Since 1991 when Republic of Macedonia became formally an independent country a well as constitutional democracy and a scene of a free market economy, the number of locally published newspapers and magazines, both in Macedonian and Albanian, substantially has increased while at the same time the most of Yugoslav ones have disappeared. Also, the Bulgarian press has become available, and after the cultural politics performed by the IMRO leading government coalition since 1998 - available on the daily basis.
The archivization of the press published has been fragmented, poorly organized and hardly accessible to the public including the professional journalists. Press publishers keep the hard copy archive for their own titles only and some of the journalists keep their private ones.
The only concentrated although inefficient archive is kept by the National Library that according to the law is provided with the hard copy of anything published in the country. Working mostly with the traditional, pre-digital methods, unprepared for dealing with the new capacity of the press, the National Library is not able to fulfill the demand for the up-dated, easily and regularly available record.

Project Activity and Products

EuroBalkan Institute established the first digital press archive in Macedonia in October 1999. Provided by OSI Macedonia with the grant for limited equipment, software and employment expenses, it has so far fully up-to-date archived three daily newspapers - Nova Makedonija, Utrinski Vesnik, Dnevnik and one weekly - Start. The other three titles, including two daily: Vecer and Makedonija Denes and one weekly: Fokus have been archived with delay. The choice of the titles has been based on the popularity of the titles expressed in the number of the sold, the professional stand, variety of the political association as well as the principle of providing the continuity of information (Only Nova Makedonija and Vecer, still edited within the state owned publishing house inherited from the Yugoslav press infrastructure, have been continuously appearing since 1991).

The long-term aim of the project is to provide the full coverage of the press published in Macedonia including the Albanian and Turkish one, available via Internet in the form of indexed database.

Target Audience

The EuroBalkan digital press archive facilitates:

• Research based and investigative journalism,
• Social researchers of various kinds: historians, sociologists, political scientists and media specialists to whom the press is the major if not only source of information of the contemporary history
• Government institutions at least potentially interested in their public image
• General public seeking information and civic knowledge