Mapping BRICS Media by Kaarle Nordenstreng Daya Kishan Thussu

Author:Kaarle Nordenstreng, Daya Kishan Thussu [Kaarle Nordenstreng, Daya Kishan Thussu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science
ISBN: 9781135445362
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2015-03-27T04:00:00+00:00

The print media’s struggle for survival

Media changes in the 2000s have resulted in the decentralization of the national economy and political life. Being heavily dependent on the centralized production processes and distribution systems of the Soviet era, post-Soviet Russian print media were not able to maintain both cheap and efficient home delivery and timely retail sales systems. As a result, the press in small towns with limited advertising markets had dramatic reductions in circulation and became very dependent on subsidies from local authorities, while newspapers in urban industrial centres began to serve the everyday cultural demands and consumption of the inhabitants, able to link distribution to the transport and trade infrastructure of these cities. The arrival of the global phenomenon of free newspapers, together with the establishment of new lifestyle and consumer habits made this development even stronger.

The pyramid structure of the press market that was at the heart of the ideologically determined and vertically hierarchical Soviet media system has been replaced by a complex of horizontally linked regional local media markets, marked by declining local print media. As the State Agency of Press and Mass Communication reported, ‘two thirds of the circulation of socio-political newspapers are created by regional and local editions’ (2007: 30). The number of newspaper titles increased significantly from nearly 5,000 (in 1991), to nearly 6,000 (in 2000) and to over 28,000 (in 2012), but the newspaper circulation as a whole first dropped dramatically from 160 million to 109 million (a decrease of 68 per cent) and then increased again to 232 million at time of writing (an increase of 112 per cent), though with the share of nationally distributed newspapers falling to 35 per cent. In many places, newspapers reduced publication from daily to weekly, reflecting the trend in print media from news to entertainment (SMI Rossiji, 2011). The print media also continued to decline under pressure from increasing competition from the Internet and with the impact of the global financial crisis of 2008–2010.

The lack of significant investment in printing and distribution, as well as the uneven development of regional advertising markets, clearly affected the business operations of the newspaper companies. On the one hand, the non-national press became strongly dependent on regional and local authorities, which began to provide large amounts of both formal and informal financial support. On the other hand, the privatized national dailies with established Soviet brands – Komsomolskaya Pravda, Sovetsky Sport, Moskovsky Komsomolets, Trud, Izvestia – retained the largest market shares, thus gaining some segments of the advertising market.

The most active private-media holding companies have built themselves up around the well-established titles: Moscow’s daily newspapers – Moskovsky Komsomolets (Average Issue Readership (AIR): 1.4 million), Komsomolskaya Pravda (2.2 million) and Izvestia (334,900) – safeguarded their popularity outside the capital by producing inserts in cooperation with regional dailies. These dailies adopted particular content strategies similar to sensational journalism. Other leading publications are state-owned: Rossijskaya Gazeta (1 million), Sport-Express (523,900), Sovetsky Sport (418,900) and Trud (196,900). The position of quality newspapers is more problematic.

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