information:highlighting
Literární listy

Early signs of change were few. In an interview with KSČ Presidium member Josef Smrkovský published in the Party newspaper Rudé Právo with the title "What Lies Ahead", he insisted that Dubček's appointment at the January Plenum would further the goals of socialism and maintain the working class nature of the Party.

However, right after Dubček assumed power, the scholar Eduard Goldstücker became chairman of the Union of Czechoslovak Writers and thus editor-in-chief of Literární noviny, which under Novotný had been filled with party loyalists. Goldstücker tested the boundaries of Dubček's devotion to freedom of the press when on 4 February he appeared in a television interview as the new head of the union. During the interview he openly criticized Novotný, exposing all of Novotný's previously unreported policies and explaining how they were preventing progress in Czechoslovakia.

Goldstücker suffered no repercussions, Dubček instead began to build a sense of trust among the media, the government, and the citizens. It was under Goldstücker that the journal's name was changed to Literární listy, and on 29 February, the Union published the first copy of the censor-free journal. By August, Literární listy had a circulation of 300,000, making it the most published periodical in Europe.