Last year, reported that Zsófia Mészáros, the former editor-in-chief who left 444 after a decade, founded her own company. The main activity of Pelikán Projekt Nonprofit Kft. is "other community and social activities that cannot be classified elsewhere", but its scope of activities is broader: education, PR, communication, book publishing, news agency activity, program production, etc. According to his confession, Mészáros "will do the same as at 444" - but the first months of the business started this year do not show this - writes a dear reader in a letter sent to our editors, which we publish without any changes.
the name of the website and Facebook page, Pelikán Projekt deals with training, scholarships and grants for journalists. first large-scale program started in March this year, they started free journalism training for 10 career starters, at the end of which they promise to provide them with job opportunities.
As we know, nothing is free, so this course also needs to be financed with someone's money - but who?
Well, this is what is not revealed by the company belonging to the left that promotes and demands transparency. of kreativ.hu about who supports the project:
"They are responsible people who want to do something for the future, who have the opportunity to support such an organization, but their goal is not to end up in the shop window - partly precisely because they have no personal ambitions to do so. The professional work was completely entrusted to me, the Pelikán Project is my company. It could be said that it was created because the plan convinced them that it is possible to make the country more sensitive and smarter in the long term with training and supporting serious content."
Photo: Pelikán Project Facebook
Regarding what can be expected from the relatively new Pelikán Project in the future, he said that "in addition to our training and internship programs, we will also support specific projects, either one of the highlighted works of editorial offices, or authors' own materials, articles, books, documentaries". . Ergo, he wants to be a left-wing patron - at other people's expense.
In any case, only journalism training is included in the repertoire of the currently small team. three people are listed on the website Júlia Boros who also transferred from 444 , and Gáspár Tamás Bence, who joined at the beginning of April 2024 . The former is the co-founder and program director of the Pelikán Project, and the latter performs technical and creative tasks and teaches video journalism as part of the training.
Another interesting thing is that on her private Facebook profile , Zsófia Mészáros shared the Media1 article about the company by thanking several people in the post, including a certain Janan Mirwais.
If you're wondering where this name might sound familiar, we'll tell you: it's Bernadett Szél's former adviser of Afghan origin, who came into the public eye for not passing the national security screening.
Photo: Pelikán Project Facebook
For the time being, the Pelikán Project is an opaque, secretive project: it is not known who is being supported and whose money it is. In addition to the three employees, the only things that have been revealed so far are that Péter Magyari , who became a Válasz Online journalist from 444, and András Király, the editor of Telex, taught a class at the free training course for new journalists.
Cover image: Pelikán Project Facebook
