Jukka Pietiläinen

Foreign News and Foreign Trade What Kind of Relationship

This article presents the results of a search for relationships between news and trade in 33 countries on the basis of data from the 1995 international news flow study. The results prove that the links between trade and news are high in the majority of the countries studied, but there are some important exceptions, like the countries with a unilateral trade flow and a culturally oriented news service (Kuwait), large countries (the US, Russia) and many developing countries. The correlation between news and trade is highest in small industrial countries that are dependent on foreign trade and in which the structure of foreign news differs from the universal structure of foreign news. The comparison of the historical change in news flows in a given country with its international trade indicates that the change in the geographic distribution of foreign trade has an impact on the change in news flows.

Media Use in Putin's Russia

During the past 15 years Russia has been transformed from a newspaper-reading country to a mainly television-watching country. Entertainment channels have increased their audience recently and regularly reach almost half of the population in towns and cities. Survey results collected in February 2007 suggest that the Internet is taking the place of newspapers, especially among the educated, high-income elites and youth. Newspapers do not appear to be responding to the needs of the middle-class audience, while magazines and the Internet are becoming more important media. In general, those media that have modelled themselves on their Western counterparts have had more success at keeping and even increasing their audience.

Why Do Russians Support Censorship of the Media

This article analyses support for censorship in Russia as part of the democratization process. Censorship has been an important part of Russian history and it was strengthened during the Soviet era. After the collapse of the Soviet system formal censorship was banned even though the reality has been different. Therefore it is not strange that many Russians would like to limit the freedom of the media and to censor certain topics. The views of Russians on censorship have been studied on the basis of a survey carried out in 2007. According to the results, three different dimensions of censorship were found. These dimensions include moral censorship, political censorship, and censorship of religious materials. Support for these dimensions varies on the basis of socio-demographic characteristics and media use. The article concludes that many Russians reject new phenomena, while support for the censorship of political criticism is not as high, but political censorship seems to enjoy more support among elites than among the common people.

Journalists in the Russian Regions: How Different Generations View their Professional Roles

The history of the post-Soviet media offers abundant material for research on the transformation from an authoritarian and closed society to a democratic and open one. The post-Soviet media, as its sixteen-year history shows, have in principle been kept on the leash of the political authorities — it is possible to let go of the leash, or to shorten it. During the perestroika era and in the early 1990s Russian journalists’ understanding of the ‘fourth estate’ had a real sense of political efficacy and empowerment. Yeltsin’s government, fascinated by the spirit of freedom of speech, had given the green light to liberal laws and reforms, and its inability to control the political situation left space for freedom, even anarchy.

Media Audiences in a Russian Province

Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Tampere, Kalevantie 4, FIN33014, jukka.pietilainen@uta.fi During the last 15 years of the 20th century, Russian society and media experienced a major change from a centrally planned, authoritarian and unified Soviet society to a market-based, (at least partly) democratic and fragmented society. With the collapse of the Soviet system, the former press structure with dominant national newspapers collapsed and regional newspapers became the most important part of the press. At the same time, newspaper publishing shifted from a daily (usually six times a week) to a weekly rhythm, so that in 2000 the circulation of weeklies was almost two thirds of the circulation of all newspapers (excluding newspapers published irregularly or less than once a week) (for these statistics see Pietilainen 2002a, 124-125 and Pietilainen 2002b, 213-217). According to many studies (Wyman 1997, 108; Resnyanskaya & Fomicheva 1999, 87-88), newspapers have also been losing their readers in the post-Soviet period, but a major part of the population continues to read not only one but usually several newspapers. Although press printing statistics do not reveal the complete picture of press plurality in individual regions, local studies reveal that the plurality of newspapers directed to a wider audience has increased significantly. For example, in Karelia the number of newspapers geared toward a wider audience increased significantly from two or three to over ten. However, few studies have paid attention to the regional newspapers in Karelia (Efremova 1999; Zhurnalist i zhurnalistika... 1994; Kirichek 1998; Lange 1997, 195; see also data from Russian GallupMedia revealing the same fact in many regions and a newspaper article by Kniivila 2002) and usually the distribution of the audience among them has not been covered in these studies. The aim of this article is to illuminate the press competition in Karelia and to find out which factors have an impact on newspaper choice. The data is based on two surveys collected in the Republic of Karelia, the first one in February 2000 in Petrozavodsk and the second one in January-February 2002 in Petrozavodsk, Kondopoga and Pryazha (Praasa).