One of the exhibits at the museum will be the first issue of a newspaper launched based on Napoleon’s decision.
The concept of the proposed Media Museum project in Zagreb, which was presented this week, would resemble Washington’s Newseum. It would include a digitalized collection of all the newspapers that have been published in Croatia, reports Večernji List on June 12, 2016.
“The museum would cover at least 1,000 square meters, and it would also include the contemporary electronic media, while the project implementation would be supported from the EU funds”, said Nada Zgrabljić-Rotar, the head of the Department of Communication Studies at the Croatian University Studies in Zagreb, who has been pushing this project. According to her, it will be especially interesting to see a rich collection of newspaper front pages compiled by Branko Lovrić, the retired director general of Večernji List.
His impressive collection contains almost 4,000 front pages, including first issues of numerous newspapers and other publications published in Croatia. “When I started collecting the first issues of newspapers years ago, I was not even aware that so many were published over the years. Between the two wars, there was a total of 200 daily papers. In the 1990s, we had almost 600 new publications on the newsstands, some of which did not last long, while the others we are still reading today”, said Lovrić.
He invested a lot of money in the collection, because he had to hire a number of people to look for the old and rare issues. “These are people who search the attics and basements; they go through tonnes of the waste paper and recover the stuff from waste containers. The publications I am interested in can turn out to be very rare and that costs money”, he explained.
Since Lovrić is collecting all the publications that can be found in Croatia, he has both Ustasha and Partisan newspapers, fanzines, national minorities’ publications, as well as those meant for peasants, rockers and butchers. “I am only interested in the first issues, as this is where you can see the entire capacity of the news desk. They are a reflection of all the journalistic effort invested into the new publication”, he said while pointing to the front page of the first issue of Kraljski Dalmatin (which was launched in Zadar in 1806 based on the decision of Napoleon himself) and to the first issue of Le Monde and other publications he has managed to find.
