Fake News Tragač (Serbia)

FakeNews Tragac is a fact-checking website dedicated to the fight against misinformation published in the Serbian language, both in traditional and new media. The analyses are conducted on the basis of daily monitoring of media content and reports from readers, who can submit materials whose authenticity they doubt. Materials can be submitted to the editorial board via the website or social networks.

Standard analyses are published in five thematic sections: Politics, Economics, Society and Culture, Quasi-Science and the World, while short analyses, whose dismissal does not require more than two or three sentences, are published in the section titled “In Brief”. More complex, long-term analyses are published in the section called “Tragac in Action”, which was dedicated to various topics in previous years: from the credibility of data in the famous encyclopedia “1000 whys – 1000 because”, through pseudo-historical narratives on YouTube channels, to the analysis of war announcements on the front pages of tabloids from Serbia.

In collaboration with readers, FakeNews Tragac has also created a Register of sites dealing with manipulative advertising. The public is alerted to more than a hundred such sites, which mainly contain manipulations related to advertising medical products, manipulations related to investment platforms, and manipulative prize games and services.

FakeNews Tragac was launched in December 2017 by the Novi Sad School of Journalism (Novosadska novinarska skola – NNS). It is a civil society organization that deals with the development and professionalization of the media sphere in Serbia and the region. It has existed since 1996, and has been operating as a non-governmental organization since 1998. FakeNews Tragac is a member of the Press Council and recognizes the competence of this regulatory body.

The launch of the FakeNews Tragac project was supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic within the Transformation Cooperation (2017) program, after which the website received support from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

The website’s editorial office is located in Novi Sad. It consists of graduate journalists – Stefan Janjic (editor), Milovan Nikolic (deputy editor), Ivan Subotic and Stefan Kosanovic, and many external associates cooperate with the website. The program manager is Jelena Jovovic, project coordinator at the Novi Sad School of Journalism.

Website: fakenews.rs