ABSTRACT
This section is largely based on papers presented at ‘The Mass Media in Post-Soviet Russia’ conference held at the University of Surrey on 6–8 April 2006. The conference was organised as part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Post-Soviet Russian Television Culture’ headed by Professor Stephen Hutchings. The conference attracted not only a wide range of Russian and Western academics researching post-Soviet mass media from different angles, but also journalists and media consultants. After the conference, the BBC Russian Service broadcast some interviews with keynote speaker, Ellen Mickiewicz, and several other paper-givers. To further broaden the debate about the post-Soviet media, three public debates on related topics were sponsored by the AHRC and organised by Professor Stephen Hutchings (University of Manchester), in co-operation with Dr Natalia Rulyova (University of Birmingham) in 2007. Currently, we are starting a new project funded by the Centre for East European Languages Based Area Studies (CEELBAS), which aims to consolidate the efforts of academics, media specialists, and journalists by running an electronic forum on the mass media in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
