City radio, a media outlet that started operating in Niš during the time of Milošević 29 years ago, stopped broadcasting on October 5. To close the circle and send a message that today, instead of a feeling of hope, there is only a feeling of hopelessness
Thursday was quite an ordinary day. One of those that doesn't hint at any excitement.
Kole went up to the studio to update the rare commercials and check along the way that he hadn't accidentally messed up Jazzler or Comrex or the Internet again. It happens often. In Milentieva, with the onset of the first cold nights, power outages became frequent. Ija fed the kittens, the offspring of a street cat that got lost in her office cupboard in April. Afterwards, they drank coffee in the courtyard without saying too much. From the studio came the gentle sound of a French melody, the kind that is almost impossible to hear on other radio stations, because it is old-fashioned and sentimental.
In the evening, Iya checked everything in the studio again, turned off the light and, as she did every night, while closing the door behind her, whispered: "Good night, love!" Her love returned from AIR lab with the magical voice of Joan Baez, diamonds and rust.
It had to be
Friday started gloomy, with fog and rain that didn't even look like autumn. Ija did not go up to the studio. She felt guilty because she had known for days that on Saturday her "Good night, love!" would be followed by silence on the other side. City radio will cease to exist after 29 years. This is how a fictional novel or short story might begin, anyway.
The problem is that there is nothing fictional about the writing. It had to be.
After the terrible torture we were exposed to by the Agency for Economic Registers and the inability to earn for almost five months, after the appearance of a strange "customer" in the middle of that chaos and the likely scenario that we will not be granted a new license at the competition (because everything that happened to us in in the last year it strangely resembles the case of a regional station from Vojvodina) we decided to stop broadcasting ourselves. There is too much love in City Radio for someone to hijack it and crush it further. I will not allow that pleasure to anyone.
Lowering the regulator
It was not by chance that this Saturday was chosen for lowering the regulator, the one that goes on the air. Saturday is October 5. 24 years straight from the day when we gathered in the squares all over Serbia and pretended to attend a celebration of life, of hope for some future normality in which we will live, love, and work. It will turn out that the celebration was actually a memorial to a lost youth and the first day of disappointed hopes.
How can we forget that on that day we walked countless times to the loft on the high fifteenth floor from where for almost a year and more the small, forbidden City radio station illegally, despite the ban, broadcast a program that was the opposite of the rosy reality with which we were drugged on the regime's screens at that time misery, poverty, wars and isolation.
On October 5, we broadcast the program until the afternoon hours, sent reports to our colleagues from other stations in the ANEM network, and received information from them about what was happening in all cities and Belgrade. In the afternoon, we switched the program to B92 and we all went out to Trg Kralja Milana.
We believed, naively and foolishly, that all bad things had come to an end, unaware that the rudiments of that abnormality at that time would survive, grow stronger, and as soon as they had the opportunity to attack us again, this time much more prepared, because they knew what they shouldn't do. to allow them to rule if at all possible this time for life.
Hence their pathological obsession with the media. Especially small local ones. So much so that they bought everything they could touch in bursts. Those others that they could not win over and neutralize in this way led to a total financial collapse with skillful engineering.
Stumbling
What used to be a nice job turned into a puddle and while I'm breathing I won't be able to understand the number of people who willingly swam in it. We didn't know how to do it, we couldn't, we didn't want to.
Unable to adapt to the new reality, to bow to the hand that awards crumbs for silence through rigged contests, which overtake when "their" media settles fatly, to keep quiet when our friends advised us not to be more Catholic than the Pope, but equally unwilling to we propagate anyone's narrative for money, to network in order to participate in the looting of public budgets intended for the media, and especially unwilling to participate in mass cultural stumbling and pandering to the debatable taste of the predominant audience, we knew we wouldn't last long.
And we lasted longer than possible. How much it costs is no longer important. It is so great that it cannot be measured by anything material.
That's why we stop broadcasting right on the anniversary of an event that, unfortunately, many people today readily renounce. To close the circle and send a message that in the span of 24 years, nothing important has actually changed, except that on October 5, 2024, instead of a feeling of hope, only a feeling of hopelessness is present.
As pathetic as it sounds, in the end we would like to thank the listeners who will miss us on 99.9 MHz. Also, we would like to thank all the friends of our little precious radio over the past three decades. I won't name anyone because I'm sure to forget someone. In the end, I send special love to all dear people who passed through our studio, marketing, editorial office and devoted part of their lives to something that was the most cultural and beautiful in the air of the city of Nis for decades. Some are here, and some, unfortunately, are no longer with us. I will not list them in particular because there are dozens of them and many have continued their careers in numerous media throughout Serbia. I am sure that both of them feel this love.
Tonight I will say "Good night, love!" for the last time when I turn off the lights and with Tanoy, Love will greet me and all of you who are listening right now with something wickedly good, because everything is wickedly good. Then, like Scarlett O Hara, I will think about everything tomorrow. And I will cry tomorrow. I have that right.
Source: Citysmart media
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