The Satan Cometh (To Offices of Delo Newspaper)

Peter Jančič, Editor-in-Chief of Delo daily became an object of an elaborate prank. Namely, Delo’s automatic answering system has a nice feature, where you can apparently type in the initials of a person and your call is then transferred to his or her extension. As far as I get it, if you punch in “PJAN”, you ought to get through to newspaper’s current editor in chief. But before you do get through the system tells you the name you punched in and asks for confirmation. Or so they tought…

You have reached Satan…

For those of you, who don’t understand Slovene: in the last section, when the person placing the call types in numbers 75266 (PJAN), the system is suppose to respond by “you requested Peter Jančič”, but instead it responds by “you requested Satan!”. Why is that, I hear you asking…

Jančič was named Delo’s editor in chief shortly after Danilo Slivnik became the newspaper’s CEO in a switch which more or less exactly failed to please the eye, as it was obviously aimed at making the largest daily “government-friendly” in a new political eviroment with Janez Janša as PM.

Despite his repeated attempts at asserting himself as being worthy of his post, Jančič is widely perceived as a straw-man, with Slivnik effectivelly running and editing the newspaper, so Jančič (once a respected journalist and columnist for Večer daily) became tha laughing-stock of Slovene journalism. The atmosphere at Delo, however is poisonous at the moment. Given this and Jančič’s less-then-adequate performance, it is little wonder Delo’s quality is dropping rapidly