Newspapers are media whose task is to report on contemporary events. In the standard Croatian language, journalists and publicists use journalistic-publicist functional style for public communication through newspapers, magazines, radio and television. This style has informative, pedagogical, enlightening, propaganda, popularizing, agitating and entertaining functions in journalistic media. Due to its wide reach, the media greatly influence language use and the formation of language awareness and literacy. On the basis of examples from contemporary Croatian newspaper texts from four daily newspapers and one online portal, deviations from standard Croatian language norms at the orthographic, grammatical and lexical levels are indicated. It was observed that the most deviated from the orthographic norm, then from the syntactic norm. On the lexical level, the influence of the English language is especially prominent. Anglicisms and/or English expressions are often used excessively, and not reaching for one's own lexical solutions leads to a distortion of linguistic precision, which can then have a negative impact on language culture. By raising awareness of such deviations from the norm in newspaper style, the importance of language culture as a key element in nurturing the Croatian standard language in the modern media environment is emphasized.