About ONASA

ONASA

ONASA — Nezavisna novinska agencija iz Sarajeva, "Independent news agency from Sarajevo" — is a private independent news agency based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is consistently described in reference and monitoring sources as the main private news agency in the country, and the IREX Media Sustainability Index described it as the only nationwide independent news agency in Bosnia and Herzegovina, gathering and distributing news for print and broadcast media across both of the country's entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska. Its headquarters is at Zmaja od Bosne 4, 71000 Sarajevo, and it has maintained offices in Mostar and Banja Luka in addition to its Sarajevo base. In a media system whose two publicly owned agencies belong to the two entities — FENA to the Federation and SRNA to Republika Srpska — ONASA occupies the distinct position of a commercial wire that answers to neither entity government. Its official website is onasa.com.ba.

An independent wire in an entity-divided system

To understand ONASA's position, it helps to see the structure around it. Reference counts recorded nine active news agencies in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2014, of which two were publicly owned — FENA and SRNA — while the main private agency was ONASA; two other agencies were owned by religious communities, the Bishops' Conference of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Islamic Community, and the Turkish government's Anadolu Agency also operated in the country. Most Bosnian media outlets rely on agency copy as a regular source of information, and public media use news agencies as regular sources, as the IREX Media Sustainability Index noted. Within that market, ONASA's defining characteristic, in source after source, is independence combined with nationwide reach: the Media Sustainability Index for 2001 called it "the only nationwide independent news agency" in the country, with offices in Mostar and Banja Luka, gathering and distributing news for both print and broadcast media. That combination — private ownership, an all-country footprint and a subscriber base in both entities — is what distinguishes ONASA from the entity agencies, whose wires serve their own entity first.

Headquarters and offices

ONASA is headquartered in Sarajevo at Zmaja od Bosne 4, one of the capital's principal avenues, and its full name builds the city into the brand: Nezavisna novinska agencija iz Sarajeva, the independent news agency from Sarajevo. Beyond the capital, the agency has kept offices in Mostar, the main city of Herzegovina, and in Banja Luka, the administrative centre of Republika Srpska. The Banja Luka office is significant in the Bosnian context: a Sarajevo-based private agency maintaining a working presence in the other entity's capital is exactly the nationwide structure that monitoring reports single out. Those three offices — Sarajevo, Mostar and Banja Luka — cover the country's two entities and its three largest urban news markets, and they support the correspondent gathering on which the wire's claim to countrywide coverage rests. Biographical material on the agency's alumni underlines its place in Sarajevo's post-war media world: Julie Poucher Harbin, for example, is described as a former editor of ONASA before her later work in international media.

What the neutrality research found

ONASA's reporting has been examined directly by researchers. A Central European University study of post-war Bosnian media, citing content sampled in August 2004, found ONASA's reporting the most neutral of the agencies sampled. The same scholarly literature records a debate rather than a settled verdict on one point: a perceived closeness between ONASA and the Croat Democratic Union (HDZ) has been discussed by scholars, and the study presents that perceived closeness as a matter of scholarly assessment and debate, not established fact. The two findings together describe the agency's reputation problem and asset in a divided market. Neutrality is commercially functional for an independent wire: as the IREX Media Sustainability Index observed of independent agencies in Bosnia and Herzegovina, they provide news in a more or less nondiscriminatory fashion because their ultimate goal is to maintain the largest possible number of subscribers — a wire that reads as one community's mouthpiece loses customers in the other communities. The Index also noted the countervailing habit in smaller communities, where outlets tend to prefer the agency best suited to the community's needs, often meaning information geared toward the ethnic group of the region — the market pressure against which ONASA's cross-entity neutrality was measured.

