Ivan Davydov. Interpol, issue twentieth: NTV failure

Interpol, issue twentieth: NTV failure
Ivan Davydov

Date of publication: September 1, 2000

Prelude: Tower

I am writing this in August, but you will read it in September. Therefore, at least you survived August and that’s good.

At the end of the day, August gave us a fire in the tower. One could expect the media to repeat the well-established scenario of reaction to the tragedy, we’ve seen enough. But it turned out not. Apparently, the concept of “tragedy” is defined mathematically for Russian journalists - by the number of deaths. More than a hundred is a tragedy, definitely. Twelve - back and forth again. But three is clearly not enough.

This apparently explains the shift in the thematic spectrum: no one, for example, is looking for someone to blame. Everyone somehow immediately came to terms with the fact that the paging companies were to blame. But what are the possibilities: well, firstly, of course, Putin set fire to the tower. To finally end freedom of speech. (However, this version was implicitly voiced by Kiselev and Dorenko in their interviews with Echo.) The tower was set on fire by the communists. They've already tried. Chechens (this version was voiced by Udugov , but they believed him, it seems, only in France). The tower was set on fire by newspaper men. Video merchants. Why didn't the president come to Ostankino? Didn’t rush into the fire with a fire extinguisher at the ready?! I am not being ironic: a week ago the question “why didn’t the president dive into the Barents Sea?” seemed to make sense to everyone. I don't see the difference.

But Prokhanov says that the tower burned down due to the prayers of the Optina elders . The desert fathers and the blameless wives, in a word, achieved their goal. Prokhanov is a genius: “Something in the nature of things could not stand it - in the copper cable or in the heart of a heavenly angel. Perhaps the last abominations that ORT did with the North Sea widows. Or the abominations of NTV, which showed Hanga to virgins, rubbing it with garlic and mercury The tower smoked, turning either into a huge Novodvorskaya, scolding communism, or into Kiselyov, praising the NATO troops. Poptsov flew out of the tower like a pastor, riding a broom, in long johns, depicting freaks of war veterans. Svanidze’s head, frightening the firefighters, alone, without a puny body, shimmered with whites, holding Naina Iosifovna’s shoe in his teeth. And only Shvydkoy, clinging to the tower with his suspenders, was unperturbed, like the causal part of a naked prosecutor.”

An interesting point: a fighter for Russian spirituality and against non-Russian spirituality, choking on jubilation, is not aware of his own cynicism. The three dead are the same ordinary Russian people for whose happiness he seems to be fighting. However, neither he nor his fellow party members were ever embarrassed by the need to pay with other people’s lives for their own ideas. Also, pay attention to, excuse me, the causal place of the naked prosecutor . We have only one naked prosecutor, and you know him. The funny thing is that the red press, “Zavtra” is no exception, at one time devoted many pages to defending an honest crime fighter defamed by his family. And now they remember it in this context. Old friends are quickly forgotten, however. And if they remember, then partially somehow.

Behind the arguments that filled all the newspapers for a week, that now we’ll start going to theaters and reading books (can you imagine, by the way, it turns out that someone watches TV except Shusharin , but at least he’s for money, and what’s the rest for?) some interesting problem. August turned out to be truly fateful, primarily for the media. It only took a month for all the leading media to turn into sheets of standard format: a spectacular picture from the scene of the incident plus a certain set of irresponsible propaganda lyrics. Result: all generally important topics dropped out of the context of the discussion. The opposition media, which closely followed every step of the authorities, convinced themselves and their fans for so long that the president must be a diver that they lost sight of the real intentions of the authorities. And crying on television in newspapers and magazines is crying out of one’s own helplessness (see also Andrei Levkin’s article “Fish of the Baskervilles” ). Well, colleagues, you will go to the theater and read books. The latter may be beneficial if by books one does not mean some Bolman novels .

Television, which, however, has almost returned, has expanded its presence on the Internet. News from central TV channels can be read in Gazeta.ru , others - in the new project of Porta , all at once - in SMI.ru.

Crazy thought: what country would we be living in now if the fire in Ostankino had happened a couple of months before the Duma elections?

And now a terrible secret. Only the lazy do not predict the rise in popularity of the network in the capitals. Some, even with numbers in their hands, convince us that the takeoff has already happened. Well, who benefits from this? Wasn't the fire started, for example, in order to more efficiently launch the early commissioning of the long-promised NTV portal, as in the old days?

