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The entire editorial staff of Transindex news portal in Transylvania resigned on Tuesday morning for political reasons, according to a statement from the newspaper’s editorial staff.
“The time has come to report to you about ourselves, and for many of us, this will be the last piece of news we write on Transindex. This morning, after twenty-three years of operation, the entire Transindex editorial team resigned,” Transindex itself reported.
We feel that our work within this institution has become completely impossible and that we can no longer, to the best of our professional ability, carry out the task that should be the task of the free press.”
Transindex added: “We refuse to do our journalistic work according to the demands of any political force.”
“We have all noticed that the space for freedom of expression and publicity in Transylvanian Hungary has become increasingly restricted in recent times. For almost two years, we have been struggling for our survival in a politically-determined environment in which the press can only choose between two paths: either it capitulates and continues to function as a virtual mouthpiece for various political interests, or it tries to do its job, but in this case, risks being impossible. We have chosen the latter path and are now packing our bags because we have no choice,” the journalists wrote.
They also report that the majority owner is preparing to sell Transindex and its future fate is still unknown to the journalists as well.
Last November, Transindex launched a campaign of support because they saw the newspaper’s survival as under threat. At the time, they wrote that it was no longer possible to maintain the website without readers’ contributions.
According to Media1.hu, the staff of Transindex will be leaving in one go and will join the staff of Telex, which was founded in 2020 by former staff of Hungarian Index.
Media1 reports that before the entire Transindex team handed in their resignations, the question of where they would continue their careers in the future was essentially decided. It is no coincidence that Telex was the first to notice the Transylvanian news portal’s announcement of the mass departures, as the paper knew in advance that Transindex.ro staff would be leaving and would be moving to a joint project with Telex.hu. It is not yet known whether the planned project will be called Transtelex, but Media1 has learned that the addresses Transtelex.ro and Transtelex.hu were registered by someone in November (the site is currently empty).
Telex has already had a close relationship with Transindex since its launch. They have won several international competitions together, and readers could have read several articles written jointly by the two staff.
Featured image: illustration via Pixabay
