On Thursday, 30 November, Ziarul de Gardă received the contract from Poșta Moldovei (the Post Office of Moldova, a state enterprise) for newspaper distribution for 2024 and found an increase in the cost of distribution by 341% (i.e. more than four times more than the tariff for 2023), which critically affects the editorial office’s ability to carry out the subscription campaign and assume the production of the printed edition for the coming years.

It should be noted that from the beginning of 2023, Poșta Moldovei has already increased distribution tariffs by about 40%, even though the editors of independent newspapers explained that the financial situation of the editorial teams was already quite bad after the COVID-19 pandemic and two years before the war.

In October 2023, Poșta Moldovei again announced that an increase of around 40% in distribution costs would follow, explaining that the existing costs did not cover the de facto costs of distributing newspapers to subscribers. The post office said it would make calculations, estimates, and come back with final figures. Independent newsrooms have again announced that they too are facing a number of crises, and the Independent Press Association (of which several newsrooms, including ZdG, are members) has initiated a dialogue with the government, pointing to the risks to which independent newspaper publishers are exposed under the conditions of cost increase.

On 30 November, the ZdG (and other newsrooms) received the contract with Poșta Moldovei, and was informed by telephone that the new prices (increased by 341%) would cover the real costs of distributing newspapers. This means that the newsroom would also have to increase the cost of a subscription by about 350%, but as over 80% of ZdG subscribers are pensioners or vulnerable people, we deduce that most of them will not be able to subscribe to our newspaper.

At the same time, the Independent Press Association management has informed us that it is discussing with the government a mechanism to support independent newspaper editorial offices in covering part of their distribution costs. This coverage is expected to be made on the basis of ethics and professional conduct assessments (note that the Independent Press Association newsrooms are subject to ongoing or regular quality and ethics assessments).

Ziarul de Gardă points out to all parties some problems that arise under these conditions:

The state of independent press is of public interest
The hundreds of percent increased cost of services provided by a state entity (even if due to financial problems) should have been done gradually, in parallel with a recovery plan for newspapers serving the public interest. However, such a price increase will affect less the publications that have political patrons (some from Moscow, others – from local oligarchs), those that, through their kind of journalism, attract open and hidden advertising, and will affect more the independent newspapers, especially those that, through their kind of journalism, serve democracy, human rights, and fight against corruption.

The state of vulnerable citizens who need access to truthful information
Hundreds of percent distribution price increases immediately cause subscription prices to rise, and this puts the ability to subscribe to a newspaper under pressure for the most vulnerable subscribers – pensioners, people with disabilities or on low incomes. Given the extent of misinformation, the information war, the need for a coherent explanation of the need for European integration, the most vulnerable citizens will lose this possibility of information.

Public funding models must be transparent and exclude political implications
The mechanism of possible compensation by the government, through civil society, for the increased cost of distribution must be explicit and permanent, so that it cannot be vitiated by opaque interests, but neither can it be cancelled until the newspapers serving the public interest have recovered.   The editorial office asks the authorities to consider not only the recovery of the financial situation of Poșta Moldovei, but also to analyse the broader context and the value of the gains for the society, for the editorial offices, and for Poșta Moldovei if:

• fewer vulnerable people will subscribe to independent newspapers – who and what gains?
• fewer investigative and human rights newspapers will have fewer subscribers – who and what gains?
• people will choose cheap subscriptions offered by opaquely funded editions – who and what gains?
• the post office will get fewer newspapers for distribution – who and what wins?

ZdG calls on the Government, the Parliamentary Commission for the Media, media NGOs and development partners to analyse with the utmost diligence the risks of this decision, including the risk of the closure of the printed version of ZdG – the newspaper with the largest number of subscribers in Moldova, the only investigative newspaper, the newspaper that for over 19 years has written the history of the fight against corruption in the country.