Interview by Oleg Kusov, exclusively for Vestnik Kavkaza
Today the guest of Take My Word is the deputy director general of public relations at the Moskovskiy Komsomolets publishing house, Sergei Ivanovich Rogozhkin.
- Hello, Sergey Ivanovich! Thank you for coming here. Vestnik Kavkaza is not only about the Caucasus, but traditionally we begin our conversation with questions about this region. When was the last time you've been to the Caucasus? What are your impressions from this trip? What was memorable in this trip?
- I just had a thought that the Caucasus is always something high up, where there are mountains. When someone is yelling from high up, transmitting some signals, it is very symbolic. Therefore, I take my stay here as an opportunity to also say something important for myself and for the audience.
I visited Baku, if I'm not mistaken, last year. I visited an event similar to the Baku Humanitarian Forum. It was one of the last visits, although there have been a few in recent years. Usually we went to Baku, because the Russian media community is very actively mastering this bridge. Baku friends are all the time inviting us to meetings about culture and media. Overall, a good "bridge" has been established. So thank you once again. I see it as a continuation of this tradition. Although before, including in Soviet times, I visited such complex areas in the Caucasus as Karabakh, Georgia, etc.
- The hot spots.
-At the time they were just becoming hot and only became hot later. It seems that they have remained hot until now.
- Unfortunately, some of them remain a permanent threat. Vestnik Kavkaza, like perhaps Moskovskiy Komsomolets, does a lot to remove tensions. At least among our readers. Sergei Ivanovich, by virtue of your experience as a journalist you know very well the Soviet press and Soviet journalism in general, I would say. However, you have been working for more than 20 years in the post-Soviet press, in post-Soviet journalism. I also began my career in the Soviet times, during perestroika, and believe that at the time journalists did more for perestroika than party workers, who talked about it from podiums. Journalists were the ones who had the most progressive ideas, they became the superintendents of perestroika, right? There was a lot of talk about them back then. Today's outcome - and I am talking only about journalism and not the whole socio-political or economic situation in the country - is a rather large topic. The outcome we have in journalism today, to which we aspired, does it satisfy you? Have we reached what we wanted to reach?
- Thank you for your question. I sincerely want to answer it, because it is central to people who are associated with the media and journalism. My answer is no. I am certainly not satisfied with it. But this is a reason to ask yourself and everyone why this is happening. What combinations and connections led to it? You said that journalists have done more than officials or government mechanisms. I'd like to make just one reservation: even the first law on the media, Yeltsin's first decree, was built on a very problematic principle - the protection of the concept of the freedom of speech. One has to thank the statesmen who began working on this concept. It launched the process, as Mikhail Gorbachev said. There is another question of when and for what reasons the process has changed or developed into something new - we can also talk about this today. As for the Soviet period, talk about the Soviet period is now also very interesting, because the concepts and words used by the press, not only by propaganda workers and agitators, seem to have come in our times as if via a bridge. To think, to define, to compare, to find incomparable things, to find causes, is our journalistic and civic responsibility today.
- Your publication, your publishing house has 84 buildings and publishes approximately 28 million copies as far as I know. What a huge circulation even for the Soviet period! Very few newspapers can boast of such a circulation. But what is interesting is that Moskovskiy Komsomolets has not changed its format or layout and has maintained its title. But I believe that its content has also not changed. I am not talking about its subjects, but about its journalistic style, very lively reporting about a variety of issues, including politics, arts and culture. It was the distinctive feature of MK during the Soviet era, it was a very lively newspaper. This is what distinguished Komsomolskaya Pravda, but in many respects it has become different. MK has a style of reporting: lively, a little aloof, not one-sided. Does it allow you to maintain your independence, especially the financial one?
- You've formulated the question very elegantly, Oleg. Thank you very much. It is somewhat sleeker than the current situation of even our newspapers.
- I am just an outsider, while you can see the situation from the inside.
- But thank you, because it is a compliment well-deserved by MK. This year the newspaper is celebrating 95 years. Since 1983, its editor-in-chief Pavel Gusev, an amazing man, has been feeling the same things as we have been feeling, looking for a new foundation, a foothold that would maintain everything you have mentioned, that is its own style, character, and thus maintain the trust of its readers. I'd like to say right away that it has become very difficult to do it. This is the leitmotiv.
- For a variety of reasons, right?
- Yes, for a variety of reasons. I think that all of us working in journalism, the readers and citizens of our country, are going through a "reboot", a self-analysis about some important concepts and their presence in our vocabulary, our understanding. Thank you for Take My Word. These are just three simple words, but each of them has a great meaning. We now have to talk about it with each other in newspapers and TV, because information is not only something that excites us, give us a positive or sad mood. It is an absolutely legal norm. We have to understand it, and thus there should be a responsibility for violating it.
- But nevertheless you have demonstrated that the allegation that the printed press is dying out is wrong.
- In fact, the electronic media and everything which is related to the internet is not in conflict with the press. It is a situation in time, which will stimulate the development of vectors and their interactions. MK has its own website -www.mk.ru. Psychologically, we have stopped dividing our work into online and printed domains.
- Do you have bloggers on your website?
- We do, and I think that, as a result, the internet is helping us to maintain the space which you have mentioned. The situation with printed media is different.
- In your opinion, are any of the printed editions going to die out?
- I think that in the foreseeable future everything will be fine. The balance of forces will vary, but nevertheless there will be an interaction between these two institutions. Incidentally, I once brought the following example: I read that after the terrible tsunami in Japan broadsheets began to appear on the walls in cities which were severely affected, where there was no power at all and a great number of problems. Those newspapers contained information and united people. They began to create interactions on surviving buildings. This is perhaps the unifying role of the print media.
- That is, things which have not disappeared will help us in the most extreme situations.
- I would not want it this way, but overall a newspaper is a newspaper.
- I lived in Europe for four and a half years. I noticed that people gather in Italian cafes, buy newspapers, drink coffee. It seems as if they have no idea that print is going through such hard times nowadays, that the internet is replacing everything. Sergei Ivanovich, do you think that there can be a newspaper without an electronic version today? Many publishing houses are amassing radio and TV stations. For instance, Kommersant has its own radio, magazines. MK has no radio or television. Does this mean that your trend is printing, the paper and the website?
- Yes, but I'd like to say that one does not hurt the other. It would be possible to have a radio and a TV station in our package of information ambitions, so to speak. We often have conversations about it, but let's be honest, MK is a private newspaper, living on the results of its labor.
- Therefore, you have no oligarchs behind you.
- Yes, this is what I am talking about it. That is, cut the coat according to the cloth. As a professional, you know that in order for radio to function, and especially for TV... But this is also something that controls our editorial impulses. Our defence is that we don't sit on pipelines.
- It allows you to remain detached, neutral.
- Or at least to aspire to it. This is our credo.
