The daily newspaper Oslobodjenje, which piqued a jaded world's admiration for defiantly publishing every day during the three-and-a-half-year siege of Sarajevo, has gone blowzy and vacant. The paper is in trouble, and may not survive the peace.

''There's a lack of motivation, focus and selection of priorities,'' said Kurspahic. ''I feel bad about that.''

Kurspahic, who edited the newspaper for much of the war before slipping off to his reward as a Nieman fellow at Harvard University in 1994, was back in Sarajevo for three days in July to talk to his old colleagues about what he's learned about American journalism. The trip was funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Kurspahic has grayed in a pleasant professorial way, but looked a little fatigued himself, maybe jet-lagged. He was staying at the downtown Hotel Bosnia, locally famous for high room rates and watered-down drinks, because, like thousands of other Sarajevans who left town, he can't get into his old flat.

In the course of a long interview, Kurspahic offered his prescriptions for getting Oslobodjenje back on track and creating conditions for a more moderate press throughout the Balkans.

''Oslobodjenje needs better prioritizing,'' he said. ''They (the editors) need to reach common ground about what they want to do. The paper also needs a major infusion of energy and changes in the staff.''

He said the commentary, although still good, is predictable and stale. The newspaper ought to hire a stable of the best writers in the region to contribute fresh ideas to the opinion pages. Before that, though, news coverage has to be improved. ''You can't have a newspaper without news. Running press releases and stories about press conferences, that's not news,'' he said.

He told a gathering of about 25 journalists earlier in the day that the biggest change he faced at an American newspaper was learning to focus on ''quality-of-life'' issues instead of mere suvival. He also made the point that American newspapers often start news stories by focusing on a person being affected by events, rather than just running an official announcement: A woman surveying and describing a beautiful area about to be destroyed, rather than a development plan cossetted in a dry press release.

In fact, all three daily tabloids struggling for survival in Sarajevo--Oslobodjenje, Vecernje Novine and Dnevni Avaz-- are little more than conduits for the emanations of officials at every level, including from international agencies.. There is a major ''disconnect'' between the newspapers and the readers that is a holdover from Communist times, he said. ''Our development in that direction (toward readers) was interrupted by the war, and many of our rising stars in journalism left.''

Oslobodjenje was started as a partisan paper during the Nazi occupation, and before the recent war had a circulation of about 50,000. It has declined to perhaps 11,000 today--though no one seems to know the exact number. The newspaper's wartime exploits were blazoned by the international media, which were also taken by the paper's emerging tradition of independence and continuing commitment, in brutal circumstances, to a multiethnic society. Much of the rest of the media was obsessed by the new ethnic ideologies dividing the Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks (Muslims) in the former Yugoslavia.

The 10-story Oslobodjenje building, now collapsed by shellfire around a still-standing elevator shaft, became a monument to Sarajevo's resistance, at a cost of 10,000 lives, to Serb aggression. The paper continued to publish under the most harrowing conditions from a bomb shelter in the building's basement.

A half dozen reporters and editors were killed doing, or trying to get to, their jobs. Kurspahic, who already walked with a limp from a childhood leg injury, was again badly injured in May 1992 when his car--speeding to avoid sniper fire--crashed.

Those kinds of heroics won fame for Kurspahic and a slew of international journalism awards for his newspaper.

Not to be underestimated in garnering fame for the paper was the promotional ability of English-speaking editors like Kurspahic; the courtly Mehmed Halilovic, his successor as editor-in-chief, who is now back on staff as a columnist, and Gordana Knezevic, his Serb assistant editor during the war, now in Toronto. She created dangerous waves for herself among Canada's Serb community for an article she wrote for the daily Star during the NATO war on Yugoslavia.

Knezevic and her family, in fact, were the centerpiece for American journalist Tom Gjelten's book on Oslobodjenje during the war, Sarajevo Daily. The other book on the subject was a Kurspahic memoir, As Long as Sarajevo Exists, published in 1997 in the United States.