The dedicated 2006 analysis of the ONASA service

ONASA is unusual among Bosnian agencies in having been the subject of a dedicated published service analysis. In 2006 Press Now and the MediaPlan Institute published "Analysis of News Agency ONASA Service", prepared by the MPI Analytic Team with Srdjan Dizdarević and Tarik Jusić among its authors, examining the agency's output as a service. The existence of such a study reflects the attention international media-development organisations paid to independent wires in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina: agencies like ONASA were treated as infrastructure for the independent press, because a newspaper or broadcaster without foreign correspondents or a large newsroom could still cover the whole country if it could buy a neutral wire. The Central European University research on post-war Bosnian media drew on that 2006 analysis in assessing the agency, which is how the August 2004 neutrality finding entered the academic record. For a directory profile the point is documentary rather than promotional: ONASA's service was audited, written up and cited in scholarship, which gives its historical performance a paper trail that most small agencies in the region do not have.

Business pressures on an independent agency

The monitoring record is equally clear about the economics. The IREX Media Sustainability Index for 2003 recorded that Bosnia and Herzegovina then had two independent news agencies on offer, ONASA and SENSE, and that both had financial problems due to competition from free information services on the Internet and elsewhere. The Index's earlier reporting noted that a large number of media outlets in the country still relied on international donors to purchase news services for them — meaning that even the subscriber base of an independent wire was partly donor-financed in the post-war years. Improvements, the Index panel suggested, could be made in the quality and variety of information the independent agencies provided. Those pressures — free online content undercutting subscription wires, small outlets unable to pay full price, and donor support that declined over time — define the environment in which ONASA has operated as a private company without an entity budget behind it, in contrast to FENA and SRNA, whose funding comes from their entity governments.

Syndication and distribution listings

ONASA copy travels beyond its direct subscribers. Its reporting is widely syndicated, including in international business reporting: stories by the regional business news service SeeNews have been credited to ONASA, carrying the Sarajevo agency's material into English-language business coverage of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The agency is also listed in current press-distribution references: B2Press, the online press release distribution service, lists ONASA among Bosnia and Herzegovina's national distribution agencies alongside FENA, Patria and SRNA, in its description of distribution channels reaching political, business and regional outlets in the country. The Press Council of Bosnia and Herzegovina's listings of the country's news agencies, as carried in the IREX Media Sustainability Index, likewise place ONASA in the small standing group of Bosnian wires. For an agency whose product is wholesale news, these listings are the visible surface of its business: distribution networks and syndication partners buy ONASA material precisely because a single subscription supplies countrywide Bosnian coverage from a source that is not an entity government.

How Bosnian outlets use the ONASA wire

The Media Sustainability Index describes the market ONASA sells into in practical terms. Media outlets in Bosnia and Herzegovina have the right and the opportunity to subscribe to the products of any existing news agency in the country, and all public media use news agencies as regular sources of information. In practice, that means a municipal radio station, a cantonal broadcaster or a small newspaper chooses among wires — the entity agency of its own entity, a foreign agency, or an independent nationwide service such as ONASA — and builds its bulletins around the copy it buys. The Index's observation that smaller-community outlets often prefer the agency geared to their own community's needs, while independent agencies aim at the broadest possible subscriber base, describes ONASA's daily commercial task: to be usable, without offence or obvious slant, by newsrooms in Sarajevo, Mostar and Banja Luka alike. It is that wholesale, subscription-based role — largely invisible to the public, which sees the subscriber outlet's brand rather than the agency's — that the 2006 service analysis set out to measure.

Why ONASA matters in the Bosnian record

Assessments of Bosnia and Herzegovina's media since the 1995 Dayton settlement return repeatedly to the same structural divide: entity public broadcasters and entity agencies on one side, and a thinner layer of independent, cross-entity media on the other. ONASA belongs to that second layer and is its longest-documented agency example. It was described as the country's only nationwide independent agency as early as the 2001 Media Sustainability Index, its service was analysed in depth in 2006, its copy was found the most neutral in the 2004 sample examined by university researchers, its financial difficulties were documented as early as 2003, and it continues to be listed among the country's national agencies in current distribution and reference sources. A profile of the Bosnian agency landscape that omitted ONASA would miss the private pole of the system — the wire that Sarajevo, Mostar and Banja Luka newsrooms outside government control have used to follow events across the inter-entity boundary line. Note on sources: this profile deliberately states no founding date for ONASA, because the agency's founding date was not reliably verified from the agency's own materials in the sources consulted, and reference works that list the country's agencies do not agree on one.