ABSTRACT
The media business in Russia has developed along two somewhat contradictory lines in the post-Soviet years. At the micro level, economic change has forced media outlets to adapt to market realities. The Moscow city government has been involved in the media market since the early 1990s, giving subsidies to some newspapers and helping many others indirectly by charging them preferential rates for rent and utilities. LogoVAZ owns shares in the glossy news magazine Ogonek, and in 1997, Boris Berezovskii helped finance the creation of Novye izvestiya, a newspaper staffed mainly by journalists who fled Izvestiya in July of that year, following conflicts with the newspaper's shareholders. The all-out information war between rival business groups did not break out until the government auctioned off a larger prize: 25 percent of the shares in the telecommunications monopoly holding company Svyazinvest. Russian journalists who write exposes of public officials are often held in contempt by their colleagues, who assume they are hired guns.
