Media in Belarus Conference, Day Two

Andrei Ali­ak­san­drau, direc­tor’ deputy at Bela­PAN news agency

The cur­rent eco­nom­ic sit­u­a­tion leaves much to be desired, while the coun­try is in reces­sion. We observe dom­i­nat­ing of the state sec­tor in the media, along­side with great depen­dence of our econ­o­my on Rus­sia.

In recent years, we’ve seen a seri­ous decline in cap­i­tal­iza­tion of the Belaru­sian media mar­ket by around 40 per cent. The mar­ket vol­ume is approx­i­mate­ly 70 mil­lion USD, 18 mil­lion of which belongs to online adver­tis­ing mar­ket. The struc­ture of the media mar­ket has changed, too: in 2005, print media com­prised near 26 per cent, TV – 52 per cent, and the Inter­net occu­pied only 1 per cent. In 2016, print mass media com­prised only 5 per cent of the whole mar­ket, where­as 25 – 26 per cent now belongs to the Inter­net. And the ten­den­cy pre­serves.

The spe­cif­ic of the Belaru­sian media space is that the dom­i­nant posi­tion is tak­en by large media own­ers, and some of them are not Belaru­sian, but Russ­ian. Also, state-run mass media have recent­ly start­ed to pro­mote them­selves online.

One should bear in mind the polit­i­cal aspect influ­enc­ing the media mar­ket: state-run mass media enjoy sup­port in the form of sub­si­dies from the state bud­get. Also, many non-state mass media have been ban­ished from the state sys­tem of dis­tri­b­u­tion of print press.

Some oth­er issues: com­pul­so­ry sub­scrip­tion of bud­get work­ers to state news­pa­pers, pres­sure on adver­tiz­ers, bar­ri­ers for entry into mar­ket (reg­is­tra­tion, allo­ca­tion of fre­quen­cies, invest­ments). And one more prob­lem to be men­tioned is lack of jour­nal­ists’ access to infor­ma­tion.

How­ev­er, not every­thing is as bad as it looks: inde­pen­dent media have some oppor­tu­ni­ties to take, like new tech­nolo­gies, new plat­forms for work, new for­mats of adver­tis­ing which help draw earn­ings even for small web­sites. Adver­tis­ers’ approach­es have changed, too: they wish to tar­get spe­cif­ic audi­ences.

In my view, Belaru­sian media are still keen on pro­duc­tion of con­tent. Mean­while, it is essen­tial to learn to sell your con­tent pro­fes­sion­al­ly.

As for Bela­PAN, last year it focused on sell­ing news, where­as now we aim to increase adver­tis­ing rev­enues. A new web­site ver­sion has been launched with more ads. The step has increased web­site traf­fic by around 40 per cent with­in sev­er­al months, now we have up to 1 mil­lion unique users a month. We are also active­ly pro­mot­ing our pages on Face­book, Twit­ter and YouTube.

Pauliyuk Byk­ous­ki, media expert

The change in media con­sump­tion wor­ries not only non-state media busi­ness­es, but the gov­ern­ment, too. For exam­ple, the Min­is­ter of Infor­ma­tion has spo­ken about a drop in cir­cu­la­tions of print media.

One of present-day ten­den­cies is that the role of web­sites has shift­ed to media pres­ence on dif­fer­ent plat­forms. The mean­ing of the main page has even changed, because now peo­ple come from social nets and search plat­forms to read a par­tic­u­lar piece of news. The main cur­ren­cy is audience’s atten­tion: there is a real fight for audi­ences with mobile devices where every per­son is now a kiosk with its own con­tent and ads.

Uladz­imir Yanuke­vich, Intex-press, Baranavichy

By the exam­ple of the media that make part of the Asso­ci­a­tion of Pub­lish­ers of Region­al Press, I can say that the chief prob­lem is unequal stand­ing of inde­pen­dent media against state-run media in the dis­tri­b­u­tion and pric­ing sys­tems.

Teach­ers are oblig­ed to sub­scribe to this or that out­let and to bring con­fir­ma­tion doc­u­ments from the post-office; the fact of sub­scrip­tion is encour­aged by bonus­es, for instance, by an extra day of sum­mer vaca­tions.

When Korona hyper­mar­ket appeared in Baranavichy, we con­clud­ed an agree­ment and sold around 200 to 300 copies on the first day. But then, the shop man­agers honed me and told they had been banned to coo­op­er­ate with us. More­over, they named par­tic­u­lar­ly those per­sons from the city exec­u­tive com­mit­tee who banned this.

So, our main demand and view­point now: all media should have equal con­di­tions. Nobody will be able to com­pete with us then, because we make the most inter­est­ing prod­uct at our region­al mar­ket.

Andrei Dynko, chief edi­tor of Nasha Niva

Nasha Niva gets over 7 mil­lion views a month. We cut down on paper news­pa­per as a chance to pro­mote the out­let online.

I do not see seri­ous feed­back from social nets; the very pub­li­ca­tions on social nets do not bring us earn­ings. Social nets and mes­sen­gers should work to attract the audi­ence to our web­site. Most Belaru­sian out­lets can­not afford six per­sons to admin­is­ter social accounts.

Nasha Niva was one of the first social-polit­i­cal news­pa­pers who tried to raise funds from crowd­fund­ing. We expect to raise around 10 to 11 thou­sand euro with­in a year. But I don’t think that this is a seri­ous sum for an edi­to­r­i­al office to exist.

I like the mod­el of Den­mark where all large out­lets agreed at a time to switch on a pay­wall. I assume we’ve got to cre­ate a sol­idary pay­wall. Of course, such paid-for sub­scrip­tion will be pos­si­ble with suf­fi­cient lev­el of devel­op­ment of elec­tron­ic pay­ment sys­tems, so here we depend a bit on the state.

Inter­na­tion­al Con­fer­ence on Media Chal­lenges Held in Min­sk