Eco-friendly magazine

The Lesnevskys want to return to the Russian media market with a humanitarian mission

The founders and first owners of the REN TV channel, Irena and Dmitry Lesnevsky, who lost their brainchild to Severstal last summer, are returning to the Russian media market. And in a somewhat new role - publishers. Yesterday it was officially announced that their company Ren Media Group had acquired the weekly “Novoe Vremya” - one of the oldest Russian publications that has retained independence from the state or fuel-industrial groups friendly to the authorities, but is in a rather difficult financial situation.

Chairman of the Board of Ren Media Group Dmitry Lesnevsky, commenting on the purchase, explained to Vremya Novostey that “cinema, television, and magazines are our sphere of interests, our profession, our implementation.” Speaking about the direction of the publication, he chose to quote his mother: “It will be an environmentally friendly product.” Irena Lesnevskaya did not specify how much it cost her to acquire the magazine with all its debts, but promised to attract substantial investments in this project. “We will take out loans, we will raise everyone and everything in order to breathe new life into “New Time,” she said on the Ekho Moskvy radio station, outlining her main goals now in the printed press - “a serious general publication with analytical expertise and good journalism that clearly reflects today."

The new owners were the first to “raise” the former editor-in-chief of the newspapers “Gazeta”, “Izvestia” and “Kommersant” Raf Shakirov, who was also invited to return to the market and head the project of reviving “Novoye Vremya”. “We can say that my appointment has already taken place, and now we are working on a publication, the first updated issue of which we plan to release in February,” Mr. Shakirov himself said yesterday. The concept of the updated magazine as presented by Raf Shakirov was practically no different from the statements with which he came to Gazeta and Izvestia. Using the well-known tracing paper from English, the new editor promised to make a weekly magazine “in the general interest segment.” “Not to be confused with a socio-political magazine - we will write about everything,” he clarified. Mr. Shakirov expressed hope that the new business model “will allow the magazine not only to exist, but also to earn money.”

However, apparently, it was not the desire to make a quick profit from this project that prompted Messrs. Lesnevsky to purchase "New Time". In a conversation with a Vremya Novostei correspondent, Dmitry Lesnevsky said: “We expect that the publication will become profitable no later than in two years. However, this is not a commercial project, but rather a humanitarian one.”

It is still unclear whether the project will be humanitarian not only for the former editor-in-chief of Novoye Vremya Alexander Pumpyansky, who, in his own words, expects to remain working in some capacity in the updated publication, but also for the rest of the publication’s journalists. Let us recall that the arrival of Mr. Shakirov at Izvestia provoked the dismissal of a number of employees. One of the Novoye Vremya journalists admitted yesterday that last week the weekly's staff received notices of the liquidation of the enterprise. “We are officially fired. On December 1, we will be given work books - that’s all we know,” said Vremya Novostey’s interlocutor. “True, they promised us that they would talk to each of us individually, but whether it would be an invitation to work in a new capacity, or a farewell, is also unknown.” In turn, Dmitry Lesnevsky believes that “the alliance of Irena and Shakirov will attract many talented journalists who, for various reasons, are not in demand on the market today.”

Irina BELASHEVA