Authors

Ivan Preobrazhenskiy¹;  ¹ Insider, Latvia

Discussion

After flourishing in an unrestricted environment in the 90s, Russian media workers have been adapting to a gradually closing space since the mid-2000s. By February 2022 the Russian government had created the conditions that made it virtually impossible for the independent media outlets to live off subscriptions or advertisement. 

Even so, the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine abruptly changed the whole media landscape, becoming the end of traditional media outlets in Russia. Major players, such as Novaya Gazeta, lost their licences, others got their websites blocked and journalists forced into exile en masse. As the formal and official censorship was enacted, all the media outlets that were not ready to become the beacons of propaganda or to stop writing about anything even remotely related to politics, moved their offices outside of Russia or simply closed down. Non-independent journalists with a pro-war stance also face backslash from the state for any deviation from the official propaganda narratives. The aim is to analyse the changes of the media workers’ approach to their work and mission, and the strategies they employ to survive and remain relevant to the audience at different stages of the so far three-years war. 

Emigrant media outlets have been facing the obvious problems throughout this period: almost non-existent number of on-the-ground reporters, constrained human and financial resources, high level of dependency of employees from their editors/outlet owners and lack of transparency due to security concerns, which in turn create a fertile ground for abuses, impossibility of long-term planning and the worst of all, lack of feedback from the audience.

Since many people in Russia consider it dangerous to leave comments or write replies to the ‘banned’ outlets’ posts, it becomes impossible to verify the journalists’ assumptions about their audience. And the assumption, under which they operate, is that the most radical anti-war people are either already outside of Russia, or are already more or less their audience. And all others are perceived at least to some extent brain-washed by state propaganda.

Media outlets have a strong motivation to reach them: they now depend on grant funding, and the main selection criteria is the number of people consuming content in Russia. Hence, the self-censor. It’s important to note, that while many media workers had been self-censoring before the invasion, this was for completely different reasons: either in self-interest (for the fear of one's safety) or in the interests of the outlets’ beneficiaries. The grand change is the fact that now self-censoring is employed in the interest of the audience, or at least in the interest of reaching a wider audience. Hence, our research shows that it has been increasingly becoming media workers’ basic strategy for survival.