Peer-reviewed articles THE CONCEPT OF MARKET in Russian media, and the question of modernization
By analyzing the usage of the word “market” (rynok) in the Russian press since 1990, the author shows how the keyword takes on new meanings, reflecting and relates to the different social and political roles of the press outlets in an evolving, modernizing environment.
Published in the printed edition of Baltic Worlds BW Vol VII:2-3, 2014 p 75-82.
Published on balticworlds.com on October 20, 2014
The word “market” is at the core of the process of modernization in Russia, especially in regard to the economic aspects of modernization. This article analyzes the usage of the word “market” (rynok in Russian) in the metropolitan and provincial press in the Soviet Union and in post-Soviet Russia from 1990 to 2010. “Market” has been a keyword — in the dictionary sense of a word, expression, or concept of particular importance or significance1 — in the Russian press over the past twenty years: this is evident in its frequency and in the range of contexts in which it is used.2
In this article, I analyze the relationship of language and society by studying the usage of the word “market” (rynok) in the late Soviet and post-Soviet Russian press since 1990. I examine how the word takes on new meanings, and how its changing usage is related to the changing social and political roles of print media in a modernizing environment. The material studied consists of newspaper and magazine texts collected by a search of the Integrum database.3 The examples are taken from ten selected publications: the nationally distributed magazines Vokrug sveta, Ogonek, Kommersant-Weekly, and Kommersant Dengi; the nationally distributed newspapers Nezavisimaia gazeta, Rossii-
skaia gazeta, and Vedomosti; and the regional newspapers Delovoi Peterburg, Nizhegor-odskie novosti, and Cheliabinskii rabochii.4
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the beginning of Russia’s transition to a new economic order, a new lexicon has come into use. The term “market” has become a central one in the discussion of economics and business. The media have framed the events and processes of Russia’s post-communist transformation, including its economic transformation.5 Ekecrantz, Maia, and Castro point out that the world media have produced a linear narrative of Russia’s transition from “communist dictatorship” to a “free market and democracy”6. In Russian media, however, the narrative is not as straightforward as in the materials researched by Ekecrantz et al., and my aim in the present study is to show how “market”, as an element of the press vocabulary, has gained new meanings and become an active keyword.
In this article, “modernization” refers mainly to urbanization, industrialization, and other developmental paths connected with the transition from a rural to a modern, industrialized society. The development of modern society has brought with it fundamental changes, including the bureaucratization of administration, monetization, industrialization, urbanization, the secularization of culture, and the formation of the positive legal system.7 From the point of view of media research, modernity may imply universal literacy, high newspaper circulation, high utilization of media technology, and high penetration of television or radio.8
A major change has occurred in media market structures in post-Soviet Russia. The Russian media have gone from the centralized Soviet system to a more pluralistic one: in 1990, there were 43 national newspapers in the Soviet Union that shared 49 percent of the total newspaper circulation,9 but now the selection of newspaper is wider and circulations lower. The modernization of the media from the 1990s on has involved both greater competition and greater concentration of power.10 The ownership of Russian media is said to be divided between governmentally controlled state capital and privately controlled commercial capital, and the concentration of power has been a continuing trend in the 2000s.11
The press, when writing about the market, is simultaneously acting in the market. The press both informs the public about the market and shapes readers’ opinions about business and the economy.12 According to Elena Vartanova,13 the Russian media, which are now in a process of competition and convergence, give more consideration than ever to the interests of advertisers and audiences. For example, as an earlier study showed, the Russian business press emerged to serve the information needs of a growing urban class of business-minded people and entrepreneurs in the early 1990s, and later developed into journalism serving the established players in the economics, business, and political fields.14 This mirrors the situation in “Western”, capitalist societies, where business news expanded over a period of about forty years and is now considered a “natural” part of the news media.15 It has also been argued in a Russian study that the structure of the Russian business magazine market now resembles that of US magazines, as can be observed in the growing supply of magazines on personal finance in Russia during the 2000s, for example.16 However, according to the same comparative study, Russian business magazines are still more heterogeneous and include more coverage of politics than their US counterparts do.17 Overall, since business and politics are interrelated, it has been widely argued that business newspapers have at least some role in shaping public opinion and economic policy — including economic modernization.18 Although that influence is not straightforward, it has been argued that the language used in the press may have a great impact on the formation of society.19
The usage and meaning
of the word “market”
The present article focuses on the following questions:
a. How has the quantity of publications in the Russian press that include the word “market” changed from 1990 to 2012?
b. How was the word “market” used in the Russian press from 1990 to 2010, and what kinds of institutional structures does that usage reflect?
c. How does the use of the term “market” reflect the institutional change in the Russian press?
