Macedonian journalism is losing one of the best-known names from the generation that built the country's media system. Živko Georgievski has died at the age of 79.

He was one of those journalists who practised the craft across several countries, two systems and a string of institutions. He started his career as a high-school student at the newspaper „Večer", moved on to the youth section of Radio Ohrid, and after his studies in Belgrade began working on the main team of the then-Yugoslav news agency Tanjug. For years he ran Tanjug's Macedonian bureau, and he was a foreign correspondent with a multi-year posting in Jakarta, Indonesia.

In the 1970s he was director of Radio Ohrid. After returning to Macedonia, just before the breakup of Yugoslavia, he founded the Macedonian Press Bureau. From 1998 to 2002 he was director of MIA (the Macedonian Information Agency) - a period when the agency played a significant role in public information.

That's the dry biography. But the question is: what does it mean for today's journalism in Macedonia? Živko Georgievski was part of a generation that still believed information was a public good, that journalism was a service to the reader, and that there was a difference between „publishing" and „writing". Today those lines are blurred. A large share of Macedonian internet portals are reworded headlines copied from US wire agencies - with an ad-driven background.

He was a man who wrote about what he saw, in a country that has at times been a hard place to do real journalism. He retired from MIA and from then on lived in Ohrid - the city he was tied to all his life and where he'll be buried tomorrow.

His colleagues will remember him. The younger generation of journalists, who grew up in an era where journalism was already pushed to sell itself for algorithmic clicks - might think again. What is it that makes a career meaningful? Jakarta as a correspondent, Tanjug, MIA. Or 5,000 followers on Twitter and quick „takes"? That's the quiet closing sentence.