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From Online media in post-socialist Europe

When communism crashed in Central and Eastern Europe, between 1989 and 1991, hopes ran high that a newly-free media could accelerate the expected transition to democracy. Instead of a fourth estate emerging, “the speedy arrival of major foreign media owners; the starting of media outlets by local power-brokers and wealthy business people; and the very profitable growth of magazines dedicated to "celebrity", lifestyle and gossip”, as a recent Guardian article summed up^[1], led to a media market where journalistic standards import much less than the quest for influence.

The involvement of the media in the revolutions of the early 1990’s led some to anticipate a journalists-guided democratization of post-socialist Europe. But, as Essex professor Vicky Randall noted as soon as 1993, “[the media] have been better at knocking down the old regime than in positively shaping the new”^[2]. Indeed, economic development was not followed by a westernization of the local media standards. Information as a public good or newspapers as a counterweight to politicians are only a few concepts that failed to take root in the region.

The arrival of the internet, from the mid-1990’s onwards, provided yet another place to put the newly-acquired freedom of expression to use. Once again, online media failed to develop into a tool for democratization. Instead, the murky patterns at work in the offline world replicated online. As a result, online news publishing in post-socialist Europe remains a tricky business.

Research on the media in Eastern Europe has mostly overlooked the business aspect of the trade. In Patrick H. O'Neil’s Post-communism and the media in Eastern Europe, for instance, the word 'profit’ appears only twice. What’s more, local scholars and media watchers publish rarely in English (except in Slovenia and Croatia), so that the only resources available in English when it comes to media monitoring are to be found at the OSCE or at other international organizations, all of which focus rather on freedom than on business. When it comes to research about online media, the academic situation is direr still. Hardly any official report bothers to mention the web as a medium, and local researchers are only beginning to consider it as a field of studies.

Far from having ‘transitioned’ to liberal democracies, countries in post-socialist Europe have developed their own brand of liberalism. The transplantation of Western institutions and the imitation of Western practices did not result in post-socialist countries to become Western-like democracies. Instead, practices from the communist-era made their ways to the new social and economic systems, and new ones developed as inhabitants had to confront the difficult period that immediately followed the crash of socialism.

Commercialization and privatizations did not turn the region’s media markets into clones of their American or German counterparts. Although some trends look similar, such as the widening of readership through tabloidization, post-socialist Europe remains strongly marked by its communist and illiberal past. The most visible divide between Western and post-socialist media lies in public trust: over 75% of the inhabitants of post-socialist Europe distrust their media, twice as much as in Western Europe. Some scholars, such as Slavko Splichal of the University of Ljubljana, have documented the evolution of the media markets in what they call imitative revolutions^[5].

The events that followed the crash of the communist regimes changed the region’s media in 3 ways: politically, technologically and economically.

First, the very purpose of journalism underwent a tremendous redefinition. Journalists used to be political workers, meant to carry out the message of the party to the masses. After the revolution, their job definition went to resemble their Western colleagues’, somewhere between writing what the readers demanded and bringing a counterweight to political power.

The technology transformed itself. In the 1980’s, typewriters and linotype were common sights. The arrival of digitization blew away all the printing system in place during the communist era. Take Poland, for instance. In 1989, the country’s newspapers were printed in 1 color: black. Offset printing was unheard of. The average number of pages per issue stood around 8. From such a dismal starting point, Polish media companies managed to reach Western standards ^[6]. With some foreign cash and expertise, but mostly with loads of enthusiasm, Polish publishers bridged a 50-year technological gap in just 10 years.

The shock also dramatically altered the way business was done. Whereas the government used to order when and where advertising should be published ^[7], editors and companies were now free to sell and buy ad space. In Montenegro in the early 1990’s for instance, people working at the newly-created Graffiti magazine, a satirical weekly, were afraid to sell advertising space because, they thought, it might have brought the wrath of the financial police ^[8].

Probably as a result of the shockwaves of the 1990’s, media stakeholders are more inclined to accept change, compared to their Western counterparts. In Montenegro, for instance, 3 dailies, 18 TVs and 42 radios serve 700,000 consumers, thus causing a large surplus in content supply many experts believe will turn into a market crash in the upcoming months. Faced with the possibility of a great many journalists’ layoffs, the head of the Media Institute told me simply that the market had to “correct” itself and that the process was quite normal^[9]. A far cry from the answer media stakeholders usually give to the evolutions in the market in Western countries. In France, for instance, the favored answer to the crisis affecting the media is to preserve the statu quo at all cost, even if it means eating in the government’s hands .

I assumed that, coming from such a successful revolution in publishing, the actors of the post-socialist media scene would have little trouble adjusting to a new landslide change: internet. What’s more, the dotcom bubble burst before it reached Central and Eastern Europe. The “mega-trauma” caused by the mass layoffs in online newsrooms in North America and Western Europe in the early 2000’s, which is responsible for the aversion many media professionals now feel for the web, simply did not happen East of Berlin ^[10]. All this, I though, paved the way for innovative and rapid actions on the online news market.

That proved to be too optimistic. As Mirek Kowalski told me half-jokingly, “it’s harder to go online than to go capitalist”. Indeed, conservatism runs high in post-socialist Europe’s newsrooms, but not for the same reasons as in Western Europe. The media being often considered as a tool of influence rather than as a profit center, no media barons sees the need to reach out to young consumers (the old generation, comprising decision-makers and politicians, rarely ventures online). As a result, the market for online news remains wide-open to new players, making it much more competitive and innovative.

That said, the total market for online advertising was worth slightly less than €1 billion in 2007, about one fourth of the UK’s. That represents about 10 euros spent for each user in post-socialist Europe, against 100 in the UK. But the GDP gap between the 2 is much less, with British inhabitants only 3 times richer than their post-socialist counterparts. In other words, there’s room for growth.

This study aims at assessing the state of online media in post-socialist Europe from a business-oriented perspective. It does not pretend to be a scientific examination on the matter, nor does it aim at comprehensively analyzing the market. Rather, it shows that there is a market for online news developing and that opportunities abound in this 335-million-people-strong market. Business developers in the whole of Europe should not miss them, as local players are already ready to serve news-hungry online consumers.