Crisis in Russian media

The main problem for the printed media is the lack or absence of advertisements. And that’s a time for many printing outlets to change their strategy and to become more popular among the readers, not among the advertisers. That’s the way the question of the quality came up. At the same time crisis stimulate the process of the substitution of the traditional media for online-media.
Now experts predict already several scenarios of the development of the market of press in Russia. For instance, the Vice-President of the Guild of Periodical Press Publishers Vasily Gatov in his comment to “Novaya Gazeta”   believes that the crisis will provoke at least three models of the market behavior. Even in case of large-scale crisis, regional printing outlets, most of who mainly subsidized by the local authorities will definitely survive, though their dependence will increase. Normally, Average publishing houses and newspapers do not have a lot of debts. Therefore they depend more of their owners, who in their turn can lose a lot of money with their debts in other fields of business. As a result they can close their media as non-core assets. Big media companies will definitely have much more loss, Gatov says, because they are much more debt loaded. And finally 3 Russian Public media companies (CTC Media - one of the leaders of Russian entertainment television, Rambler - popular search engine and RBC – RosBusinessConsalting) will also suffer losses.
Talking about more general trends in media market all over the country we can see that the influence of the government may increase dramatically during the crisis. Especially in the regions where the local press is not that various as in Moscow and Saint-Petersburg and mainly depend on local authorities. Many newspapers and magazines will have to reorganize themselves and to start to cut down expenses that will lead to the salary and staff reduction. What about journalists, they will have to reconsider the quality of their publications.
All those problems initiated the launching of anti-crisis journalists club in Moscow. The chairman of the Union of Journalists of Russia Vsevolod Bogdanov announced that a new information agency will be also started. It is aimed on holding the round table and press-conferences concerning journalist’s employment, the news agency REGNUM reports.
During the discussion journalist came up with many other problems and issues, such as exposure of journalists face to employer. Because many of them even don’t have their contracts of employment. They also discussed the problem of relationship between media owners and journalists. This problem is especially acute for Russian media landscape, where many publishing houses belong to oligarchs, who proclaim their policy via quality press.
Journalists also emphasized that lately press lost completely their function of control over the state machine. According to many participants of the round table, the officials don’t use any more media as a strategic tool, but just ignore it.