In its candidacy for the UNESCO title of World Book Capital 2010, the Municipality of Ljubljana wrote that it would encourage and support the publication of a biweekly cultural magazine that will fill a gap in the Slovene media market, providing in-depth coverage of culture and society. Together with the Ministry of Culture we offered a public tender in which the newspaper publisher Delo was selected to issue the magazine. The biweekly Pogledi will be published as a supplement of the daily newspaper Delo and as an independent publication.
The Editor-in-Chief of Pogledi, Ženja Leiler, says: “I understand Pogledi primarily as a great responsibility and commitment. After a break of a decade since the discontinuation of Razgledi, a magazine will finally be published on the Slovenian print media market that we have missed, that we have talked about, but that we have barely believed we would ever have again. During this time, the media landscape has fundamentally changed; the life of newspapers is these days far from being something self-evident and the situation is characterised by numerous questions but hardly any answers. For instance, does the publishing of a biweekly print magazine dedicated to art, culture and society, and to a sophisticated readership who increasingly inform themselves exclusively through electronic media, represent an anachronistic or subversive act? Is there a sufficient critical mass of readers in the Slovene speaking world to enable the survival of such a magazine on the market? How does one address the youngest readers, who read newspapers (if at all) only on the Internet? And perhaps most importantly: in these times of change, increasingly less favourable to serious reading and content, will authors and readers be able to “connect to each other”? These are demanding questions, and not just rhetorical questions. The answers will not appear overnight. Nonetheless, I am convinced that these questions are not only worth posing, they must be posed. Therefore, Pogledi will above all be a magazine that will attempt to write in a relevant way about the relevant issues of art, culture and society. Here and now. It will be a magazine that will try to be constructive and responsible towards public discourse, seeking to establish a space in which society will be able to communicate with itself. Above all, it will be a magazine that is not indifferent to the kind of world we live in.”