ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses current processes in the Russian media system at three institutional dimensions of the Russian media system, that of the media industry, social media and media regulation, thus focusing on the work of currently influential ‘agents of change’ in the Russian media in the first two decades of the second millennium. The Russian media industry today is the result of the multi-layered and controversial post-Soviet processes of deregulation, privatization and shift to a market economy. The dominance of national television has even strengthened in the Russian digital switch-over, i.e. the national implementation of the federal programme for the ‘Development of Television and Radio Broadcasting in the Russian Federation in 2009–2015’. The Russian Internet has been developing since 1993 and the number of users has been increasing rapidly, initially in large industrial cities but, in the past decade, more evenly across the country, reaching an Internet penetration rate of 72 per cent in 2018.
