About News Agency of Republika Srpska (SRNA)

News Agency of Republika Srpska (SRNA)

News Agency of Republika Srpska (SRNA) — Novinska agencija Republike Srpske — is the official news agency of Republika Srpska, one of the two entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was founded on 7 April 1992 in Pale, at the start of the Bosnian War, as the Srpska novinska agencija (Serb News Agency), the first news agency of Republika Srpska, and it was renamed to its current name by a decision of the Government of Republika Srpska on 27 March 2008. A peer-reviewed study of the agency describes it as the first and only news agency in Republika Srpska and one of the leading agencies in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Its headquarters is now in Bijeljina, in the north-east of Republika Srpska. SRNA is the Republika Srpska counterpart to FENA, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina's agency, and its dispatches, credited to SRNA, are carried daily by media across Republika Srpska and the wider region.

Founded in Pale in April 1992

SRNA began work in wartime conditions in Pale, the wartime seat of the Bosnian Serb leadership east of Sarajevo. Its first director was Todor Dutina. The agency's first premises were in the Pale Cultural Centre, where it had a few rooms, one telephone, two typewriters and one fax machine; it later moved to the Belvedere pension above Pale. Its first dispatch was issued on 8 April 1992, the day after its founding. Those beginnings — a handful of rooms and a single telephone line — are a fixed part of the agency's own institutional memory, and they mark SRNA as one of several agencies created by the warring parties in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992: the Sarajevo government's agency was BH Press, founded the same year with a parallel official function, while the Croat side relied primarily on Croatia's HINA agency. SRNA marks the Orthodox feast of the Annunciation, Blagovijesti, as its patronal feast, the slava by which the agency celebrates its anniversary each spring, close to the April founding date.

Wartime output and the first four years

The scale of SRNA's wartime work is recorded in its own early totals. In its first four years, the agency distributed 81,370 news items, 38,400 phono (audio) reports totalling about 1,900 hours of programme, and 9,600 photographs. The phono service — recorded audio reports that radio stations could broadcast — mattered in a war in which radio was a primary source of information, and SRNA has offered photo and phono services alongside its text wire since its inception. By 1996, the end of that first four-year period, the agency had correspondents in every town in Republika Srpska. The figures also illustrate the function the agency performed for the Republika Srpska authorities of the time: it was the channel through which official statements, military and political developments and the entity's account of the war reached domestic radio stations and newspapers, and through which they were sent abroad.

A correspondent network at home and abroad

SRNA built an unusually wide foreign network for a wartime agency. By 1996 its correspondents abroad included Cleveland, New York, Moscow, London, Paris, Geneva, Berlin, Brussels, Sydney, Vienna, Stockholm, Sofia, Skopje, Nicosia, Athens and Amsterdam, in addition to its presence across Republika Srpska. The academic study of the agency published through CEEOL notes that SRNA has maintained a developed network of correspondents in the country and in all major centres in Europe and around the world. During the war, its foreign correspondents worked unpaid — the agency's foreign reporting in those years rested on volunteers in diaspora and foreign capitals rather than on salaried staff. The choice of cities reflected both the geography of the Bosnian Serb diaspora, with correspondents in the United States and Australia, and the diplomatic capitals whose decisions shaped the war and the peace negotiations that ended it in 1995.

Renaming in 2008 and the move to Bijeljina

For its first sixteen years the agency carried its founding name, Srpska novinska agencija — Serb News Agency. On 27 March 2008 the Government of Republika Srpska renamed it the News Agency of Republika Srpska, Novinska agencija Republike Srpske, aligning the agency's formal name with the entity it serves while keeping the SRNA abbreviation by which its copy had always been credited. The headquarters is now in Bijeljina. The Serbian Wikipedia's infobox for the agency lists Radmilo Šipovac as its general director and Tatjana Parađina as editor-in-chief. Republika Srpska's own public reporting continues to treat SRNA as the entity's official wire: statements by Republika Srpska officials, ministers and institutions are routinely given "to SRNA" and distributed under its credit, and its reports are republished by the entity's broadcasters and newspapers and by outlets in Serbia.

