Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 22 – A new 57-page
report prepared jointly by the Mediastandart Foundation and Aleksey Kudrin’s
Committee on Civic Initiatives finds that the media in a majority of Russian
regions is now stagnating, the result of a combination of state policy and the
weakness of the advertising sector there.
The full report,
available at komitetgi.ru/analytics/3573/
and summarized by Simon Zhvoronkov on the Polit.ru portal (polit.ru/article/2017/12/21/media/),
rates the media in the regions according to 50 criteria and concludes that the
situation varies widely but in almost no places can they be described as
flourishing.
Over the last three years, the gap
between the most developed regional media, which includes those in Moscow, St.
Petersburg, Yamalo-Nenets district, the Moscow oblast, the Nenets district,
Sakhalin oblast, Khabarovsk kray and some others, and the least, which includes
Crimea, Transbaikal kray, the Jewish autonomous oblast, and Kalmykia, has
widened.
State regulation
played a major but not exclusive role in this.
The ban on foreign investors has hurt the regional outlets, and the preference
of the authorities for central rather than regional media has as well.
Moreover, the traditional media are far more regulated than the new media, and
people are thus choosing the latter.
But also significant in the decline of
regional media over the last several years has been the collapse of advertising
revenue from the state and from business -- which has left outlets with ever
less income and the harsh choice between raising prices or going out of
business. And as prices rise, fewer people buy them because they too are
suffering from the economic downturn.
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