Transindex

» see transindex.ro as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The money came from a political party, and for twenty-two years that arrangement held. Transindex went up in June 1999 in Cluj-Napoca, backed by the Transylvanian Hungarian Technical Scientific Society and a company called Nextra, published by the Média Index Association with Attila Kelemen as responsible editor. It grew into the main Hungarian-language news site in Romania, which in practice meant the main independent news source for a minority of over a million people.

The funder was the Communitas Foundation, which belongs to the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania, the party that has represented the minority in Bucharest since 1989. Transindex was financed by it from the beginning. In the spring of 2021 Communitas said it would stop.

By November the newsroom was asking readers for money directly, saying that keeping the portal running without reader contributions had become impossible. At the same time the majority owner was preparing to sell. The staff read the funding cut and the pending sale together.

On 15 February 2022 the entire editorial staff resigned in one morning. Their statement said they had quit because their work inside the institution had been rendered entirely impossible, and that they were not willing to do journalistic work according to the expectations of any political actors. There was nobody left to publish, and Transindex stopped.

Minority-language news is something I can follow the shape of without having read a word of it. Transindex published in Hungarian, from Romania, for readers who are a minority in one country and a diaspora from another, and the entire point of it was that those readers had somewhere of their own to find out what was happening. I read about it in 2026 in English translation, which is exactly the situation it existed to prevent.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was for ~

Transindex covered Transylvania and Székely Land alongside the rest of the world, in the ordinary registers of a news portal: politics and public life, the economy, the environment, culture and theater. Its own tagline was a napos oldal, the sunny side. For a long stretch it was the best known Hungarian-language portal in the country, and it ran the kind of reporting that a party-financed outlet is not supposed to be able to run.

~ february 2022 ~

The resignation was collective and it was on the record. What the journalists described was a narrowing of what the Hungarian-language press in Transylvania was permitted to do, and a choice between capitulating or trying to work properly and being obstructed for it. They left instead.

~ transtelex ~

The staff did not scatter. Within a day they had a partner in Telex, the Hungarian outlet founded in 2020 by journalists who had themselves walked out of Index over editorial interference, and the new site went up as Transtelex at transtelex.ro.

It runs on reader money, which is the one thing Transindex did not manage to become in time. The people are the same, the beat is the same, and the funding no longer comes from anyone with a seat in parliament.

~ the frozen copy ~

transindex.ro still answers. It forwards you to transindex.adatbank.ro, where the Transylvanian Hungarian digital archive holds the front page as it stood, down to the old Revive advertising tags and a Facebook widget that no longer loads. The page description still says this is the best known Hungarian news portal in Romania. Twenty-three years of reporting sit underneath it, still readable.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »