations in 2025 on 8 April 2026.

Leadership: from Huremović to Hadžiahmetović

Reference works long listed Elmir Huremović as FENA's director, and that was accurate for the period from 2016 until early 2025 — but it is no longer the current position, and the chronology matters. On 17 January 2025 the Federation Government dismissed FENA's Management Board, citing a loss of confidence, and appointed an acting board. On 25 February 2025 the Government consented to the acting board's decisions dismissing Huremović, director since 2016, at the expiry of his mandate, and appointing Elvir Hadžiahmetović as director and Ilija Musa as deputy director. Elvir Hadžiahmetović has therefore been FENA's director since February 2025. Oslobođenje reported that Hadžiahmetović was chosen from the quota of Narod i pravda (NiP), a member of the Federation's governing coalition, and Avaz reported that he had once headed the public relations service of the SDA party; Istraga had reported in May 2023 that the coalition's division of public companies assigned FENA to NiP. On 9 July 2025 the Government appointed a new Management Board for four years, whose members include two employees, among them editor-in-chief Dejan Jazvić; in 2017 the Ombudsman had found that complainants had rightly pointed to the unlawfulness of appointing FENA's editor-in-chief to the Board, a dual role the BH Journalists association described as a conflict of interest, and Jazvić was reappointed to the Board in July 2025 while remaining editor-in-chief. On 10 October 2025 the Government dismissed the Board's chair and appointed an acting chair.

International memberships and cooperation

FENA became a full member of the European Alliance of News Agencies (EANA) on 22 September 2017 — the first Bosnian agency admitted to the alliance — and it is also a member of ABNA-SE, the Association of Balkan News Agencies – Southeast Europe, and of the Alliance of Mediterranean News Agencies. ABNA-SE members re-elected FENA's deputy director Ilija Musa as the association's president in September 2026. FENA signed a cooperation agreement with Türkiye's Anadolu Agency in November 2018 and with Morocco's MAP agency in May 2025. The agency hosted the EANA Spring Conference and General Assembly at Sarajevo City Hall, an event its director described as the largest media gathering ever organised in Bosnia and Herzegovina in terms of the number of participants and the influence of the agencies represented; the conference had been scheduled two years earlier and postponed twice because of the coronavirus pandemic, and its main topic was "Fact and Fiction in War and Pandemics". In October 2024, then director Huremović was elected chair of EANA's artificial intelligence committee.

Editorial independence and the state-control debate

FENA adopted an ethical code in March 2022 and is a member of the Press Council of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but State Media Monitor identifies no statutory guarantee of the agency's institutional editorial independence and no independent external oversight body. The Monitor has classified FENA as state-controlled in every review cycle from 2022 to 2026, reasoning that the Federation Government appoints its Management Board, exercises decisive influence over executive appointments, and controls its principal financing and institutional plans. Local experts and journalists interviewed by the Monitor in April and May 2024 said that the Government's role in appointing the Board and approving the leadership allowed political actors to exert influence over FENA's editorial line, and that its coverage was sometimes perceived as cautious or aligned with the political preferences of the Federation government. During the campaign for the general elections of 4 October 2026, Istraga reported on 16 September 2026 that Director Hadžiahmetović was handing out NiP promotional material at a party stand; Izdvojeno reported that Deputy Director Musa, appointed on the proposal of the Croatian Democratic Union of BiH (HDZ BiH), had regularly lectured at that party's political academies. State Media Monitor records that no response by FENA's Board or the Government to those reports was located.

FENA in the Bosnian agency landscape

Bosnia and Herzegovina's news agency sector mirrors the country's constitutional structure. Reference counts recorded nine active news agencies in the country in 2014, of which two were publicly owned: FENA for the Federation and SRNA for Republika Srpska. The main private agency is ONASA, two agencies are owned by religious communities — the Catholic Press Agency of the Bishops' Conference and the Islamic Community's MINA — and the Turkish government's Anadolu Agency also operates in the country. Within that field FENA occupies the position of the Federation's official wire: its copy, marked with the FENA name, is carried daily by newspapers, broadcasters and portals across the Federation and beyond, and its business service reports on both of the country's stock exchanges, in Sarajevo and Banja Luka. Its combination of budget funding, a government-appointed board and a statutory Federation-wide role makes it, at once, one of the country's most-used news sources and a recurring subject of debate about the boundary between a public news institution and a government-controlled one.