The Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications decided not to recognize Vedomosti as a systemically important organization due to a conflict in the editorial office

The conflict within the editorial office of the Vedomosti newspaper was one of the reasons why the publication was not included in the list of backbone organizations of the Russian Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications. Vedomosti themselves write about this.

Conflict in Vedomosti

In March 2020, the newspaper's owners announced a preliminary agreement to sell it to Konstantin Zyatkov, head of the Versiya publishing house, and Aleksey Golubovich, managing director of Arbat Capital. After that, Andrei Shmarov was appointed acting editor-in-chief, who had a conflict with the editors, who accused him of censorship restrictions. So, he corrected the title of the article about Rosneft to the opposite in meaning, removed the column about Igor Sechin from the publication’s website, and also announced a ban on the publication of polls by the Levada Center and criticism of the zeroing of Vladimir Putin’s presidential terms.

As Alexei Volin, Deputy Minister of Communications, explained to the publication, the list included publications that would occupy large niches in the market for a long time, and Vedomosti employees themselves say that the actions of and. O. editor-in-chief Andrey Shmarov will lead to the decline of the publication. “Since the shareholders of Vedomosti are not going to change and. O. editor-in-chief, we should expect the disappearance of the existing audience, ”Volin said, adding that now the publication“ resembles an uncontrolled bus ”and that this“ is in no way a symbol of system formation.

In addition, the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications considered that Vedomosti did not meet the formal criterion for inclusion in the list - a monthly audience of 10 million people. The publication notes that the audience of his site in March increased sharply and amounted to 14.4 million, but the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications used average data for the past few months in its calculations (for example, in February, Vedomosti had 6.9 million readers).

Updated April 29 12:45 pm . The Kremlin believes that internal relations in the team can in no way influence decisions on providing assistance to companies, told Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov reporters. For the reasoning of the decision of the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications, he recommended to contact the department itself.

• The list of 79 backbone companies was presented by the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications on April 21. Of the newspapers there included, in particular, "Kommersant", "Komsomolskaya Pravda", "Moskovsky Komsomolets". They can count on additional state support.