With many Serbian-language podcasts struggling to compete with Western media, Galeb Nikačević — who started out as an MTV host in the early 2000s — has found a way to draw local listeners in.
19 May 2020Text: Aleks Eror
If you live in Serbia, are under the age of 45 and own a television, it’s almost certain that you know Galeb Nikačević. Over the last two decades, Nikačević has grown into one of the most recognisable media personalities in the country. Part of this has to do with his appearance: mixed-race and covered in tattoos, there aren’t many people in Serbia who look like Nikačević. Even fewer have managed to forge a career in the public eye like he has.
Having made his name as a host for MTV and Vice, last year Nikačević left his role as editor-in-chief of Noizz — an Axel Springer-owned news portal targeted at millennials — to launch his own podcast. Five short months since publishing its first episode, his show Agelast has fixed itself to the top of the national podcast charts a time when the format is experiencing something of a national boom, with a rapidly growing podcast ecosystem.
The Serbian media landscape is very different to the one where Nikačević began his career nearly 20 years ago, when he debuted as an on-screen host for Metropolis — a small, cult TV station that could most accurately be described as a cross between MTV, pirate radio and Jackass. Its signal didn’t even cover the whole of Belgrade. Today, the Serbian press consists almost entirely of tabloids, the state broadcaster is little more than a mouthpiece for an increasingly autocratic government, most private media companies are owned by corrupt tycoons, and Big Brother-esque reality TV shows dominate programming. The 21st century has been a period of great upheaval for the media globally, but in Serbia, it has been uniquely devastating.
“Space for that kind of cultural content [like we ran on Metropolis] has disappeared,” says Nikačević matter-of-factly. “The state doesn’t invest in culture on any level and talented individuals usually go abroad to find work, so we have a huge brain drain. The only formats that get any sort of investment are those that are proven to work, don’t cost a lot of money, and can very quickly and easily turn a profit. Risk-taking, creativity, innovation, long-term investment in things that are new and original… that’s reserved for markets that are financially and culturally a bit better off.”
Unsurprisingly, more discerning audiences have largely tuned out and rely on the output of the Western media instead. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t hunger for homegrown content as well. Nikačević says that even though people “are raised on Western media and consume Western culture, one of the most common comments I get [about Agelast] is ‘oh, I love how this is like an American podcast, only it’s in Serbian!’.”
Nikačević tells me that, as a result of these unenviable circumstances, podcasting is just a hobby for the vast majority of producers in the country and that he is part of a tiny minority — perhaps just three or four producers — for whom it is their primary source of income. Most people would be put off by these challenges, but as a half-Somali kid growing up in Voždovac, one of Belgrade’s rougher neighbourhoods, in the 1990s, Nikačević is no stranger to adversity