NTV failure

So, it's done. It is open, this long-promised Russian CNN . All online and many non-online media are full of reports. And also speeches by the creators, primarily Anton Nosik. The unobtrusiveness and indirectness of PR strikes to the heart.

For example, Anton says in an interview with Netoscope, which he recently opened:

The Media-Most holding, not only the NTV television company, employs a thousand journalists. Millions are spent on creating first-class, exclusive information. There is no such information product on the Russian Internet yet, when operational information, created by hundreds of professionals, is fully presented on the Internet in a form that is convenient and familiar to the Internet audience, that is, with hypertext, with an archive, with a conveniently downloadable picture, slide show and video clips of main stories.

I want to shout hurray and throw some cap into the air. But for some reason I remember Lyudmirsky’s words, spoken two years ago on a different occasion: “You say it’s bad? Well, in this case it’s not necessary to be good, in this case it’s precisely bad that’s necessary! I’m a professional, I know, I’ve been doing this for a long time.” . This argument comes into play when all other show-offs have been exhausted." This is from the article "Marketing With Show-off" , published once in the now defunct "Hall of Columns". I accidentally returned to this almost memorial complex and was surprised to discover that the speakers were from 1998 years turned out to be prophetic literature in the full sense of the word. We will talk about this later.

Much has already been said about the technical shortcomings of the project, but they are most likely a consequence of the early opening. Yes, and it’s not interesting. The main drawback of the project is conceptual. Every television company must have a website. This is a rule of good manners now. Even every laundry service should have a website. But if a television company does not create a presentation page, but an information resource, then limiting itself to the banal transfer of its own (even unique and high-quality, although in this case this is a controversial point) product to the network is a big mistake. And the presence of some kind of slide show doesn’t help matters. People generally go to other sites for slide shows, shouldn’t Anton Borisovich know?

Internet information resources live by different laws from off-line ones. The Internet stubbornly dictates its own requirements for the presentation of information. And the question of survival for the Internet version of the off-line media is to become something more than the Internet version. Isn’t Itogi, for example, objectively better in quality than any “purely online” media? However, they are far from the popularity of Vesti or Gazeta.Ru (and any other online version of the top off-line media). These laws are not described in the instructions, but isn’t it part of professionalism to feel them?

The banal transplantation of off-line flowers to online soil is fraught with other dangers: at this stage, what can be called the “reverse effect of a promoted brand.” Well, why should I read Kommersant online if I’m used to starting my morning with this even before turning on the computer (by the way, I wouldn’t see it for ages)? I’d rather look for something online that I can’t find outside of it. (This means, for example, “Lenta.Ru”, and not pornography, as some might think. Isn’t there a lot of pornography outside the network, in the same, for example, “Kommersant”?)

If optimistic forecasts about the inevitable growth of the Internet audience come true, the “network versions” will face a new problem: their online audience will block the “traditional” one. Regarding NTV, this still looks like a utopia, but for the same “Itogi” the prospect is quite real. It’s scary to think what kind of disruption of existing structures this will entail. Maybe then the heads of off-line media will regret those times when they gave the go-ahead for the early descent from the stocks of their own Internet versions and broke bottles of champagne on the plastic sides of the servers.

By the way, the NTV portal is not the only MOST website that appeared last week. "NTV-Profit" opened the official website of the film "Russian Revolt" (in its maiden name "The Captain's Daughter"), which was not in time for the anniversary. Bunt.Ru is an enviable domain. Look, the BRIDGE will do just fine. In foreseeable future.

Other

On the occasion of its fourth anniversary, Planet Internet magazine published another diagram of the RUNET trust. The version in which companies are united into “influence groups” based on the similarity of names (for example, everyone who has the word “media” in their name is in one group, the word “fund” is in another) is not without a certain naive grace. Something like a three-year-old child’s reasoning about the universe. Or a schizophrenic - on the same topic. Details (and the actual diagram) are in my article on SMI.ru.

An exclusive photo report about the fire on the tower appeared on the Obozrenia.ru website.

Reports on the progress of restoration work are published on the tower's official website .

Boat

And on one Estonian website a game appeared: by driving an English rescue boat, you can save the crew of the Kursk. Or it may not be saved, but in this case there is a “play again” button.

One might view this as the limit of cynicism. Or it can be - as an attempt to correct the incorrigible. At least that way.