News Agency of the Slovak Republic (TASR)

The News Agency of the Slovak Republic (Tlačová agentúra Slovenskej republiky, TASR) is Slovakia’s national news agency, established in 1992 and based in Bratislava. It provides text, photographic, audio and video news services to media organisations, public institutions and commercial subscribers, and operates a network of regional and foreign correspondents, with staff in Brussels, Prague, Budapest, Warsaw and Vojvodina and working relationships with more than twenty foreign agencies. Its reporting is distributed in Slovak, English and Hungarian. Vladimír Puchala has been Director-General since 2018.

Media assets

News agency: TASR, providing domestic, foreign, economic, sports and specialist news services in text, photographic, video and audio formats.

Digital: Teraz.sk, NewsNow, Webmagazin.sk, Skolske.sk, the TASR photographic archive and mobile applications.

Multimedia: TASR TV, including live broadcasts of press conferences and other events.

Commercial services: the WebReport media monitoring service, text news monitoring, TASR Pro, news bulletins, advertising and the Original Text Service (OTS), which distributes paid press releases separately from editorial journalism.

TASR wholly owns TERAZ MEDIA a.s., which operates digital publishing and related commercial activities. The subsidiary recorded a profit of EUR 11,537 in 2025.

Ownership and governance

TASR originated under Act No. 81/1992 Coll., adopted on 30 January 1992 and effective from 1 April 1992. Its present legal framework is Act No. 385/2008 Coll., which defines the agency as a public, national, independent information institution and a legal entity entered in the Companies Register, acting in its own name and on its own responsibility.

The Act establishes a five-member Board of Directors (Správna rada). Four members are elected and may be removed by the National Council from candidates proposed through its parliamentary committee, with expertise required in law, economics, journalism and information technology. The fifth member is elected by the agency’s employees from among their own number. Members serve five-year terms, with a maximum of two consecutive terms, must act without bias and may not hold positions in political parties.

The current board comprises Jozef Bednár as chair, Michal Pidanič as deputy chair, and Samuel Bachár, Erik Mader and Alexander Riabov. Bednár became chair on 20 May 2025, when Pidanič became deputy chair, and Bachár was elected by the National Council on 26 March 2025 as the member responsible for information technology. Mader was elected by the agency’s employees on 22 January 2026, after the employment and board mandate of Alena Mezeiová ended on 31 December 2025, and his mandate runs until 4 March 2029.

The Board elects the Director-General by public vote following a public hearing, by an absolute majority of all members. The Director-General is the agency’s statutory body, serves a five-year term renewable once, and may be removed by an absolute majority of all board members on grounds set out in the Act. Puchala was first elected in 2018 and re-elected unanimously on 24 August 2022 for a second five-year term, against the candidates Pavol Pavlík and Rastislav Borsík; that mandate began on 5 September 2022 and therefore runs to September 2027.

Source of funding and budget

TASR finances its activities through a statutory state contribution, sales of news and related services, commercial income and other permitted sources. State budget funds may not finance the agency’s separate business undertakings, and neither its funds nor its property may be used to finance political parties, movements or candidates. A reserve fund is built from after-tax profits.

The financing model changed in 2023. An amendment adopted on 20 June replaced individually negotiated public-service funding agreements with an annual entitlement from the state budget, effective from January 2024. Under Section 6a of Act No. 385/2008 the contribution equals 0.0029 per cent of nominal gross domestic product from two years earlier, may not fall below the contribution provided in the preceding year, and must be transferred by 31 January. The funds are designated for services in the public interest. Before the change the base level had been unaltered since 2015, with occasional supplements negotiated with the Ministry of Culture.

TASR’s 2025 annual report records total accounting revenue of EUR 6,384,169, costs before income tax of EUR 6,354,315 and a net profit of EUR 27,571. The state public-service contribution, provided under contract MK 223/2024/M, amounted to EUR 3,561,571. The separate budget-execution report shows receipts of EUR 7,232,173, expenditure of EUR 6,749,346 and a surplus of EUR 482,827, of which EUR 383,135 was carried forward from previous years, leaving a reported surplus of EUR 99,692 excluding those funds. The reserve fund stood at EUR 237,556.35 at 31 December 2025, before the proposed transfer of the year’s profit. Sales of the agency’s products and services generated approximately EUR 2.72 million, with media customers accounting for 60 per cent of invoiced business, public-sector clients 21 per cent, private commercial clients 13 per cent and foreign customers 6 per cent. The agency employed 136 staff at the end of 2025, comprising 115 journalists and 21 other employees.

The government’s 2026 budget framework projects expenditure of EUR 6.98 million, with a statutory contribution of about EUR 3.79 million from the Ministry of Culture and the remainder covered by own revenue, the contribution representing about 54 per cent of planned expenditure. The draft 2027 budget provides for expenditure approaching EUR 7.2 million and a statutory contribution of about EUR 3.97 million, calculated on the existing formula.

A separate legislative proposal could increase that contribution. Members of the Slovak National Party submitted parliamentary bill 1365 on 8 May 2026, proposing to raise the rate from 0.0029 to 0.006 per cent of GDP from January 2027. At a parliamentary committee meeting in May 2026 Puchala argued that the additional funding would allow the agency to avoid increasing subscription prices for client newsrooms, and set out proposals including strengthening regional reporting, adding correspondents in Kyiv, Paris, Berlin, Washington and Moscow, covering Croatia, Bulgaria and Serbia, and developing German and French language services. The opposition representative Zora Jaurová questioned the proposed increase during a period of fiscal consolidation. The bill remained at first reading at this update, and the draft 2027 budget continued to apply the existing rate of 0.0029 per cent.

Editorial independence

Act No. 385/2008 expressly guarantees the agency’s independence in producing and distributing news. It permits outside interference in editorial content only on the basis and within the scope of law, and requires reporting to be balanced, plural and objective, without favouring or opposing any political, economic, religious, ethnic or other interest group.

The agency also publishes its principles of agency journalism, which require impartiality in the handling of controversial subjects, that all interested parties be given the opportunity to present their positions, consistent attribution of sources and accuracy in reproducing quoted texts and speeches, and which provide an address for correction requests under the publications law. Its Board approved an internal Ethics Code and Rules of News Reporting in May 2009, addressing conflicts of interest, confidentiality, professional conduct and relationships between journalists and commercial interests.

The Board of Directors supervises compliance with the agency’s statutory obligations and may consider complaints and propose corrective measures. Four of its five members are elected by Parliament, which creates institutional exposure to political influence despite the statutory guarantees. No external body verifies compliance: the Council for Media Services supervises broadcasting and on-demand audiovisual services, and agency output falls outside the remit it exercises over STVR.

No independently conducted systematic assessment establishing sustained political bias or government-directed editorial coverage at TASR was located for this update. The evidence reviewed does not demonstrate a continuing pattern of editorial decisions imposed or approved by state authorities.

AI and digital policy

No publicly available TASR newsroom policy specifically governing the use, verification and disclosure of generative artificial intelligence in journalism was located for this update, and the agency’s published principles of agency journalism contain no provisions on artificial intelligence or automated content.

Classification rationale

Four of the five members of TASR’s governing board are elected by Parliament, and a statutory state contribution supplies more than half its ordinary financing. The law protects editorial independence, and no evidence of sustained editorial direction by state authorities was established for this review.

The classification changed in the 2024 review cycle. The agency had been recorded as Independent State-Managed/Owned (ISM) while the state contribution did not constitute the predominant share of its financing, and moved to ISFM after the statutory entitlement that took effect in January 2024 took the state share above half of its ordinary financing. Its governance has not changed over that period.

October 2026