Stojan Cerovic was one of Serbia's finest and most widely respected journalists. During the early 1990s, he distinguished himself as a columnist on the Belgrade weekly news magazine he co-founded, Vreme (Time), developing into the most articulate and perceptive critic of the then Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic's warmongering and abuse of power.

The winner of several journalist awards at home and abroad, he was awarded a Nieman Foundation scholarship to study at Harvard University for a year in 1993; he was appointed senior researcher at the US Institute for Peace in 2000. He also lectured at the Central European University in Budapest.

Charles Simic, the American poet of Serbian origin, described Stojan's collection of essays, Exit From History (2004), as the "diary of a rational man who, through no fault of his own, has been living locked up in a madhouse".