Vučinić graduated with a degree in international law from the University of Belgrade in 1985 and attended the General Manager Program at Harvard Business School in 2000.
[4] In 1995, with seed money from George Soros's Open Society Institute, Vučinić and the late Washington Post journalist Stuart Auerbach formed the Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF), an international non-profit organization based in New York City, Prague, Hong Kong, and Singapore with the goal of establishing a fund to provide loans to independent press organizations in new democracies with histories of government oppression of the media.
In July 2005, Vučinić recorded a TED talk in Oxford, UK, in which he noted that 83% of the people in the world live in countries without an independent press and thus don't know what's really going on in their homelands.
The “information” they receive is twisted and colored, and as a result they “are deprived of understanding their reality.”[5] On May 4, 2006, Bruno Giussani of TED reported that Vučinić's idea had become reality: “for the first time a social cause will be listed on a major stock exchange.” He explained that the MDLF, the Swiss bank Vontobel, and a Zurich firm, responsAbility, were jointly introducing “a security that mobilises private investment to support a free press – basically a bond with a social element.”[6] By 2012, MDLF had made over $100 million in loans to newspapers, magazines, radio stations and websites around the world, funding over 200 projects in 30 countries;[7][8][9] by the same year, over 36 million people in the developing world were getting their news from media financed by MDLF.
[14] Vučinić founded IndieVoices, a crowdfunding portal that raises funds for independent media, mostly in the developing world.