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Newspapers: Free to Be Bankrupt In an extraordinarily frank meeting on November 6 with mass media leaders, President Boris Yeltsin rendered a brutal history, in his view, of the press in Russia and its current crisis. His summary: the majority of publications are in deep financial crisis, almost bankrupt. They suffer, he concluded, from the schizophrenia of having editorial boards that sought to be “free,” but depending on the state for subsidy, printing and other material elements of existence. He predicted that national newspapers would drop, in circulation, to ten percent of their 1991 level. He agree that something should be done to cope with the sweeping price increases and the loss of the mass reader. Our crackerjack editor, Andrei Richter, has prepared an analysis of subscription trends and their relations to costs that provide a grounding for analysis of President Yeltsin’s statement: Late in 1990 Argumenty i fakty (Arguments and Facts), an eight page liberal tabloid of short news items and answers to readers’ questions, had a circulation of 33,190,400 copies, good enough for the Guinness Book of World Records. Half of Soviet families were then regularly reading the weekly. Five seats in Russia’s legislature were held in 1990 by otherwise unknown journalists of AiF. That was no exception. One year earlier, in 1989, liberal chief editors of both Ogoniok (The Small Flame) and Moskovskie novosti (The Moscow News) won seats in the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, while Komsomolskaya pravda, a four page newspaper run by the Young Communists, reached a record-breaking figure of twenty million copies sold every day. 1990 was the peak point of the mass media’s popularity among the population and no one anticipated the scale of the fall that followed. Dimensions of the disaster for national press can be seen in the figures of the accompanying table. With some explanation, the table can also give an insight into the uneven trends of the circulation figures. Subscriptions generally account for up to ninety percent of circulation. Subscriptions are organized by a state agency (affiliated with the post office) on a basis of what used to be a once-a-year-campaign every fall, when the readers paid for one year in advance. Since inflation growth has become unpredictable, subscriptions are charged twice a year in Russia, four times a year in Ukraine, and so on, depending on the scale of the economic downfall in the ex-Soviet republic. Increased costs have been the major economic reason for the recent fall of circulation. Cost of delivery, conducted in the USSR by the post office, accounted for about 30 percent of the cover price of a publication in late 1980s, but has grown to 50 percent last year, about 60 percent this year, and is expected to comprise as much as 85 percent of the cover price in 1994. Newsprint prices have gone up 340 times (from 290 to 100,000 rubles per ton) since 1990. Printing costs, although different for different newspapers, have grown thousands of times in the same time slot. According to Obshchaya gazeta (9-16 July, 1993),dynamics of the subscription prices leave behind those of population revenues, minimum wages, dollar’s rate of exchange and other economic indicators. The press survives these hardships only because of state subsidies. In a press briefing on November 10, Deputy Minister for Press and Information David Tsabria said that there are about 30 billion rubles in subsidy, and that is only half of what is needed. He pointed out that only about 40 percent of the 15,000 mass media outlets in Russia are non-government agencies and one out of three would probably cease existence. He suggested that amendments to the 1991 Mass Media Law would bar state and administrative structures from acting as founders of the mass media in the future. There are also political and social reasons for the ups and downs. The original beneficiaries of the growing demand for information were communist newspapers. In 1986-88 the Party and its leaders were the most radical voices heard in the country. Therefore, to learn of the new political trends people were looking for stories and editorials in Pravda and Sovetskaya Rossia. By 1988 more freedom to express an opinion was granted to some ‘quality’ publications not directly affiliated with the party committees. Those were the golden years for Izvestia (News) and the like. But at the time of the first free elections held in 1989-90, the public at large turned to reading the most unleashed liberal dailies and weeklie—Argumenty i fakty, Ogoniok, and Komsomolskaya pravda—that were uncovering one forbidden topic after another. (Due to its late arrival to the free subscription market, Moskovskie novosti, a pioneer of glasnost, could not share their success in the already divided and crowded market place.) Critical for the future of the press were 1991 and 1992, years of the decline of mass circulation press. The birth of newly independent states was followed by restrictions regarding distribution of some (‘subversive’?) Moscow publications in a number of them (Baltics, Georgia, and Central Asia). Customs and transportation problems have slowed the delivery of others. A recent (October 29) report of Information Television Agency (ITA) says that subscription to just five Moscow publications are permitted in the republic of Uzbekistan. They are Argumenty i fakty, Trud, Rabochaya tribuna (Workers’ Tribune), Sovetsky sport (Soviet Sport), and Meditsinskaya gazeta (Medical Newspaper). With the exception of AiF, the subscription leader everywhere in ex-USSR, all others are absolutely harmless to the left-wing government of Tashkent, with its bad fame for suppression of opposition voices. Political apathy widespread in most of ex-Soviet republics following their independence in late 1991 also contributed to the fall in newspaper reading. A change of the perception, dominant just several years before, that whatever appears in print is true, undermined the glasnost-flavored prestige of the press and public’s trust to mass media in general. A relative success of Moskovsky komsomolets (Moscow Young Communist) and Trud (Labour) on this generally gloomy background can be attributed to the fact that they used the new freedoms of the press mainly to publicize entertainment stories and ‘yellowish’ information. The new papers, Kommersant (Businessman) for the new rich and Nezavisimaya gazeta (Independent Newspaper) for the high-brow intellectuals, seem to have reached just these categories of readers have a ceiling in appeal. Moskovsky komsomolets is an example of the most successful local newspaper in Russia. Mikhail Poltoranin, head of Federal Information Center, made a point (on October 25) of the fact that, this year, print runs of local papers exceed those of national press and considered it as a sign of the end of ‘totalitarian system and centralism;” but the most circulated of the local press are municipal bulletins of classified ads and TV schedules, a doubtful achievement of press freedom. The table also shows Pravda, Sovetskaya Rossia, and Rossiyskaya gazeta all affected by the power struggle this fall. These newspapers, which, by the way, looked better than their liberal competitors in the results of subscription for the second half of 1993, were either excluded from the 1994 subscription campaign, or forced to change political allegiance during the crucial subscription month of October. Table: Circulation of Major Newspapers (in Millions)
Sources:
Dannye TsRPA Rospechat o tirazhakh otdelnykh gazet i
zhurnalov, rasprostraniaemykh po podpiske, na 1 yanvaria
1993 goda (Rospechat Data on Circulation of Some
Newspapers and Magazines, by January 1, 1993)
(unpublished report), Moscow, 1993; Moskovskie novosti, 4
(1993); Izvestia TsK KPSS, 1 (1989): 138-139;
other. |
Last Updated: 11/20/99 |
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© 1999 Post-Soviet Media Law &
Policy Newsletter |
