Journalism and Newsmaking in Russia

Within the nearly two decades that Vladimir Putin has been in power, Russian lawmakers and authorities have turned the country’s media into a highly efficient tool of regime legitimation – very successfully so, as Putin’s popularity ratings show. The Kremlin has been particularly innovative in using a wide range of programmes for propaganda purposes, among them not only news, but also talks shows and light entertainment formats. Media outlets that tried to provide alternative views to those of the Kremlin have been shut down, forced into exile or operate under severely restricted conditions.

Despite a global fascination with Putin’s success in media manipulation and propaganda, we know rather little about what exactly is going on in Russian media, how journalists handle the ever-changing policies the government implements and how they affect their everyday practices in the newsroom and beyond. Instead of reducing Russian journalists to ‘soldiers of the Kremlin’, we want to understand the complexities of journalistic agency as well as the factors that affect news making: political pressure, market and self-censorship.

Russian journalism does not exist in isolation from the world. This is why we bring scholars and media practitioners from different countries to the United Kingdom to add a wider perspective on the logics of newsmaking in Russia. Interesting here is to what extent Russian journalism – whether deplorably or not – is leading the way in how journalism is done in the late 2010s. For the time being, we thought about gathering journalists who are familiar with Russian media, among them Ukrainian and Hungarian experts as well as expats from the former Eastern blog who are currently working or conducting research in Britain.

In English