"The general impression is that newspapers are at an increasingly lower professional standard, that there is increasingly less ethics and more manipulation," said Stjepan Malovic, director of the International Centre for the Education of Journalists, where the results were presented.
He said the survey was conducted in the second half of April, covering four dailies in each country. The researchers analysed the newspaper's first five pages - type of article, authorship, quoting and numbers of sources, headlines, representation of subjects, and the author-subject relationship.
Gordana Vilovic and Igor Kanizaj surveyed Croatia's Jutarnji List, Vecernji List, Vjesnik and 24 Sata, processing a total of 1,361 articles.
Kanizaj said short articles dominated, that journalists relied on one source in the majority of cases, that there was a one-sided selection of sources, and that two or three sources were quoted in the smallest number of articles.
Politics, the economy, crime and accidents were the most frequent subjects, unbiased headlines prevailed, the most sensationalistic ones were used for politics, crime and accidents, and the front page subjects were covered in the newspaper's first five pages in only nine per cent of cases.
All four dailies published more than 50% of brief news on the first five pages, 61.8% on average, with 24 Sata having the most (79.1%). Short articles made up for 22.6% of the first five pages, 12.3% were articles and 1.3% were larger features.
Authored pieces made up an average 66.8% of articles, 18.7% were agency news items, 0.7% are rewritten news items and 14.3% were editorials.
Vecernji List had the highest number of authored pieces (82.2%) and Vjesnik the least (55.5%). Vjesnik had the most agency news items (41.6%), followed by Jutranji List (21.8%) and Vecernji List (13.3%), while 24 Sata did not have any.
An average 25.1% of articles was unsigned, while 44.2% were signed with initials.
24 Sata published the highest number of unsigned articles (37%), followed by Vjesnik (31.9%), Jutarnji List (18%), and Vecernji List (6.3%). Vecernji List had 53.5% articles signed with initials, followed by 24 Sata (52.1%), Jutarnji List (38.3%), and Vjesnik (33.3%).
24 Sata published the highest number of articles without quoting a source (67.3%), followed by Vecernji List (21.4%), Vjesnik (4.3%), and Jutarnji List (2.9%).
Politics dominated the first five pages - 32.3% in Jutarnji List, 38.2% in Vjesnik, 52% in Vecernji List - while articles dealing with crime dominated the first five pages of 24 Sata (21.9%).
The survey was conducted by universities in Zagreb, Dubrovnik, Tuzla, Podgorica and Vienna, with assistance from the Montenegro Institute for International Cultural and Technical Cooperation.
Newspaper credibility surveys will continue and the final results will be published in September.
The Opatija conference opened yesterday and closes on Sunday as part of the Journalism Education and Training in Croatia programme, which was supported by the European Commission.