I will look first at a quantitative analysis of the publications in the Russian press from 1990 to 2012 that include the word “market”, before presenting the results of a qualitative analysis of the use of the term in material from the years 1990, 2000, and 2010. Finally, I will draw some conclusions on the connection between the language of the press and the change in the institutional role of the press in Russian society.
To obtain a sufficient sample of data for the quantitative analysis, I drew on a wide selection of metropolitan and provincial media and media archives from the Integrum database service. The selection represents, to some degree, the federal structure of Russia, a country administratively organized as a hierarchy of republics, districts (okrug), regions (krai), provinces (oblast), and areas (rai’on).
In the first phase of the quantitative analysis, I measured how often the word “market” (rynok) was used in Russian press from 1990 to 2012.20 This query searched a total of 6485 media, mainly newspapers and magazines. In the second phase, a more restricted query was used to search specific categories of the metropolitan press and metropolitan media archives. This query searched 1909 media. Although it is impossible to measure word frequency with absolute objectivity, a corpus of this size makes it possible to deduce some generalizations.21
In addition, a qualitative content analysis was done based on a selection of media in the years 1990, 2000, and 2010. A total of 217 examples were chosen for the qualitative analysis, 56 to 81 in each of the selected years, 1990, 2000, and 2010.22
The final selection included the following media:
- Nationally distributed newspapers: Nezavisimaia gazeta, Rossiiskaia gazeta, Vedomosti (2000, 2010)
- lNationally distributed magazines: Vokrug sveta, Ogonek, Kommersant-Weekly (only in 1990), Kommersant Dengi (2000, 2010)
- Regional newspapers: Delovoi Peterburg (St. Petersburg, 2000 and 2010), Nizhegorodskie novosti (Nizhnyi Novgorod, 2000 and 2010), Cheliabinskii rabochii (Cheliabinsk, 2000 and 2010)
These publications were chosen because most of them (Vokrug sveta, Ogonek, Kommersant-Weekly, Nezavisimaia gazeta, Rossiiskaia gazeta) published at least some stories containing “market” (rynok) in 1990.24 Kommersant-Weekly has been renamed Vlast; however, for the 2000 and 2010 analysis I chose the magazine Dengi, a sister publication of Vlast with a stronger orientation towards business and economics. In order to make the selection more comprehensive and to reflect the differentiation of the Russian media market,25 I added a business newspaper (Vedomosti, founded in 1999) and three regional newspapers (Delovoi Peterburg, Nizhegorodskie novosti and Cheliabinskii rabochii) to the selection for the years 2000 and 2010. In addition to comparisons between national and regional perspectives (in 2000 and 2010), the selection permits comparisons between general interest media (Vokrug sveta, Ogonek, Nezavisimaia gazeta, Rossiiskaia gazeta, Nizhegorodskie novosti, and Cheliabinskii rabochii) and business media (Kommersant-Weekly, Kommersant Dengi, Vedomosti, and Delovoi Peterburg).
“Market” in the Russian press, 1990—2012
The frequency of the word “market” (rynok) in the Russian press increased dramatically between 1990 and 2012. The selection of metropolitan and regional or local media in the Integrum database contains only about 300 articles dated 1990 and containing the word “market”, but nearly half a million dated 2012 with that word. However, this change can be explained in part by the fact that the number of sources available in the Integrum database has grown over the years. The majority of the documents in the Integrum database are from the 2000s. Nonetheless, we can observe a huge increase in the use of the word. In 1990, Russia was still part of the Soviet Union, and although the market economy model was a subject of debate, the discussion was limited to some metropolitan publications, mainly those specialized in economic issues. Later, “market” became a topic for all kinds of general-interest, political, and business-oriented media.
