Home / Media Landscapes / Background

The media landscape in Slovenia

The small Slovenian media market is highly concentrated. After the collapse of the former Yugoslavia the number of media in the country rose sharply. Slovenia's public radio broadcaster Radio Televizija Slovenija was formerly part of the Yugoslavian broadcasting corporation. The appearance of commercial radio and television programmes in the 1990s posed a serious challenge to public radio, facing it with true competition for the first time in its history.

Ljubljana
Foto: Jean-David & Anne-Laure, Lizenz: Creative Commons by-sa/2.0

Despite the numerous private stations that have been founded in recent years, the two public radio broadcasters Val 202 and Ra SLO1 are still the most popular in the country. Notwithstanding, the big private radio stations have been able to attract a majority of listeners. In total the country has roughly 90 radio stations.

Trotz zahlreicher Privatsender, die in den vergangenen Jahren gegründet wurden, sind die zwei öffentlich-rechtlichen Radiosender Val 202 und Ra SLO1 noch immer die am meist gehörten Stationen im Land. Doch die größten privaten Radiosender haben mittlerweile den Großteil der Hörer für sich gewinnen können. Insgesamt gibt es rund 90 Radiostationen.

Apart from the national and regional public stations, private television broadcasters – above all POP TV and Kanal A – have a large number of viewers.

The major national newspapers were privatised after 1990. While some remained in public hands, large state enterprises such as the Laško brewery purchased the publishing companies that put out others. A majority of the daily Delo, for example, belongs to Laško. Several years ago the large newspapers met with strong competition when the Austrian publishing house Styria introduced the first free newspaper, which has met with great success.

Since then free papers have made strong inroads into the Slovenian media market, and have more readers than the traditional dailies. The sales figures of all of the large dailies have sunk in recent years, resulting in cutbacks at the editorial offices. At the same time the influential papers like Delo, Dnevnik and Večer are trying to attract more readers with the help of Internet and multimedia offers.

While several critical Internet projects like the portal Vest have sprung up in recent years, serious, quality blogs are few and far between. Blogs are only rarely maintained regularly, and for the most part do not deal with European political issues.

This country's media at euro|topics