Who, what, when, where and why

After a hiatus, Insajder is back with their own medium

Part of our mission is to make professional-grade technology available to all who believe that quality independent journalism has a fundamental role to play in any healthy society. This is exactly in line with the mission of Insajder, originally an investigative TV program whose authors created more than 120 episodes that aired between 2004 and 2015 on TV B92. During its existence, the creators interviewed more than 500 people and displayed over 1,000 pieces of evidence of fraud, corruption and crime in Serbia and the region.

As Insajder’s founder Brankica Stanković says: “We do not care who is in power today, who was yesterday, or who will be tomorrow. We do not make stories about individuals or political parties, but we disclose omissions in the system and pinpoint mistakes.”

Exposés on fraud, crime and corruption are often met with resistance from powerful and influential viewers. While in operation, the Insajder team experienced this full force and was often faced with those seeking to discredit them with threats and campaigns against the TV show. At a certain point, further cooperation with TV B92 no longer seemed like a good fit for the Insajder team.

That’s when the team consisting of 13 investigative journalists, some of them with 20 years of experience in the field, decided to step outside the medium of television and its conventions. Since Insajder’s audio/visual coverage is authentic and strong, it seemed logical to launch their own medium in the form of a video portal which would allow them to reach their audiences globally while remaining independent.

After more than a year long hiatus, Insajder.net was launched succesfully yesterday. We were happy to be able to assist with building the video portal based on our open source CMS Newscoop. The site we created is fully responsive, with focus placed on videos and images. Thanks to the use of http/2 protocol, the site is loading quickly, which is crucial for optimum user experience. Central to the design was the way we decided to present serials within timelines, both on the homepage and on the page of each serial as well. We decided to wrap up all the content related to one serial, such as videos, articles, snippets, or even pdf documents, in one spot. Within each timeline, readers can filter out specific content (i.e. filter out videos, which are episodes).

It’s a common practice for other media in the region to produce high volumes of content that only seek to get high numbers of clicks and  monetise pageviews, but this is not a goal that Insajder has. Their focus is on producing high quality content that will grow a healthy viewer base by itself. However, during the first day following the launch, Insajder received approximately 100.000 pageviews, 18.000 users and average session duration of 19 minutes. Not bad, right?

For the second phase of the project, we planned to start Live Blog coverage for the elections in Serbia in April. But as a large amount of flooding occurred in Serbia yesterday, we altered the original plan and began covering the quickly unfolding events immediately with the default Live Blog theme.

Brankica Stanković declars that: “This portal will never resort to announcing anything as “spectacular”, “unseen” or “sensational”. Everything will be professional, checked and responsible.” We wish the Insajder team success on their mission and a lot of dedicated readers!

Want to join our team and help us build the useful tools for journalists? We’d love to have you. Check out our jobs page to see if there are any openings right for you. If you don’t see what you're looking for, feel free to send us an email, we are always on the hunt for talented people.