Nis, Vranje and Bor Pay Informer Eight Million Dinars in Ads

Three local governments, Nis, Vranje and Bor, have contracted advertising in the tabloid Informer worth a combined total of about eight million dinars, according to documents published on August 6, 2026, by Jelena Milosevic, a member of the presidency and a lawmaker for the Party of Freedom and Justice (SSP). The single largest amount, almost 4.2 million dinars, comes from the Bor city government, which paid to advertise the public review of its urban planning documents.

According to the same documents, the Nis Administration for Property, Economy and Environmental Protection paid one million dinars for two ads, while the Vranje city administration contracted advertising worth 2.8 million dinars. Milosevic says the Vranje contract does not specify what service was being paid for, and that in none of the three cases was the choice of medium put out to public tender.

What the three contracts say

All three deals were awarded directly, according to the documents the lawmaker attached. The one million dinars from Nis covers two ads, the Bor contract covers a public review announcement, and the Vranje contract has no clearly defined service attached to it.

“I want to know exactly what method was used to choose Informer instead of some local outlet, because there was no public tender here,” Milosevic said.

The question she is raising is not just a formality. Announcements of public reviews of planning documents and local government notices are typically placed in outlets that residents of that area actually read, and Informer is a national tabloid based in Belgrade.

Why the Bor contract costs the most

At almost 4.2 million dinars, Bor’s bill is larger than Nis’s and Vranje’s combined. Milosevic linked it to the issue that draws the most attention in eastern Serbia: the fate of the local mine.

“Dear people of Zajecar, if you want to know what happens to the mine, it looks like you’ll have to follow ‘Informer’, that’s what your authorities have decided for you!” she wrote alongside the document detailing Bor’s contract.

The message is politically charged, but it comes with a fact attached: this is payment for publishing a single administrative procedure, not a months long campaign.

The ads are just one channel

Direct contracts are not the only route through which public money reaches the tabloid’s publisher. An analysis of the first 100 competitions held this year for project co-financing of media content, published by the Association of Independent Electronic Media (ANEM), shows that Alo Media System, Insajder Tim and companies linked to them won a combined 98.7 million dinars through these competitions.

The breakdown within that sum says more than the total itself:

• Best Media Team, a joint venture of the two companies, won more than 49 million dinars
• Insajder Tim received 12 million dinars
• Alo Media System received 11.7 million dinars
• INI media, co-owned with Alo Media System and publisher of the Nis based NisTV, received 26 million dinars, of which 25 million came from the City of Nis competition alone

This is where the circle closes at a point the documents themselves do not show. Nis shows up twice in this story: once as a city paying for ads in Informer, and again as the city whose media competition was the single largest source of funding for an outlet linked to Alo’s publisher. Measured against that 25 million dinars, the one million dinars for two ads is a small line item in the same flow of money.

“Who knows how many contracts like this exist across Serbia! They insult us and humiliate us with our own money! That’s why, once this government falls, these poison factories have to be shut down,” Milosevic concluded.

What happens next

Neither the city governments of Nis, Vranje and Bor, nor Informer’s publisher, have issued a public response to these claims. Local government contracts are documents available under the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance, which means the fastest way to check the record is to request the full text of all three deals and an explanation of why they were awarded directly rather than put out to tender.

Milosevic herself raised the question of how many similar contracts exist in other cities, and that is something that can be measured: every local government keeps records of the contracts it signs. Until those records are compared, it remains an open question whether these three deals are the exception or a snapshot of a wider pattern in which local budgets pay for advertising in a medium that is not local at all.