When the first issue of Vijesti was published on September 1, 1997, the signatory of these lines was in the fourth grade of the "Blažo Jokov Orlandić" Elementary School in Bar.
I remember my first contact with the newspaper as spending time between swimming on the old promenade in front of the Bar hotel "Topolica" by reading what was my father's choice that day or as a way to bridge the breaks in the table tennis matches next to the Voluntary Blood Donors Club which had a rich archive of the Bar newspaper, with a very unusual format.
The age that will follow will be completely different and the change in technology will bring a fundamentally different way of life and information.
And in all of this, Vijesti managed to survive on the same path, difficult, tiring, often ungrateful, but extremely significant and with achievements that are often not known to those who grasped the new space of freedom with that effort.
And all this with a seemingly simple premise - identify the biggest problems of society and try to solve them or stimulate their solution, with many allies, even more opponents, because reform is a process that has no end. Not everyone can stand it and it's not for everyone.
It is a great honor, it is an even greater responsibility, it is a great reward, it is an even greater challenge to be in the position of editor-in-chief at the moment when Vijesti is celebrating its 25th anniversary.
A quarter of a century in a space where events are piling up, a profession where there is no past work, a media environment that has been either systematically destroyed or directed so that under the guise of media work, it deals with rare professional and independent media.
But it is easy to understand why Vijesti survives in its struggle, because first of all it is a free space for free people - to try to apply their vision to the entire society in accordance with the values around which they gathered.
Pluralism of opinion, freedom of expression, different views on different phenomena, all of this exists in Vijesti and all of this is reflected in the product of Vijesti, and ultimately in the entire society.
In this struggle, journalists eternally sacrifice themselves in order to give a voice to those who have no other way for society to hear them, and in the process they constantly challenge and oppose various centers of power.
That's how it was until now, that's how it will always be. There is a constant struggle for the democratization of every area, but whoever goes, gets there.
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