Paul Goble
Staunton,
March 5 – Among the many things that are hyper-centralized in Vladimir Putin’s
Russia are news outlets, but remarkably, social media are undermining that
centralization; and today, the second most cited news source on those channels
is located not in Moscow but in Yekaterinburg.
That
is the URA.ru news portal, and while it is cited far less often than Novosti
(ria.ru), it beats out TASS (tass.ru) two to one, according to a survey during
January of this year by the Medialogia company. During that month, Novosit was
cited on Russian social media 1.8 million times, URA.ru 265,000 times, and TASS
126,000 (ura.news/news/1052374986).
This
is a remarkable development in the Russian media environment, and URA.ru’s
achievement suggests that in the electronic media, regional outlet can and sometimes
do attract far more attention than Moscow ones, breaking the information stranglehold
the center has over the regions, even as regional print media die and regional TV
is forced off the air.
Not
everyone in Moscow is happy about this development, and a recent attack on
URA.ru for supposedly distributing “fake news” appears part of a larger effort
to frighten its readers off and to keep the agency from continuing to break
stories that the Moscow media ignore (ura.news/articles/1036277673).
There
are many other regional news agencies in Russia that are contributing to this
development. They deserve the following they have among Russians and they merit
more attention from those interested in the development of Russia than they
normally get. They may be based in the regions, but they often, as does URA.ru,
cover stories of countrywide import.
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