Text, photo, phono and video services

SRNA's services have expanded with the technology of each period. Text and photography were joined from the start by the phono audio service, measured in thousands of reports and hours of programme in the agency's first four years. In 2016 the agency added a video service. The CEEOL study concludes that, with photo and phono services since its inception and video since 2016, SRNA keeps pace with modern technological challenges and ranks among the more advanced modern news agencies in its market. Its output is produced for subscribers rather than primarily for direct public reading: newspapers, radio and television stations in Republika Srpska build their news programmes heavily on the SRNA wire, and the agency functions in the classic agency role of a wholesaler of news — collecting material from its correspondents, shaping it in the newsroom and distributing it to client media.

The agency as wholesaler and symbol: the academic assessment

The peer-reviewed study of SRNA's informative role, published in a CEEOL-indexed journal, places the agency in the general theory of news agencies before assessing its specific position. News agencies, the study notes, function as wholesalers of news, collecting news from various parts of the world, shaping it and distributing it to clients, mainly traditional mass media and end users; since the nineteenth century they have been essential gatekeepers defining the agenda of the mass media. Agencies also represent a pillar of national identity, the study argues, similar to the national bank, the army or the post office, symbolising statehood. Against that frame, the study describes SRNA as the first and only news agency in Republika Srpska and one of the leading agencies in Bosnia and Herzegovina, servicing a large number of mass media with its content, a witness and also a participant in all major socio-political, cultural and historical events in Republika Srpska, and — as part of international communication highways — an important agent of international communication for Republika Srpska. The study also notes the other side of that closeness: in times of crisis, the agency contributes to a kind of social homogenisation.

Criticism and disinformation findings

Fact-checking and academic literature has criticised SRNA's output. The Atlantic Council's DFRLab, in an open-source analysis of disinformation in Bosnia and Herzegovina drawing on the Bosnian fact-checking outlet Raskrinkavanje, documented a January 2018 case in which SRNA republished — and later deleted — an old false claim that the American philosopher Noam Chomsky had referred to Albanians as "a wild tribe" and described them as ungrateful to Serbs in Kosovo who had welcomed them to their territory. The quote was, in the DFRLab's assessment, a complete fabrication, and Raskrinkavanje identified that the story was picked up by nine media outlets from SRNA; the analysis noted that SRNA provided no evidence for its claims and that such narratives aggravate conflict between Serbs and Albanians over the political status of Kosovo. Raskrinkavanje's later disinformation reporting, summarised by the SEE Check network, placed SRNA among thirteen sources in Republika Srpska within a wider disinformation hub of about thirty interconnected outlets that regularly used each other as sources or redistributors, and recorded that attack pieces from the anonymous website Infosrpska, set up before the 2018 elections against critics of the government, were regularly republished by SRNA together with the public broadcaster RTRS and ATV. These findings are part of the documented record on the agency and sit alongside its official role.

SRNA in the Bosnian agency landscape

Bosnia and Herzegovina has two publicly owned entity agencies: FENA for the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and SRNA for Republika Srpska. Reference counts recorded nine active agencies in the country in 2014, of which those two were the public ones, the main private agency was ONASA, two belonged to religious communities, and Türkiye's Anadolu Agency also operated. SRNA's position differs from FENA's in one structural respect noted by researchers: it is the only agency in its entity, so a Republika Srpska outlet that wants an entity wire has a single supplier, whereas Federation media can choose among several. From a few rooms in the Pale Cultural Centre in April 1992, with one telephone and two typewriters, SRNA developed into the standing news infrastructure of Republika Srpska — its official channel to its own media system, the source credited on a large share of the entity's daily news, and, as the academic and fact-checking literature shows, an institution whose output is studied both for its informational role and for its place in the region's contested information space.