Eyewitnesses and virtuals

Autumn is approaching - new media projects enter the market.

August 16 - the date of the official start of the next attempt to create Russian New Yorker - this time it is called the "new eyewitness" , and makes it , of course, Sergey Mostovshchikov. The name is chosen well. Indeed, the New Yorker is not translated into Russian either as a "New Yorker", or as a "resident of New York", or even as a "Moskvich". Only as an “eyewitness”: I was there (in New York), I drank medical drink, and now, having returned, I’m talking about what I saw, “there will be no points.”

The most interesting thing here is where this desire of the Russian media test came from at all costs to make it “New Yorker” with us. This is heard for at least three years now, and precisely as a cherished dream. It would seem that there were already two Russian “Newsouics”, one Russian “Forbes”, several “Fayneshl Times” and “Wall Street of Jornals”, and you can’t count a variety of spigels-but for some reason the soul asked for “New Yorker”. This cherished name was mentioned in connection with a variety of projects - "metropolitan", "big city", even "timeout", but now, it seems, it has finally gained flesh in the "eyewitness".

The Russian media market was suffered by some strange, unusual disease, the symptom of which is the crisis of subjectivity. In the poor, performed by the chaos of the early 90s, the creators of the media had no doubt about the opportunity to take and promote from scratch in Russia its own, unique media brand, which has a face and name, whose cost is reflected in multimillion-dollar capitalization. The creators of the “independent”, “businessman” or “Russian telegraph” never came up with the idea of ​​making “Russian Fayneshl Times” - they made a new, modern media for Russia, free from both Soviet and Western media dogmas. And this, in general, turned out - adjusted for crises, oligarchic wars and other conjuncture.

In the late 90s and early zero, decay began-new original projects were somewhat strange and did not live for a long time (the “conservative” ## 1 and 2, “metropolitan”), or fell on the periphery of public life (“New Izvestia”, “Russian Courier”, “Rossia”, etc.) and ceased to be media in the proper, becoming not the same Resources of influence "just in case." Meanwhile, meanwhile, kept the same "Kommersant" and "Vedomosti", and from the weekly - "expert". Finally, the publishers, having suffered with low -trip, fundamentally unprofitable and, most importantly, not very influential publications, at some point decided that all this was from local unprofessionalism and provinciality. And then the era of the expectation of the coming of Western brands began, which "will come and do as it should."

Of course, world brands are good not only in their professionalism. For Russian business, to have media assets as a resource of influence has become meaningless in the Putin era (for the authorities learned to ignore everything that they write about it), and besides dangerous, they can also be stuck on the neck for politics, and there will be no one to interview. Another thing is when, on the cover of the publication, in large letters it is written, for example, Newsweek; This, read, is a universal “roof”, even more abrupt than any “Chekists”. Here, if you are afraid of anything, then only a random bullet .

However, the Western brands nevertheless still can’t “literary” to translate into Russian - the expansion is openly choked. There is nothing surprising in this: the Russian literary (and within its framework is journalistic and journalistic) tradition - perhaps more serious than English or franco -speaking; Our formats, genres and methods of working with the material are firmly rooted in the audience of the "reading country of the world." And therefore, here the situation not only does not resemble the auto industry, but is directly opposite to it: the imported is worse than the domestic (the quality of which, however, is also satisfied with few). “Effective managers” of Western training time after time require journalists of dry, impersonal and detached presentation of facts (as it should be according to a translated textbook), and readers once after time buy Izvestia only for the feuilletons of Maxim Sokolov or the columns of Alexander Arkhangelsky, where there is no dryness, no objectivity, nor even the facts themselves, but there is an interesting point of view, but there is an interesting point of view. set forth by a beautiful Russian language. And people do not even read all other news - there are TV and the Internet for news.

In other words, the small circulations of most publications are not because the Russian people have forgotten how to read. Rather, because they have nothing to read. But this media test will never be able to admit this, because thereby she will sign a sentence to her professionalism.

Meanwhile, while there was a gaping emptiness in the printing diagnostic market for many years, people learned to read “e -media” - Internet news and comments. We are used to thinking that we are talking about a global trend, but in fact it is uniquely Russian. In Russia alone, the leaders of the ratings of attendance and citation are not sites of print publications, information agencies and television companies, but media that exist on the Internet and nowhere else. And only on the Web is created that without which there is no real publication - the living, permanent communities of authors and regular readers, where some others are changing places all the time. The volumes of visits to the leading Internet media are comparable to the circulations of federal newspapers, otherwise they are sometimes superior to them - despite the fact that the market value of print media is, in general, symbolic.

We have not yet learned how to make business from the Internet media; Neither the sale of content, nor advertising on the network work as a business model. Although a huge number of representatives of the most promising audience - urban "white collar" - today prefer high -quality network content and club communication through the network to any offline information products. That media manager who can solve this problem at the business process level has the right to, probably, to apply for state-owned economics. In the meantime, the Internet media, with all their wealth and diversity, remain semi -amateur and charitable substitutes for the “real” press - which is still very, very few.

PS On the same day, on August 16, in addition to the release of the "New Eye", another important media event occurred. Resumed the work of Globalrus.ru - one of the best sites of daily comments in the Russian -speaking network. It is not known how much the edition is “enough” this time, but in any case - with one white spot in the landscape of Runet for a while, there were fewer. And that's good.