Kurspahic is now an editor for The Connection newspaper group in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.

That kind of contact with the wider world of journalism is more difficult for Oslobodjenje's editors today. For the most part, the top editors, headed by Mirko Sagolj, don't have international experience or speak English, which, Kurspahic observed, is a handicap in the global communications environment. English and some other foreign languages also are a big help in dealing with donors and international organizations, like the Office of the High Representative, that practically run the country.

Vecernje Novine, which Kurspahic did not comment on because he said he hasn't been reading it, shares some of Oslobodjenje's fatigue with its heavy fare of dull and biased news and commentary. Also working against it is its lack of clout with most internationals. To the annoyance of staffers, most foreigners aren't even aware that the evening paper also published continuously during the war. The paper, which had a younger and less illustrious staff, was ignored in Gjelten's book.

Its circulation is about 13,000.

The third daily, Dnevni Avaz, was founded after the war and has the biggest circulation, estimated at around 60,000. The paper is a creature, pure and simple, of the dominant Party of Democratic Action (SDA), headed by the redoubtable Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic. With its greater resources, it is generally considered, even by its competitors, as the best of the three papers for its news coverage and professionalism. The other two papers, it should be quckly added, also depend to a degree on the SDA and the government in the Muslim-Croat Federation for support, and their content reflects it.

None of the papers has more than a token circulation in the Serb Republic, the ''other'' entity in Bosnia-Herzegovina where all media from the capital are deeply mistrusted.

Kurspahic, who spends about two hours a day in Virginia monitoring some of the press in Bosnia-Herzegovina, including his old paper, said he doesn't blame the international community for not rushing to save Oslobodjenje, which is vying with Vecernje Novine in the European and American donor sweepstakes.

''Oslobodjenje has no clear picture of what it wants to do. People at the paper have to make some decisions among themselves about their priorities. Also, it's been more than three-and-a-half years since the war ended and it's time for some accounting'' to clean up its debts, he said. Privatization of state-owned media, including Oslobodjenje, remains bogged down with no clear road ahead.

But he insists that, in spite of daunting problems of quality, staffing and debt, it isn't just nostalgia for the glory days of the war that keeps him championing Oslobodjenje. ''I still believe that in regional journalism, there's no paper that offers a better chance (to succeed). It's just a matter of ambition. The people at Oslobodjenje are so busy thinking of ways to survive, they are not looking at ways the paper can establish itself again,'' he said.

The future of all the press in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kurspahic added, depends on whether there is ''Europeanization'' of the Balkans.
In fact, while Kurspahic was holding forth in Sarajevo, NATO Supreme Commander Wesley Clark was also in town talking with the three members of the B-H presidency, which includes Izetbegovic. They were planning for the Sarajevo summit on the Balkans involving the presidents of the industrialized countries, Russia and various international organizations--some 62 delegations in all. The summit, scheduled for late July, was a follow-up to the Balkan Stability Pact announced at NATO's 50th anniversary meeting in Washington in April, while the air war against Yugoslavia was in full swing. The pact would provide a new level of economic and military assistance to all of Belgrade's immediate neighbors.

One plan endorsed by billionnaire investor George Soros, whose Open Society Foundation has sunk money into Oslobodjenje, as well as other B-H media, would turn the Balkans into a free trade area administered by the European Union.
'There is hope, Kurspahic said, ''if there is a common currency, no borders and a NATO presence, and if there are steps toward prosperity and removal of reasons for tensions, such as the grab for territories.''

Opening up markets, Kurspahic added, would spur the press to ''promote moderation as a concept.'' The press would advocate tolerance not because the press is ''nice,'' but because it would be in its financial interest to be able to reach everyone in the country. And then, he said, the ''depressing reality'' of a hostile media, based on party support and organized around ethnic tensions, would disappear.

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Napoli, formerly a print media adviser in Bosnia-Herzegovina for IREX ProMedia, a non-profit contractor based in Washington, D.C., teaches journalism at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash.