Russian blogging

When the Deutsche Welle asked me to write an article about important events in the Russian blogosphere, I was myself in the midst of just such an event.

On September 14, 2009, the company Gazprom held a workshop for 120 members of its subsidiary in the village of Listvyanka on the Baltic Sea. The theme was: "New Media: Modern Information and Communication Technology and the Future of Internet Resource Development at Gazprom." For five days, the workshop participants did much more than just sit armed with laptops, listening to presentations about the information systems of one of the world’s biggest energy concerns. They got to grips with questions such as what is a blog, why do people and companies start blogs, what is the difference between private blogs and commercial blogs, what distinguishes blog hosts from one another and what good would a blog be to me.

Running a workshop like this is an important way for Gazprom and its PR experts to approach a public that has long been familiar with the world of blogging. The fact that a workshop took place in which LiveJournal and the Russian version of Facebook were considered as "new media" shows that it's taken the Russian blogosphere five years to reach this level of recognition.

Developing LiveJournal

The topography and development of the Russian blogosphere differs dramatically from blogospheres elsewhere, and LiveJournal plays an important role in this. Somehow it has happened, that the majority of thinking people have stumbled upon this free Weblog provider and chosen it as both information platform and social playground.

Alongside the IT specialists who start online projects with LiveJournal, there are now journalists, photographers, teachers, office workers. LiveJournal is become ever more important: the content always finds new readers and the bloggers always find new followers. It seems that the social interaction - discussion, banter, debate - that had disappeared, first out of the papers and then out of the television, found a new home in LiveJournal. It sometimes seems as if public discussion does not exist at all outside of the site!

In the West, of course, it is different. Journalists have blogs, but usually they belong to the Web pages of the respective publication (logically so, I might add). When a blogger notices that he has a regular following of several hundred, he moves his blog to an independent site where he can use advertising to turn his readership into cash. In the United States, the average LiveJournal blogger is a student with a following of about 30 like-minded peers.

LiveJournal’s success

It was the Russians who made it possible for LiveJournal to become a platform in which an individual blog can have a readership of thousands. One the one hand, this is to be welcomed: it's very practical to have information and comments from a wide variety of people collected together on one page. On the other hand, this can be damaging to professional and commercial blogs. Everybody is in LiveJournal: the blogs attract the readers and the readers attract the big names. Journalists have learned not to blog themselves, but to use blogs as information sources. LiveJournal has become a "novel medium" of the highest popularity.

Meaning and reach

It is important to take into account the fact that LiveJournal's impact hasn’t reached all of Russia's 2 million native speaker Internet users. Take an imaginary pair of scissors and cut out a few thousand of the best known bloggers and you’ll find that readership levels soon fall away. What you're left with is your average LiveJournal user with a following of 30 friends. The small minority of well-known bloggers have attracted so many readers and built up so much influence that they are not to be ignored. That’s why, on the May 21, 2009, a blog authored by none other than President Dmitry Medvedev appeared. The president knows that the most important section of his readership is LiveJournal users. These are readers who don't just consume, but actively engage with information. As such, they are unique.

Relationship between bloggers and journalists

Towards the end of August 2009, something else of significance happened within the Russian blogosphere. One of the country's largest industrial disasters occurred at the Sayano–Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station, but in the first 24 hours nothing was reported through the official channels. The information vacuum was filled by amateur video recordings of the event, taken by eye-witnesses.

When the RusHydro press office finally awoke out of its professional coma, it found itself confronted with a barrage of rumors (like the ones about the workers trapped inside the power station, banging desperately on the steel piping, ignored by those that heard them). These rumors were spread by journalist Michail Afanasjew, who published in his blog. They soon reached such an intensity that even the mass media started to carry them.

The lack of information from official sources and the decision to prosecute the journalist did little to improve matters. RusHydro made an unusual decision - it invited Russia's best-known blogger, Rustem Adagamow (40,901 readers at time of writing) to visit the power station, photograph it, and report on what he saw. Adagamow had previously linked to the rumors Afanasjew’s blog and other critical articles.

A few days later, the news agency Interfax was asking "Should We Have Blind Trust in Bloggers? The most popular of Russian bloggers spreads gruesome rumors around the work, and then takes pretty pictures of the rescue operation! Bloggers and blog critics like to criticize the mass media, but are they any better? Journalists are accountable to the law, their editors and the public. But what about bloggers? For them it's just their own conscience that counts. Or something else."

A few days later, Rustem Adagamow became the first blogger to be invited to an official event at the Kremlin - as a reporter.

Over the past couple of months, the Russian blogosphere has ceased to be marginal. It's not just bloggers and their friends who are meeting there now. It's the rich and powerful, the mass media, social organizations, representatives of RusHydro, President Medvedev, 120 PR specialists from a Gazprom offshoot and everyone else that the blogosphere has been waiting for.

Author: Nikolay Danilov

Editor: Sean Sinico