The Rudar newspaper

The first issue of the newspaper, which served as a bulletin of the Velenje Lignite Mine trade union, was published on 1 January 1953. The newspaper was named Velenjski rudar and was the first to restrict its reporting exclusively to the Šalek Valley. Its first editor-in-chief was Zdenko Furlan.

The newspaper was published monthly; at the end of 1957 it temporarily ceased publication until the beginning of May 1960, when it was revived; at that time it omitted the adjective ‘velenjski’ (of Velenje) from its name and was thereafter known as Rudar (Miner). It remained the bulletin of the workers’ collective of the Velenje Lignite Mine, although it consistently reported on developments throughout the entire Šalek Valley. The newspaper was published intermittently; from its fifth issue (May 1961) onwards it was published monthly, with issues of widely varying length.

On 17 April 1965, the final issue of Rudar, the bulletin of the workers’ collective of the Velenje Lignite Mine, was published because the municipal committee of the SZDL (Socialist Alliance of the Working People) in Velenje had established its own publication – Šaleški rudar (The Šalek Miner) It was published under that name until 1972, when it was renamed ‘Naš čas’ (Our Time), a title it still bears today. After one year, the fortnightly publication became a weekly.

Immediately after the establishment of Šaleški rudar, the mine began publishing Informator, the occasional bulletin of the Information Service of the RLV collective. In 1967, it was decided to resume the regular publication of its own periodical — Samoupravljanje (Self-Management) — which, in May 1973, as the bulletin of the collective of the Velenje Lignite Mine, re-adopted the former name Rudar and has retained it to the present day.