“We are fed up with formats!” Novaya Gazeta, one of the most innovative and successful media projects of the post-Soviet era, turns 15 on April 1st. The New Times dealt with the national characteristics of the democratic press together with the editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta
Dmitry Muratov to Andrey Kolesnikov
Dmitry, to put it bluntly, your newspaper is somehow wrong. A strange appearance, a strange periodicity ... Did it happen by itself or was it specially invented?
We tried many times to organize the newspaper. Of course, we know how an ordinary newspaper is made: a layout, a rubricator... It doesn't work that way. Yegor Yakovlev once said that Novaya Gazeta was built on the principle of a "hot line". The most important thing should be in the newspaper. And most importantly, in our opinion, this is everything that concerns the control of power by society. I will say a brazen thing: Novaya Gazeta is public opinion. For example, quite unexpectedly, public opinion, that is, the opinion of our readers, urgently demanded that we return to the topic of Stalinist terror. Judging by the measurements of our site, this topic is the subject of great interest of the audience. And in response to this, we are starting to publish a regular tab about the personal and nominal responsibility of those who were guilty of massacres.
And of course, if we follow these principles, everything goes to hell! Each planning meeting is a terrible curse about the fact that something flies out of the room ... In a word, when everyone goes in the format, we do the non-format. We are tired of formats! Tired of formats!
What is this current format?
This is a newspaper, as they say, designed for "a single, 25-year-old billionaire" - they advertise under it. Or: on our TV screens, for example, there is a war of mayonnaise, a battle of annihilation. It is designed for people who are being eaten up by inflation, and this mayonnaise is being sucked into them. Here are two formats. And there is an intermediate format that one channel offers - a big night corpse truck. You wrote a very funny Solomon column about this. 1 These formats do not suit me, this "trend" of theirs - all this "leasing", "yachting", "putting" ... These formats do not reflect the mood of society, but manipulate it. Well, what kind of format is this, when in the village of Coal, Yakutsk region, 418 families freeze, they have -3o Celsius in their homes and schools, and when a boiler house was brought to the residents and it did not work, they were explained the problem: “Your village is not suitable for the boiler house.” This format definitely does not fit into the life of a 25-year-old single billionaire!
We have a very smart audience. And we can't raise circulation at the cost of losing reputation. As Andrey Lipsky put it 2 : "We form our agenda." And we will do it regardless of the market. 15 years without a market!
Novaya has a huge circulation by today's standards: the total circulation is half a million. But this is how much public opinion weighs?
Now there is a new philosophy: "Don't ship me!" We are constantly reproached that we are “loading” with Chechnya, Beslan, Stalinist repressions, reminding us of the promises of the previous governments. Yes, we "load" - and work for the audience that understands why we do it. Society has a right to know what's going on. Another thing is that there is no society as a whole. There are several nations. There are people who live along the roads and far from them. There are people who have been transferred to the reserve, and there are conscripted people. There is a part of the intelligentsia that treats us with indulgence and even love and kindness. Here we are working for these people. We consider our audience to be our people.
Can an opposition newspaper be commercially successful?
We categorically reject the concept of "opposition newspaper" in relation to ourselves. Still, the opposition is an organization, a party or a community of people who would like to come to power. We are not going to come to take the place of power. We do not have an opposition, we have our own position. We are not a party newspaper. Our “party” is our audience that we serve. Now for the commercial success. We really, by Russian standards, have a large circulation. And there is an upward trend. The audience of the site has grown 10 times over the past year and a half - from 110 to 130 thousand people visit at least 10 pages a week. But it is very difficult to spread. Many networks are bought up by one of the Russian metallurgical oligarchs. The hawkers began to interpret their stalls as advertising media rather than as a place to sell newspapers. Until recently, postal rates have grown insanely, and the newspaper went, for example, to Samara for four days. We set up an experiment here: we launched carrier pigeons that competed with Russian mail. Pigeons delivered the newspaper 78 times faster than mail. We are actually witnessing the murder of periodical media... All this is being done in the aggregate in order to prevent the appearance of a minimally different point of view on reality. Here's a trade...
How does the authorities react to your publications - scolds, or maybe thanks?
I will say something absolutely unpopular. Under conditions of authoritarian power, the newspaper's speeches are extremely effective. I don't remember a case when over the past year our inquiries on the toughest problems have not been answered by the authorities. The Prosecutor General's Office, the Federal Migration Service, and the government work best with our requests. Worst of all - the FSB.
What is the state of affairs of Yury Shchekochikhin and Anna Politkovskaya?
We were denied the initiation of a criminal case on the fact of Shchekochikhin's death. We conducted our own investigation, applied to an institute in Britain that analyzes poisonings (it later dealt with the Litvinenko case). They questioned the official diagnosis - Lyell's syndrome, an allergic syndrome of impaired immune activity. For a long time before Shchekochikhin and never after him, no one in the country was struck by this syndrome. I can say that he suffered nothing but an allergy to honey. However, we were denied a third time. How can a case be closed if the cause of the allergy that led to death is not determined? But, to the credit of the head of the Investigative Committee, Bastrykin, the last decision of the investigator was canceled, and the materials were sent for the fourth check.
In the Politkovskaya case, we are helping the group of Pyotr Gharibyan, a highly professional investigator for particularly important cases of the Investigative Committee under the Prosecutor General's Office, as best we can. The investigation is approaching an understanding of the figure of the main customer. But they are trying to break this business. And when we understand who is ruining the case, we will understand who ordered the murder.
What do you think about the future? Like a thaw?
We called it in the title "Thaw". And there are plans: perhaps, over time, we will switch to a daily release. And the color in the advertising tabs. Although, as Yuri Rost put it, Novaya "cannot be colored, it can sometimes work with color."
Dmitry Muratov was born in 1961. By education, he is a journalist. Prior to founding Novaya Gazeta in 1993, he worked for Komsomolskaya Pravda. Since 1995, he has been the editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta. Awarded the Order of Friendship. Novaya Gazeta is published three times a week. Circulation - 173,550 copies. The total circulation, including inserts in regional editions, is 536,125 copies.
