It’s funny that Dzidzovic, 54, finds journalists obsolete given that he is one. He was the chief of the Bosnian army’s press center during the 1990s war, and continued in journalism when he launched his newspaper, SabaH, after immigrating to the United States in 1995. "SabaH," means sunrise and symbolizes the arrival of a new generation of Bosnian immigrants to the United States in more than a hundred years.
The paper started as a small, 8.5-x-11 newsletter for and by Bosnians in New York, and soon gained popularity with nearby communities. He moved the paper in 2006 to St. Louis, which at 50,000 has the largest number of Bosnians in the country, and is more centrally located. His weekly paper has a nationwide circulation of 40,000, and is delivered to 40 cities across the United States.
“At the beginning when I published the first issue, the mission of SabaH was to inform people what was going on in Bosnia and what’s going on in the United States in their own language,” Dzidzovic says. “But later, it turned out to be a bridge between Bosnia and the United States—a bridge between our community, which is almost 400,000 in the United States. That’s the way their family members or people in Bosnia know what they are doing and how they are doing.” It also was a way for Bosnians who had scattered across the country to reconnect. On a wall in SabaH’s office on Gravois, Dzidzovic fastened a map of the United States with push-pins on each of the 40 cities that have a Bosnian population of at least 2,000 people.
Today, the paper is the largest Bosnian newspaper outside of Bosnia itself, and it’s why every copy bears the tag line, “New York Times od bosanskih zajednice”—The New York Times of the Bosnian community. SabaH lives up to that by publishing world news, interviews with successful Bosnians or others who’ve impacted the community, news from back home, and news about their new home. He does a lot of the original reporting, driving to each of the 40 cities in his 2005 Toyota that has already logged 200,000 miles. “I’m sorry that I bought a house in St. Louis,” he says. “I should buy an RV. That’s what I need, actually.”
His connections with the Bosnian community are well–recognized, and in many ways, Dzidzovic is the face of the Bosnian community. A recent St. Louis Post-Dispatch article interviewed him about the area’s Muslim population because Bosnians constitute the largest percentage. Politicians stop by SabaH offices to campaign and chat, including U.S. Rep. Russ Carnahan, whose district includes much of the southside’s Bosnian community.
“[SabaH’s] been a great tool for community leaders to engage and be able to really have a two-way street of information,” Carnahan says. “We can go there and learn about things that are going on in the community, but also they can learn about what’s going on in Washington or in state government or local government.”
Already, Carnahan says, Bosnians are becoming more involved with the general community, civic affairs, and politics. It’s a fact not lost on Dzidzovic, who established his paper as independent—financially and politically. And while Bosnia is in a political limbo with its government divided among ethnic and religious lines, Dzidzovic doesn’t want to run his paper like that even if it seems that most of his coverage is on Bosnian Muslims.
“I don’t divide between and I don’t make any differences between Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Croats, Bosnian Serbs. But the picture of our community, 97 to 98 percent are Bosnian Muslims, and maybe that’s why I’m talking about Bosnian Muslims,” he says. “I’m not a religion newspaper, I’m just a newspaper of my country and my country is multiethnic and multicultural. That’s how I consider my newspaper.”
Nevertheless, Dzidzovic’s idea of how a newspaper should be run is quite different than the actual New York Times, or any other American newspaper for that matter. His network of freelancers scattered throughout the country and Europe don’t always expect a paycheck (he doesn’t, either, when he occasionally writes stories for editor-friends in Sarajevo). And unlike the namesake of his tag line, Dzidzovic isn’t headed toward a New York Times-style paywall.
“I don’t believe in that,” he says. “Whenever you sit next to your computer and click, you’re always thinking about free. Why are people going to websites? Because they’re free... My goal is to make a bad website,” he laughs, “on purpose. I don’t want to give the best things on the website for free. The best articles, I save them for just the printing machine.”
Dzidzovic didn’t dream big when he printed his first issue, and he’s surprised at how far his paper has spread and how fast it has grown. But after the president of Bosnia selected him to be part of his official delegation to the White House, and Dzidzovic met Condoleeza Rice, Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush, and after the former president—plus famous Bosnian singers and journalists—celebrated SabaH’s tenth anniversary, he began to think bigger. He likes the idea that anybody can produce journalism through cell phones and compact cameras. It’s why he thinks journalists should move on from breaking the news to investigating the news. He’s meeting with technology consultants sometime this month to figure out how to attract visitors to his website to upload their content directly.
So far, it’s just Dzidzovic, his wife, and daughter that man the paper, and there isn’t any sign that that’s going to change in the future. When they lived in New York, the Dzidzovic family produced the paper while working other jobs to support themselves. It’s not unique to SabaH, but it’s something that University of Missouri–St. Louis media studies professor Rita Csapo-Sweet thinks is both a strength and difficulty.
“That’s actually something that’s often overlooked, but it’s tremendously important. When you become a corporate entity, you lose your family identity,” Csapo-Sweet says. “The really wonderful thing about the smaller, ethnic papers, it’s often just the sheer dedication of one family or one person to keep it going...but it’s also easy for them to burn out.”
“Is this position a gift from God to me or punishment? It’s not easy to run all of this. It’s either push or press to my entire family,” Dzidzovic says. “In 14 years, we came to issue no. 677, which means we never stopped from the first issue and all work was basically done by my family. Ask me how many times we did it sick, under fever. We never stopped. Did I have any vacation? No, because the paper has to come every week. So there’s no vacation time. Did I relax ever anywhere on the world? No I didn’t. In that way, it’s punishment.
“But it’s pleasure,” he adds. “It’s a pleasure that [because of technology] I can do editorial work here from office, from the house, from New York, from Japan, from China—wherever I have the connection I can do it. That’s the pleasure because I love to travel. I love it.”
This is part two of a three-part series on St. Louis’ ethnic newspapers. Next week, we look at Red Latina, St. Louis’ largest Hispanic newspaper. Click here to read part one, which went behind the scenes at the St. Louis Chinese American News.
