“Vedomosti” should be a purely business media, “and not express their opinions on the pages,” said the new owner of Vedomosti, Uralian media manager Ivan Yeryomin today at a zoom conference with the editors of a Moscow publication. As its participants told Open Media, the meeting was held with the feeling that the owner of Vedomosti believes: "Journalists of the publication do not know how to work, and he will teach us how."
“After talking with Eremin, we are a little shocked. There was even talk that Zyatkov was still nothing, "says one of the employees of Vedomosti.
He is upset that, in his opinion, the new owner of the publication came into conversation, not knowing what “Vedomosti” is and how they work. “At the beginning of the conversation, he suggested“ not pretending ”and admit that PR contracts are completely normal, because Vedomosti also has contracts with the city hall. That is, he does not distinguish between editorials and contracts concluded by our department of conferences and the department of special projects for the release of special applications for customers. From his words it follows that he considers it normal to intervene in editorial policy, adds the source of Open Media.
Eremin, according to another participant in the meeting, also stated that Dogma, a code of internal editorial rules that has been in force from the very foundation of the newspaper, sets out the principles for writing articles, rules for communication between journalists and newsmakers, and tightly regulates the editorial staff’s work. The new owner, in a conversation with reporters, said that "Vedomosti" has become a war sheet and they are writing the wrong notes, "he says.
According to the interlocutor of OM, Eremin did not rule out that in the future it will become known about some of his partners in Vedomosti. The new owner of the publication did not answer the question of journalists about his relationship with Rosneft.
Yeryomin told reporters that he would like to keep the Vedomosti team - but he said that he did not consider it necessary to dismiss the acting deputy appointed at the end of March. editor-in-chief of the newspaper Andrei Shmarov, if the editors did not find a common language with him. The fight against Shmarov and publications about her on the pages of Vedomosti Yeryomin called "activism."
Whether he is considering the possibility of basically changing the chief editor, Eremin did not say so. In response to this question from the Vedomosti journalist, the new owner of the publication only said that it was “ugly to discuss” in a zoom conference with the whole team, because Andrei Shmarov also participated in this conference and “heard everything”.
Attendance at the Vedomosti website in May fell markedly, data from Internet meters indicate. In the rating of the Yandex.Radar service, the publication’s website immediately lost nine positions, dropping to 24th place among all Russian media. In the previous month, only 8.9 million people visited vedomosti.ru.
The LiveInternet counter also shows a sharp decrease in attendance: in May, Vedomosti’s website, according to its data, only 15 million people visited it, about one and a half times less than a month earlier.