The loyal editor effect: Russian online journalism after independence

Abstract

This article investigates what effect pressure from owners – via loyal editors – had on journalistic output at the popular Russian online newspapers Lenta and Gazeta. Using novel methods to analyze a data-set of nearly 1 million articles from the period 2010–2015, this article separates the effect of a changing news agenda from new editorial priorities. Statistical tests show that changes in output coincide temporally with editorial change, and that the direction of change sees new editors move away from publication patterns associated with other independent outlets. In both Gazeta and Lenta, editorial changes were accompanied by a move away from core news areas such as domestic and international politics, toward lifestyle and human interest subjects. The loyal editor effect resulted in a 50% reduction in coverage of controversial legal proceedings, together with the business dealings of Russian elites.

Keywords:

• Russian media
• independent media
• Gazeta
• Lenta
• journalism
• editors

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges helpful feedback from Tom Rowley, Ilya Yablokov, Julie Fedor, Joanna Szostek, Gernot Howanitz, Marina Khmelnitskaya, and comments from members of the Conspiracy and Democracy Project, in particular John Naughton, David Runciman, Hugo Drochon, Tanya Filer, and Alfred Moore.

Notes

1. By late 2014, both Lenta and Gazeta had fallen below the online publication RBC in Medialogia’s rankings. In May 2016, after the analysis for this article was completed, three top RBC editors were sacked, apparently after pressure from the Kremlin. In a move mirroring the changes at Lenta two years earlier, a number of journalists resigned in protest. According to media speculation, the firings were in response to investigative journalism that exposed the wealth of Putin’s associates, the true identity of his daughters, and delved into the Panama papers (Seddon 2016).

2. Defined as authors who published at least five articles over the previous four-month period.

3. The classification is based on the Calvert Journal’s (2014) typology of the Russian media landscape, “Media Compass,” where outlets were classified on two axes, from independent to state-controlled and from low- to high-brow.

4. For this reason Slon, owned by Natalia Sindeeva, could not be included, as most of its content is behind a paywall.

5. The tables show keywords present in at least 100 articles from the early period, in both the independent and the state-controlled group, and that were at least 50% over- or under-represented following the change in both Gazeta and Lenta. Results obtained in this manner should be treated as impressionistic rather than statistically significant, due to a high number of tests being performed.

6. The number of articles with “insurgent” as a keyword during the early period is high because the state-controlled outlets published a much larger number total number of articles, and because the pejorative meaning refers primarily to insurgents elsewhere (e.g. in Syria) rather than Russian-speakers in Ukraine.

7. When doing the calculations, I used proportions rather than raw numbers to account for changing sample size.

8. There are three publications in the independent group and seven in the state-controlled group. Three in ten is 30%.

9. One explanation might be that the independent and state-controlled groups cut unevenly across the highbrow–lowbrow divide: Lifenews and Komsomol’skaya Pravda skew findings toward the sensational and popular. For the purposes of this article, this imbalance is unproblematic, as the relationship is stable: Komsomol’skaya Pravda was as much a tabloid in 2012 as in 2015.

10. The model assumes that the editorial intervention had no impact on the other publications’ output.

11. Of course, a reduction of more than 100% would be illogical.