A crucial point is that the frequency of the word “market” (rynok) in the metropolitan print media seems to have undergone only modest change after an initial ten-year period of growth, while in the provincial media its frequency continues to grow sharply until 2008. The two curves start to diverge in 1995—1996. Until 1995, almost all occurrences were in nationally distributed publications. After that, the proportion of other publications increased sharply. In 1995, 35,932 articles out of 37,671 that contained “market” were published in metropolitan print media. In 2012, only 57,048 out of 489,007 articles containing “market” were published in the metropolitan press.
There was a drop in the overall frequency after 2001, and again after 2008. Could this have something to do with changing economic conditions in Russia? That might be at least a partial explanation. In the late 1990s, the Russian economy was growing and the business environment was more favorable for companies than in the reform years of the early 1990s. The ruble devaluation of 1998 briefly halted growth, but the economy recovered quickly and continued to grow. In 2001—2002, the Russian GDP growth rate decreased: after growing 10.0 percent a year earlier, the GDP grew by only 5.1 percent in 2001.26 The main sources of economic growth in the early 2000s were energy and natural resources, mainly oil and gas. Furthermore, in autumn of 2008, Russia was hit by a financial crisis, which caused the GDP to decrease by 7.8 percent in 2009 from the previous year’s figure,27 and influenced media publications as well. The media sector was reported to have declined by 10.7 percent.28 Retail sales and advertising revenues decreased while production and distribution costs increased. As a result, the media companies cut personnel and salaries and closed down media outlets.29 The search results for later years may therefore be affected by the reduced number of publications. Another possible explanation is that “market” was more frequent in the press lexicon just before the financial crisis, when the economy was more heated. A similar correlation could also explain the 2001 frequency drop.
In the qualitative analysis that follows, I will look more closely at material from the years 1990, 2000, and 2010.
The word “market” (rynok) has several meanings in day-to-day Russian usage and in the press idiom. The principal definitions include the following:30
1. A regular gathering of people for purchases and sales of livestock and commodities; an open space or a covered building where vendors convene to sell their goods: “to buy groceries at market”.
2. A system of relations that is based on free sales of goods: “the free market”; “market economy”; “transition from a planned economy to a market-based system”.
3. An area or arena in which commercial dealings are conducted; the state of trade at a particular time or in a particular context: “the labor market”; “the Russian market”; “the domestic/international/world market”; “a free market”; “to form a common market”; “the black market”; “the bottom has fallen out of the market”.
4. Demand for a particular commodity or service: “there is a market for ornamental daggers”; “the commodities market”; “the wholesale market”; “the raw materials market”; “the labor market”.
The first definition is the most traditional one: a “market” as a physical place for the exchange of goods. The traditional Russian definition in an authoritative nineteenth-century dictionary31 is close to this one, referring to an outdoor space in cities and towns for the sale of goods and for gatherings.
The second definition refers to the system of relations in society based on the free exchange of goods. Typically, this usage occurs in discussions of the market economy as compared with some kind of other economic system, such as the planned economy. The third definition refers to a “market” as a sphere of activity. This sense is used in the Russian press in, for example, texts on the domestic market, the international market, the Russian market, or the black market. The fourth definition refers to markets for certain commodities or services, such as the stock market, the financial market, or the market for clothes. In this usage, “market” usually occurs with an attribute.
These four senses of the word “market” (rynok) form the basis for the following analysis of the word’s usage in the late Soviet and post-Soviet Russian press.
The crucial year 1990: discussing Soviet markets
In the year 1990, there were discussions in the press on different economic systems, including the market economy. All the articles found with our search phrase appeared in nationally distributed publications.32 In the sample, the word “market” was most often used to denote a sphere of activity.
Judging by the stories in the sample, many things were new to Soviet society in 1990: foreign companies entered the Soviet Union, including restaurants such as McDonalds and Pizza Hut, and including some publishers. There were stories on foreign businessmen visiting the Soviet Union, giving their contact information in case Soviet entrepreneurs wished to contact them. A currency exchange market was opened, and the papers reported that most currency exchange was done on the black market (chernyi rynok).
