When ten years ago the first issue of "Monitorul de Iasi" was printed, the mass media landscape in Romania was much different of the one now. The central newspapers, generally renamed, and the former county newspapers of the Romanian Communist Party, were strongly dominating the circulation, at the time impressive indeed. The former official dailies had then headquarters, offices, furniture, money form the accounts, typewriters, cars, paper, sometimes even distribution networks, achieving the first de facto privatization in Romania, with huge economic advantage form the very beginning. In a remarkable way, Iasi, the city with the best student press in the communist period, was one of the few places in the country where the local market was not monopolized by the former party publications. The weekly "Opinia Studenteasca" (Students' Opinion), at the time with a national distribution, the daily "24 de Ore" (24 Hours) or radio VoxT" were forming a living, emotional, sometimes naïve medium, in the last post-revolution romanticism moments. In spite of the start advantages, many f the former official titles died in a few years or were marginalized by other editorial initiatives, many of the later launched with much more modest resources. A warning still valid today. Self-sufficiency, arrogance, lack of vision can demolish easier than expected. In 1991, the economic media has already become tougher, the prices were rising measurelessly, the managerial mistakes were getting more and more expensive. Even thus, mass media remained for a good while, a special territory, where the reserves of enthusiasm counterweighted the lack of resources. The inflexion moment was undoubtedly the one of the elections in 1996, when the press played a decisive role in counterweighting the big machinery of PDSR (Social Democracy Party) that many people was considering at the time indestructible.