SiolNET is a Slovenian news portal, the oldest in the country, that covers a wide variety of topics. It was established in 1996 by Telekom Slovenije, the flagship telecom provider in Slovenia.
Media assets
News portal: SiolNET
State Media Matrix Typology: Independent State Managed/Owned (ISM)
Ownership and governance
SiolNET is owned and managed by TSmedia, a company 100% owned by Telekom Slovenije, a telecom service provider majority controlled by the Slovenian government. In March 2022, the telco was more than 62% owned by the Slovenian government, according to data from the company.
Telekom Slovenija has been trying in the past few years to sell TSmedia, as part of its strategy to divest from non-core activities. Yet, in May 2021, the telco announced that it dropped plans to sell the portal in spite of a generous offer from a Serbian businessman. The media reported that the government wants to sell the portal to an oligarch from Hungary connected with the government of the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Following the loss in the April 2022 elections by the right-wing government of the former prime minister Janez Janis, these are plans are unlikely to materialize.
Source of funding and budget
SiolNET is funded through commercial revenues. According to the latest publicly available data, TSmedia had total revenues of €6.4m in 2019 when it suffered a loss of some €318,000.
Editorial independence
SiolNET has been highly politicized, the former government of the former Janez Jansa controlling the editorial agenda of the portal through the editor-in-chief Peter Jancic. Some journalists in Slovenia had been calling on the newly appointed authorities to depoliticize the portal as they promised to do with other state-administered media.
The new ruling coalition that took the helm of the government in Slovenia after the April 2022 elections took action. In November 2022, Mihael Šuštaršič, a journalist from the news agency STA, was appointed chief editor at SiolNET. He replaced Petr Jančič in the position.
The move was criticized by various journalists and analysts as a move to allow the newly installed government to control the editorial agenda at the news portal.
According to some of these critics, the appointment was not justified as the web portal was performing very well in terms of audience, denouncing the decision as a purge. However, the newly appointed editor-in-chief has so far given reasonable explanations about all editorial decisions that were criticized as being favorable to the new government. At the same time, an ad hoc content analysis conducted for this report has shown a more balanced editorial coverage at SiolNET since the new editor took over the portal, which explains the change of category in our State Media Matrix Typology.
October 2023