DMITRY YAGODIN The Blogization of Journalism How blogs politicize media and social space in Russia ACADEMIC DISSERTATION To be presented, with the permission of the Board of School of Communication, Media and Theatre of the University of Tampere, for public discussion in the Lecture Room Linna K 103, Kalevantie 5, Tampere, on May 17th, 2014, at 12 o’clock. UNIVERSITY OF TAMPERE DMITRY YAGODIN The Blogization of Journalism How blogs politicize media and social space in Russia Acta Universitatis Tamperensis 1934 Tampere University Press Tampere 2014 ACADEMIC DISSERTATION University of Tampere School of Communication, Media and Theatre Finland Copyright ©2014 Tampere University Press and the author Cover design by Mikko Reinikka Distributor: [email protected] http://granum.uta.fi Acta Universitatis Tamperensis 1934 Acta Electronica Universitatis Tamperensis 1418 ISBN 978-951-44-9450-5 (print) ISBN 978-951-44-9451-2 (pdf) ISSN-L 1455-1616 ISSN 1456-954X ISSN 1455-1616 http://tampub.uta.fi Suomen Yliopistopaino Oy – Juvenes Print 441 729 Tampere 2014 Painotuote Preface I owe many thanks to you who made this work possible. I am grateful to you for making it worthwhile. It is hard to name you all, or rather it is impossible. By reading this, you certainly belong to those to whom I radiate my gratitude. Thank you all for your attention and critique, for a friendly talk and timely empathy. My special thanks to my teachers. To Ruslan Bekurov, my master’s thesis advisor at the university in Saint-Petersburg, who encouraged me to pursue the doctoral degree abroad. To Kaarle Nordenstreng, my local “fixer” and a brilliant mentor, who helped me with my first steps at the University of Tampere. To Risto Kunelius, who skillfully guided my dissertation work, who introduced me to the academic world (both metaphorically and literarily), and who also inspired me with his proficiency, open-mindedness and friendliness. I also thank the large community of scholars at the Aleksanteri Institute in Helsinki, who broadened my horizons with multidisciplinary richness of seminars and invaluable experiences of summer schools. I cannot forget to thank my colleagues and friends from the Tampere Research Centre for Journalism, Media and Communication. This applies to all its current and past affiliations within what I informally define as the Tampere school of journalism. It is a pleasure to thank the organizations that sponsored this work between 2008 and 2013. The Academy of Finland and CIMO Fellowships helped with the initial grants. The largest part of my work was done as a paid job within the system of the Finnish Graduate School for Russian and East European Studies, funded by the Academy and located at the Aleksanteri Institute. My dearest friends, my fellows, my critical readers, and my language editors, thank you for keeping me ambitious, motivated, but still social all this time. Matt Tegelberg deserves a separate acknowledgement for playing all these roles at once. I appreciate the time and effort of my examiners Sarah Oates and Bart Cammaerts. My final and the biggest spasibo is to my beloved family. Spasibo dad for raising me the way you did. Spasibo Zhenya for your sisterly kindness. Spasibo Olga for your patience and love. Above all, spasibo mother for the life energy you gave to me. This is to you, mom. Tampere on March 25, 2014 Dmitry Yagodin Abstract Blogization is the term that I develop in this dissertation to describe the current state of Russian journalism and consider its broader implications for political and social life. In December 2011, oppositional protests in Russia moved to the forefront new political figures and civic activists who often emerged from the community of Russian bloggers and journalists. In this case, the overlap and mutual interaction between journalism and blogging stretched far beyond the realm of internal struggles within the institutional setting of journalism. The very idea of journalism was shattered. Today its old definitions are no longer adequate, and its new definitions are disputable and controversial. I argue it is the process of blogization that is partly responsible for this theoretical, and indeed empirical, uncertainty about what constitutes journalism. This subject cuts across several ongoing theoretical discussions and practical applications. I build my argumentation on the premises of the following four strands of knowledge. First, there is a broad discussion about journalistic professionalism and the roles of mass media in modern societies. Blogging presents an alternative approach or a potential turning point in journalistic development. The notion of blogization also opens a valuable framework in which one can study ongoing symbolic struggles and identity constructions within the sphere of mass communication. I identify this sphere as a field – a shared space for individual journalists, bloggers, and media institutions. This perspective emphasizes the dialectical relations between social actors and structures of cultural production. Second, I consider the blogization of journalism as part of the larger context of socio-political modernization. In this respect, the case of Russia presents a timely and relevant example. Through the lenses of blogization, we can assess the theoretical premises of transitology – a research perspective that frames the recent history of Russian political and media systems as reflections of a shift toward democratization and modernization. These two notions are repeatedly emphasized in literature about new online media and in the context of the so-called post-Soviet transition paradigm. Thus, I work with two narratives of social change induced by new media: changes in professional journalism and the transition of Russian society. Accordingly, my broader intention is to evaluate normative shifts in Russian journalism under the influence of blogging. Third, I conceptualize news making by journalists and by bloggers as a social practice through the lens of field theory, developed by Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s thinking provides useful analytical tools to delimit such a vague research object as relations between journalism and blogging. Bourdieu’s work helps to focus on the institutionalized, structural level of professional journalism, while retaining an element of agency and contingency. Fourth, to view journalism from a less structured, partly marginalized and radicalized position of the news blogging sub-culture – I draw on Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. This theory helps me to understand the meaning of ideological struggles within the broader journalistic project (journalists and bloggers acting together). The main research question of this study focuses on the implications of journalism-blogging relationships for a broader understanding of news media in Russia between 2001 and 2013. This time period is limited by the first visible instances of journalism-blogging interaction after 2001 and culminates with an unprecedented wave of political protests in early 2010s. The subject of journalism-blogging relations is an example of a highly interconnected social reality that is difficult to address using conventional sociological methods of sampling, inferences and validation. This poses a series of limitations on the study, in which I explore blogization mainly through analysis of mass media organizations, media representations of individual bloggers, and the results of their cultural production (texts). While interviewing journalists and bloggers could significantly enrich this work, it would also multiply the overall complexity and feasibility of such a project. Instead, I relied on a broader contextualization amplified by longitudinal observations. The project’s core empirical data includes eight examples of mass media and eight Live Journal bloggers, who are all important actors in the blogization process. The media sub-sample that I chose does not claim to be exhaustive or strictly representative of the Russian media landscape. It is however relatively diverse in terms of political, economic and technological contexts. I deliberately included three types of media: television as the medium with the largest audience (Channel One and NTV); newspapers targeted to specific social groups (Kommersant, Novaya Gazeta, Moskovsky Komsomolets, Rossiiskaya Gazeta); and online publications popular among younger generations, the middle class and intellectuals (Vz.ru and Lenta.ru). I limit my focus to Live Journal, a single blog platform, where I chose a sub-sample of bloggers with large readerships who come from various backgrounds and professional orientations. The final list consists of eight names. The list is not representative of the blogosphere, but covers some of the most remarkable examples of current blogging in Russia: pro-Kremlin and oppositional bloggers, trained journalists and blogging celebrities. The list also covers different genres ranging from investigative and opinionated reporting, to facts, aggregate stories, and daily life reflections. This research analyses two main types of data: the quantitative characteristics of studied media actors (journalistic organizations and bloggers), and qualitative examples of their practices. The initial overview of relations between journalism and blogging is based on official reports and media statistics. Several statistical and other publicly available reports are drawn on to describe the journalistic field in terms of its internal structure and external relations with other fields. Furthermore, I collected