The pluralism in decision making introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s was visible in the press articles on Communist Party meetings: the transcripts of speeches published in Rossiiskaia gazeta reflected diverse opinions on economic reforms and the market economy. The discussion in Rossiiskaia gazeta was mostly based on politicians’ speeches, such as those given at the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. In 1990, Boris Yeltsin was elected Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR. The sample includes his speech to Russians living abroad, in which he calls for the continued help of emigrants in the process of obtaining sovereignty for the RSFSR:
(1) “The most valuable achievements of human civilization, such as the market, the rule of law, democracy, mechanisms of social partnership, pluralism — in a word, all that forms the basis for the progress of contemporary developed countries, can be created in Russia. Here they are filled with original substance and will be enriched with new, bright colors. For us it is especially important that the first steps of the new parliament of Russia and its government have the support of many Russians residing abroad, their willingness to help.”33
In this speech, Yeltsin refers to the market as one of the most valuable achievements of civilization. For Rossiiskaia gazeta in 1990, “market” seems to have been a subject of political debate. Kommersant-Weekly on the other hand, in which a large proportion of the examples collected for 1990 were published, shows a different pattern. In this business-oriented weekly, the discourse referred mostly to the market as a sphere of activity and to markets for specific goods or services. Since the publication was oriented towards business-minded people and entrepreneurs, there was no debate as to whether the market economy was actually needed: the shift from the planned economy towards the market economy appears to have been taken for granted. The following example is characteristic of how Kommersant-weekly wrote about “the market” in the sense of an economic system: “In the country today, a situation has emerged in which the economy is in practice no longer under planned control, but the market as a new regulator has not yet formed.”34
The ambivalent situation described in that example was evident in Kommersant-Weekly’s pages in 1990. While the country still had a planned-economy system, the publication had taken up the position of discussing “the Soviet market” (sovetskii rynok) and the different players in it, including foreign companies and businessmen. The paper discussed the opportunities for trade and business in the Soviet market. Issues included the possibility of establishing a free currency market in the country (March 26, 1990) and views on the development of the fast food market (September 3, 1990). A short time later, the paper offered advice on how to act in a market economy and what such a system means in practical terms.
Ten years later, in 2000: market as fact
In just ten years, the state structure and the media had changed greatly. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia had embraced the market economy, and in 2000, the economy was growing again after the slowdown of 1998—1999. As predicted, there were no more debates on planned versus market economy in the sample of the Russian press in 2000; the market had become “naturalized” and the keyword “market” was frequently used in public discussion in the domain of economics.35
In 2000, the new business daily Vedomosti closely followed the stock, currency, and financial markets as well as major industries and the international economy. The magazine Kommersant Dengi, while also business-oriented, concentrated on specific market sectors: the housing market, the oil market, the market for luxury brands, and so on. It also published stories on business-related crime. Rossiiskaia gazeta meanwhile wrote about domestic industries, export industries, and various sectors of the economy, from the currency market to the oil market. A curious coincidence was that, in the sample, two out of ten stories in Rossiiskaia gazeta were on the weapons industry. Although it is just a coincidence, it may reflect the weight of the weapons industry in the country. Nezavisimaia gazeta placed emphasis on economic policy and the intersection of politics and the economy, writing mostly on major industries such as the energy market.
The sample stories from Ogonek concentrated on historical topics, especially on the Soviet Union. There was also an emphasis on travel stories and other international issues. In Vokrug sveta, no stories containing “market” were found in 2000.
In the regional press, Delovoi Peterburg published many market analyses, especially of the currency, financial and stock markets. Local and regional companies were less visible than had been expected. Nizhegorodskie novosti in particular kept an eye on the regional and local industrial sectors, including the food industry, and also referred to customer markets. Cheliabinskii rabochii differs from the two other regional media in this sample in its orientation towards the connection between the local economy and the national and global economies. One of the most typical formats for stories in this category was that of an interview with an expert or a politician.
After times of change, in 2010: focus on financial and stock markets
In 2010, the change from 1990 is clear. First, there is a great quantitative change: in 1990, the number of articles containing the word “market”— just three hundred — was tiny compared with half a million in 2010.36 Furthermore, almost all the articles found for 1990 were in nationwide publications, but most of the occurrences dated 2010 were in regional and local media.
Second, we can observe a qualitative change. The sample shows that the stories in 2010 are often about the market for something: the financial market, the stock market, the gas market, the housing market, and so on. The focus on the financial and stock markets is clear in business papers. In the regional and local press, there are several stories on specific local marketplaces. This marks a certain difference between the publications’ profiles.
