Alexey Chadayev. My newspaper

My newspaper
Alexey Chadayev

Publication date: February 16, 2004

The market for readable socio-political media in the literal sense does not exist in Russia today. The mechanisms on which the existing media operate are a direct consequence of the inadequacy of investment policies in this area - in other words, money scams. The only sectors that are fully remunerated directly from the consumer or advertiser were jaundice (Megapolis Express) and gloss (Cosmopolitan). The first is due to the presence of truly massive effective demand for this type of “content” (yesterday in Mytishchi they caught Hitler with his tail under a bridge). The second is due to the extremely limited supply of targeted advertising tools in the media market (there is nowhere to really spend money on advertising), which consistently forces advertisers to turn to glossy magazines (there is an unfounded prejudice among advertisers that glossy magazines are the most effective weapon targeted advertising for target audiences). What we consider traditional newspapers, i.e. daily commented feeds of news agencies (" Kommersant ", " Izvestia ", " Nezavisimaya ", " Vedomosti ", " Gazeta ", etc.), do not have effective demand either from the consumer or from the advertiser.

The question of why this is so requires a separate analysis, which I will provide below, but the fact is that all these projects are, firstly, expensive, and secondly, extremely small in circulation (with a completely shameful indicator compared to Western media penetration, even cumulative) and, thirdly, they exist thanks to the manic aspirations of investors investing in this market in order to support media influences. That is, translated into Russian, means for brainwashing and launching ducks. The business model of these media is that the editors and publications exist not so much on money from consumers and advertisers, but on the money of investors who pay readers (by reducing the market value of the publication as a product to a level below cost) to read their own propaganda. The publication, as an intermediary between the first and the second, makes its own kickback.

At the same time, the propaganda tools themselves used in these media are also extremely inadequate, because all of them, as luck would have it, are parody versions of Tretyakov’s “independence” of the 1990 model. Pseudo-objective-neutral, when what the journalist actually wants to say should under no circumstances be stated in plain text, because this is a gross violation of journalistic ethics. Roughly speaking, if the journalist’s “message” is that “I was ordered to hit Minister Sidorov, and therefore I must tell you all that he is a goat, and you must believe me,” then the “legend” of this “message” is in the article looks like this: “According to our source in the Prosecutor General’s Office, a criminal case is being prepared in the near future against Minister Sidorov under the article “corruption”, and evidence has already been collected from law enforcement agencies.” People, they say, are waiting for pure information, and absolutely no one is interested in anyone’s opinion regarding it - this is what their entire brethren are taught at the journalism department these days.

From a purely commercial point of view, at the counter level, it is extremely difficult to believe that there is any mass effective demand for this kind of “information.” No, of course, the number of people who want to pay for the publication of such information in newspapers is quite large, but those who want to read it there are decidedly few and will only get smaller in the future. The fact that such relics still exist is just the dying inertia of the perestroika Gdlyano-Ivanovo hysteria, which has outlived time by several years. Well, there are still people who need daily confirmation of their conviction that “what bastards everyone is at the top,” but there are fewer and fewer of them and there are more and more schizophrenia among them.

Here it is necessary to make a reservation that I did not use the example of attacks in the sense that all these media consist of nothing but attacks. The current market for custom-made clothing and jeans is not only not limited to raids, but also does not consist primarily of them: reading modern newspapers “between the lines” is a most exciting activity. There are all kinds of “messages” there... but the mechanism of their work is exactly the same as in the case of “impact”.

The general conclusion from the above is the following: there is no normal media market because the management of publications perceives the consumer of their products not as an audience or even a direct advertiser (as according to science), but as an “investor” or “customer”: with these latter they work (in seller-buyer format) is able to do this, but with a “counter” audience - not. Actually, this idea in itself is not new; however, the development of this understanding lies in determining the meaning of why exactly the current “Tretyakov” journalism is not a competitive product.

The reasons are quite simple. Firstly, the modern reader of a newspaper does not perceive it as a source of information about events. In this capacity, by definition, it loses to other media formats - electronic media in the first place. Therefore, a purely informational publication is doomed, and it is a pity that this is not taught at the Faculty of Journalism. Secondly, the reader cares about his own interests, and not the interests of oligarchs and ministers dealing with each other. Tretyakov journalism does not provide information about how this or that political or economic event affects each person personally; its main genre, the holy of holies, is the operational exclusive commentary of a high-status person on yesterday’s message from the Interfax feed (what Deputy Pupkin thinks about the latest government decisions). Thirdly, the modern edition does not have any position - i.e. in fact, of course, it has, but it is always carefully hidden according to the laws of the genre. While if anything can be a product today, it is just a packaged and interesting position.

Of course, many objective problems of the print media market remain outside the brackets here - first of all, the crisis of newspaper consumer culture itself. The reason for this, by the way, is far from being the development of televisions and the Internet - they, as “advanced Western experience” shows, are not exactly killers of the newspaper genre - on the contrary, they provide new opportunities for its development. It is no coincidence that offline media sites - agencies and newspapers - lead in online media ratings in the States, Germany and Great Britain; and not all sorts of “lenta.ru”, like ours. But this crisis in itself is far from the main reason - the success we have in Russia in jaundice and thematic media (sports, work, automobile, etc.) is excellent evidence of this.

The result is this, somewhat paradoxical: in order to be sold, a newspaper must be a party one. Not in the Soviet sense, when the party is one and represents the mind, honor and conscience of our era. And in the purely petty-bourgeois: socio-political newspapers must be class-based, i.e. reflect the positions of the social layer that is their main consumer, reader. In this case, their position on policy issues is not the result of a momentary situational situation, expressed in the current wishes of the investor, but a reflection of the class interests of their audience, which buys it for this. At the moment, only “Soviet Russia” meets this indicator - that’s why it exists with a large circulation using the money of pensioners in our time. In our “bourgeois” spectrum, there are no such publications: although almost all of them declare an orientation towards the “middle class”, in reality they turn out to be either oligarchic (or bossy) propaganda posters, or spineless “independent” of anything.

At the same time, we must understand: from the point of view of format, the position is not an endless discussion about the meaning of life and the problems of the universe. There is a narrow column genre for this. A position is, first of all, a tendentious, propagandistic, ideologically consistent and polemically tough author's commentary on an event - ideally one that was not so much noticed by other media. And at the same time, the position must necessarily be purely selfish: according to the principle “your shirt is closer to your body.”

In a nutshell: I need a newspaper to which I, as a reader, can apply the epithet “mine.” And I never used the epithet “general”.