TASR

What is TASR?

TASR is the Tlačová agentúra Slovenskej republiky, the Slovak news agency. Act No. 385/2008 Z. z. o Tlačovej agentúre Slovenskej republiky governs its status, activity, bodies and finances, and section 2 defines it as a public-law, national, independent information institution providing a news service to the public, constituted as a legal person entered in the commercial register.^[1] The Act provides that the agency carries out its activity in its own name, at its own expense and on its own responsibility, and that it may not transfer that activity by contract or otherwise.^[1]

On independence, section 2 provides that in creating and distributing news the agency is free and independent, that interventions in the content of its news service are permitted only on the basis of law, and that the service must serve no political, economic, religious, ethnic or other interest group either in favour or against, and must be balanced, pluralistic and objective.^[1] Those are the statute's requirements; the agency's own site names the modality nowhere else.

The agency's own pages give its seat as Dúbravská cesta 14, 841 04 Bratislava, with IČO 31 320 414, and list its domestic, economic, foreign and photo services, alongside a public-relations wire, regional and municipal services, a photo bank and TASR TV.^[2] The pages also record the agency's disclosures of state advertising under section 11a of Act No. 265/2022 Z. z. and section 103a of Act No. 264/2022 Z. z.^[2]

What does TASR cover?

Sport reaches readers mainly through teraz.sk, the agency's news portal, whose footer carries the agency's own registration details and the periodical registration number EV 40/22/SWP.^[3] The portal's sport section covers football, ice hockey including the NHL and KHL, tennis, basketball, winter sports and boxing, and carries live scores and Slovak league coverage.^[3]

The wire is carried by other Slovak outlets under the agency's byline. The Niké liga attendance figures for 2024/25 — 499,593 spectators at an average of 2,536 a match, with ŠK Slovan Bratislava at an average of 7,359 — were published on 13 June 2025 on the Petit Press sports site Sportnet with TASR given as the source.^[4] The same figures appeared the same day in the Slovak sports daily.^[5]

How large is TASR's audience?

No audited audience figure for the agency's sport service could be retrieved for this page. The agency's own about pages publish no circulation, subscriber or client figures.^[2][3]

The recognised online measurement in Slovakia is the joint industry research run through IAB Slovakia, whose 2025 annual report gives an internet population aged 12 and over of 3.7 million and 3.1 million monthly visitors to the sites in the research across 34 publishers and 73 domains; it carries no separate figure for teraz.sk.^[6] A wire service's reach is in any case only partly measurable that way, because much of its output is read under other outlets' mastheads, as the 13 June 2025 attendance story shows.^[4]

Since when has TASR existed?

The Act that governs the agency in its present form, Act No. 385/2008 Z. z., took effect on 1 January 2009.^[1] That is the date of the current legal basis, not a founding date for the agency, and no founding date is given on the agency's own about pages.^[2]

The portal through which most of its sport reaches readers directly, teraz.sk, carries the periodical registration number EV 40/22/SWP in its footer.^[3]

Why does TASR matter in Slovakia's sport?

The agency is the single point at which many Slovak sports figures enter general circulation. The completed 2024/25 Niké liga attendance count reached the market through its wire and was published under other outlets' mastheads on the same day.^[4][5]

Its independence, unlike that of a commercial title, is a statutory requirement with named operative words: the news service must be “balanced, pluralistic and objective”, and content interventions are permitted only on the basis of law.^[1]

Named monitoring bodies have published on the wider Slovak market rather than on the agency in particular. The Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom's Media Pluralism Monitor 2026 puts Slovakia's political independence risk at 52 per cent and its market plurality risk at 69 per cent, and states that “Slovakia faces high levels of media ownership concentration”.^[7] The Euromedia Ownership Monitor's Slovakia report for 2025 describes “structural risks of instrumentalisation and conflicts of interest” in the commercial part of the market.^[8] Both are quoted as statements about the market, not as findings about this agency.