The roles of the national and regional press clearly differ in their use of the word “market”. In newspapers and magazines with nationwide distribution, most of the stories discuss “market” in the sense of a sphere of activity or the market for something:
(2) With state financing, a limited amount of development work in the nuclear energy, space, and aviation industries could be taken to the market in the next 15 years.37 (Sphere of activity.)
(3) Probably, the market has not yet realized that the company’s profits will decline this year since in 2009 it sold oil from reserves made in 2008.38 (Sphere of activity.)
(4) Now he is responsible for banking and insurance systems and the stock market.39 (Market for somet hing.)
(5) Krutikhin thinks that the world natural gas market will gain, provided that it is possible to keep the prices of gas and oil from being so closely pegged.40 (Market for something.)
(6) The shadow taxi market is many times greater than the legal one.41 (Market for something.)
The differences between the roles of publications with national and regional distribution, and between newspapers and magazines, are easily observable in the sample of articles containing the keyword “market”. National magazines and regional newspapers contained the most original expressions: “shadow taxi market” (Ogonek, April 12, 2010), “erythropoietin market” (Ogonek, February 15, 2010), “market for fighting nicotine addiction” (Ogonek, January 18, 2010), “clandestine key market” (“podpol’nyi rynok kliuchei”; Nizhegorodskie novosti, April 1, 2010). National newspapers on the other hand limited themselves for the most part to conventional expressions: “oil market” (Rossiiskaia gazeta, January 11, 2010), “banking market” (Vedomosti, January 11, 2010), “equity market” (Vedomosti, January 12, 2010), “advertising market” (Vedomosti, January 13, 2010). The national newspapers seem to have a more established and standardized way of writing than magazines and regional and local publications. In magazines, originality and playful expressions may be part of the house style, while in the regional and local press, there is a need to invent new expressions in order to describe new realities. In other words, the appearance of new expressions and a widening scope of usage reflect the derivational potential of the keyword.42
“Market” in the sense of a concrete place was not a common topic in the selection. Most of the occurrences found were in the provincial press. For example, a market square was compared to a supermarket (Nizhegorodskie novosti, January 25, 2010), and the possibility of building a new covered market was discussed (“Year-round marketplace wanted for the Kazakhs”, Cheliabinskii rabochii, May 15, 2010).
Conclusions
The frequency of the word “market” (rynok) in the Russian press has dramatically increased from 1990 to 2010. In the early 1990s, the word belonged mainly to the vocabulary of national publications, especially those with an emphasis on financial and business issues. Since then, its use by the regional and local press has grown rapidly, and “market” has become a concept discussed in all kinds of national, regional, and local media.
The qualitative change in the press vocabulary has been remarkable. In 1990, there were many stories on the “market” as an economic system, but in 2010, there were few stories on this topic. The discourse in the Russian press has shifted from discussions of “the Soviet market” and “the black market” to the news of changes in stock and financial markets and the activities of players in the market. “Market” in the sense of “a place in cities and towns for the outdoor sale of goods and for gatherings” now plays a minor role in the Russian press.
The fast frequency growth and the establishment of the word “market” indicate how important the concept has become to Russian discussions of economics and business. The press is an inseparable part of economic life, reporting ups and downs as well as new openings and competition. The quantitative analysis of the word’s frequency shows some important points of change in society. The number of occurrences of “market” in the Russian press peaked before the financial crisis of 2008—2009: this may reflect the heated economic situation and high economic growth. In 2009, when the Russian economy stagnated, there was a decline in the number of articles using “market”. At the same time, the qualitative analysis indicates the shift towards the international markets for goods and finance — that is, Russia’s integration in the world economy. Many of the stories in the sample are about the Chinese, American or international markets, reflecting Russia’s participation in the world markets for goods and finance.
Examining the usage of a single word allows us to observe tendencies in the development of press language and differences between publications in different categories. “Market” as a keyword helps to distinguish the profiles of the various media. It proves useful in differentiating the profiles of national and regional media, and those of general interest and business media. However, it is too weak a marker to differentiate between business media that seem to have relatively similar orientations in the sample stories (that is, in this study, between Vedomosti, Delovoi Peterburg, and Kommersant-Weekly/Kommersant Dengi). Looking at more specific expressions, such as “funding market” or “real estate market” would help to reveal the differences between them. However, the difference between national and regional publications and between newspapers and magazines can be observed in their use of the keyword “market”.
