A couple of weeks ago, Plushev wrote an excellent column, "The Telegram-ization of a Hypothetical Navalny." One of those pieces that really makes you think.
It was about what traditional journalism should do now that every random person has their own channel for distributing information. And what happens when many people simply have no interest in dealing with the media, because they can say everything they want on YouTube and reach a much larger audience.
Here, for example, is an exchange with a video blogger about the Sokolovsky case:
I think about this constantly. On the one hand, traditional media are part of society’s basic infrastructure. Without them, nothing normal will function at all. They create the conditions for political competition, and so on.
On the other hand, I keep catching myself feeling that I’m no longer interested in giving comments to traditional media outlets. Why should I explain the approval process for the June 12 rally to three news agencies if tonight I’m going live on my own show and can say everything I think needs to be said to a much larger audience?
And on a recent trip from St. Petersburg to Pskov, I started thinking about all this even more. All because I began watching videos in the minibus.
You may remember that blogger Sasha Spielberg was recently invited to the State Duma (the lower house of Russia’s parliament). There were a million “analytical columns” about it; I read many of them and, honestly, the whole thing was pretty uninteresting.
So on the bus, I watched Sokolovsky’s and Sobolev’s videos on the same subject:
Sokolovsky:
Sobolev:
And what do I see?
Excellent. Clear. Funny. In simple language, explaining why this is happening. Without any of the murky nonsense a newspaper columnist will inevitably cram into a piece to make it seem weighty and hint at insider knowledge.
Without the idiotic, unbearable “political analyst so-and-so said such-and-such.”
And both of them look good on camera. They talk like real TV hosts too, despite being quite young.
So it’s no surprise that one reached an audience of 1.1 million people, and the other 2.2 million.
In other words, these very “video bloggers,” who so irritate professional journalists, have already outdone them on substance as well. They simply made a better product.
And this product is much harder to make. It takes far more time than banging out yet another column for a website where 30,000 people will read it.
And no journalism degree from Moscow State University, no flawless command of Russian, and no press card—so often waved around as a badge of superiority—mean anything to anyone here anymore.
At this point I’m supposed to write some kind of conclusion, but I don’t have one yet—I’m still thinking it through. My interim conclusion is that 95% of “traditional journalists and media outlets” don’t want to do a damn thing. They want to write columns/news stories/articles based on tweets.
But the remaining 5% are tremendously important, because this post and all these reflections were still prompted by a column from the journalist Plushev. And Sokolovsky himself was absorbed into a perfectly traditional media outlet.
P.S. Today at 20:18, as usual, I’ll be live on air.