The differentiation of roles among print media is a sign of modernization in the Russian press. More than ever before, the press consists of publications that are aimed at scattered and small audiences and that serve the different needs of those audiences. The change is easy to observe in Rossiiskaia gazeta, for example. In 1990, the paper referred to politicians’ speeches and participated in debates on economic reforms, but in 2010, “market” had become a “naturalized”, everyday concept in the press and was mainly used in business and economic news.
The study shows the rich usage and frequency, changing with the economic situation, of the word “market” in the Russian media. “Market” is connected with many positive aspects of modernization, including economic growth and diversification, but also with its side effects such as the “black market”. These phenomena reflect the ability of the word rynok to form the center of a “phraseological cluster”, to cite Anna Wierzbicka’s43 description of keywords that occur frequently in proverbs, idioms, book titles, and so on. “Market” is not one concept, but many, reflecting the modernization and changing economic relationships of Russian society.≈
references
1
Cf. Oxford English Dictionary, “keyword”, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/312961?redirectedFrom=keyword#eidb, accessed July 28, 2014, and Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, revised ed. (London: Fontana Press, 1988), 15. On the keywords in the Russian language and in Russian media, see e.g. Shmeleva, “Krizis (Crisis) as the Key Word of the Present Moment”, and Anna Wierzbicka, Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese (Cary, N.C.: Oxford University Press, 1997). Keywords can also be seen as the main words that form the conceptual tools of discourse in a selected research area, as in David Morgan, ed., Key Words in Religion, Media, and Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 2008).
2 T. V. Shmeleva, “Krizis (Crisis) as the Key Word of the Present Moment,” Politicheskaia lingvistika 28 (2009): 63–67.
3 Integrum is a service with a collection of databases on Russian information sources.
4 The first step of the study was a quantitative analysis of selected print media from the years 1990, 2000, and 2010 drawn from the Integrum database.
5 See e.g. Robert Entman, “Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm”, Journal of Communication 43 (1993): 51–58.
6 Jan Ekecrantz, Rousiley C. M. Maia and Céres P. S. Castro, “Media and Modernities: The Cases of Brazil and Russia”, in Media Research in Progress: JMK Conference Contributions 2002 (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2003), 101.
7 Simon Dixon, The Modernisation of Russia 1676–1825 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1–2. On modernization from the point of view of Russian media development, see e.g. Jukka Pietiläinen, The Regional Newspaper in Post-Soviet Russia: Society, Press and Journalism in the Republic of Karelia 1985–2001 (Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2002), 25.
8 Pietiläinen, The Regional Newspaper in Post-Soviet Russia, 25–26.
9 Ibid., 108.
10 See Ekecrantz et al., “Media and Modernities”, 102.
11 Kaarle Nordenstreng and Jukka Pietiläinen, “Media as a Mirror of Change”, in Witnessing Change in Contemporary Russia, ed. Tomi Huttunen and Mikko Ylikangas (Helsinki: Kikimora, 2010), 141.
12 Craig Carroll (ed.), Corporate Reputation and the News Media: Agenda-setting within Business News Coverage in Developed, Emerging, and Frontier Markets (New York and London: Routledge, 2011).
13 Elena Vartanova, “Russian Media: Market and Technology as Driving Forces of Change”, in Perspectives to the Media in Russia: “Western” Interests and Russian Developments, ed. Elena Vartanova, Hannu Nieminen, and Minna-Mari Salminen (Helsinki: Aleksanteri Institute, 2009).
14 Katja Koikkalainen, Talousjournalismin tiennäyttäjät Venäjällä: Kansainväliset vaikutteet ja paikalliset erityispiirteet Kommersant- ja Vedomosti-sanomalehdissä [The innovators of the business press in Russia: international influences and local features in the newspapers Kommersant and Vedomosti] (Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2009), 378.
15 Peter Kjaer and Tore Slaatta, “Mediating Business: Toward a Relational Perspective”, in Mediating Business: The Expansion of Business Journalism, ed. Peter Kjaer and Tore Slaatta (Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press, 2007), 13.
16 Andrei Vyrkovskii, “Sravnitelnyi analiz modelei delovykh zhurnalov SShA i Rossii” [Comparative analysis of business magazine models in the US and Russia] (dissertation, Moscow State University, 2007).
17 See Vyrkovskii, “Sravnitelnyi analiz modelei delovykh zhurnalov”, 10–11.
18 See e.g. the overview by Kjaer and Slaatta, “Mediating Business”, 18.
19 Rutger von Seth, “The Russian Daily Press, 1978–2003: Political Argumentation and the Problematic Public Sphere,” Russian Journal of Communication 5 no. 3 (2013): 214–228, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19409419.2013.819460, accessed August 6, 2013.
20 The search phrase рынок!т (rynok!t) was used to find articles containing one or more instances of the word for “market” in its root form, which is the nominative and accusative singular.
21 For a discussion, see Wierzbicka, Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words, 12.
22 For the qualitative analysis, I chose every fifth occurrence in chronological order (i.e., the first, sixth, eleventh, etc.) in the selected publications, up to a maximum of three stories per day and ten stories per medium per year (but up to a maximum of 29 stories per medium in 1990, since the total sample was relatively small). This yields 56 to 81 examples in each selected year, and 217 examples in all for the qualitative analysis. All the material was accessible through the Integrum database, and the selection of newspapers and magazines was based on the results of the initial quantitative analysis described above. The structural changes in Russian media affected the selection of examples: some of the publications in the selection of 1990 are no longer published, and some have undergone changes of name or ownership.
23 Sources: Company information; “National Readership Survey” by TNS Rossiia, accessed October 21, 2010, www.tns-global.ru; and Koikkalainen, Talousjournalismin tiennäyttäjät Venäjällä.
24 According to a search of the Integrum database.
25 See Nordenstreng and Pietiläinen, “Media as a Mirror of Change”, 143–144.
26 “BOFIT Russia Statistics 1990–2007”, Bank of Finland Institute for Economies in Transition, April 30, 2011, http://www.suomenpankki.fi/bofit_en/seuranta/venajatilastot/Documents/BOFIT_RussiaStatistics_1990_2007.pdf.
27 “BOFIT Russia Statistics 2013”, Bank of Finland Institute for Economies in Transition, http://www.suomenpankki.fi/bofit_en/seuranta/venajatilastot/Pages/default.aspx, accessed July 29, 2013.
28 “Do samogo dna” [To the very bottom], Novosti SMI 13 (2010), 20–21.
29 Rossiiskii rynok periodicheskoi pechati: Sostoianie, tendentsii i perspektivy razvitiia [The Russian periodicals market: Situation, trends and outlook] (Moscow: Federalnoe agentstvo po pechati i massovym kommunikatsiiam, 2010), http://www.fapmc.ru/files/download/798_file.pdf, 5. Accessed June 2, 2010.
30 Cf. “rynok” in Bolshoi tolkovyi slovar’ russkogo iazyka [The great interpretive dictionary of the Russian language], ed. S. A. Kuznetsov (St. Petersburg: Institut lingvisticheskykh issledovanii, Rossiiskaia Akademiia nauk, 1998).
31 V. I. Dal, Tolkovyi slovar’ russkogo iazyka: sovremennaia versiia [Interpretive dictionary of the Russian language: contemporary edition] (Moscow: Eksmo, 2002).
32 This may be due to the fact that the Integrum database contains little of the local and regional press of that time.
33 Rossiiskaia gazeta, December 26, 1990
34 Kommersant-Weekly, May 28, 1990.
35 Compare with Kjaer and Slaatta, “Mediating Business,” 13–31.
36 We must bear in mind, however, that the number of sources available in Integrum was smaller for 1990 than for 2010.
37 Nezavisimaia gazeta, January 25, 2010.
38 Vedomosti, January 13, 2010.
39 Vedomosti, January 12, 2010.
40 Nezavisimaia gazeta, January 14, 2010.
41 Ogonek, April 12, 2010.
42 See Shmeleva, “Krizis (Crisis) as the Key Word of the Present Moment”, 63.
43 Wierzbicka, Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words, 16.
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