Novaya Gazeta

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Novaya Gazeta
logo
description national newspaper
publishing company ANO RID "Novaya Gazeta"
First edition April 1, 1993
Frequency of publication three times a week
Sold edition 600,000 copies
( zeit.de, March 8, 2007 )
Editor-in-chief Sergei Kosheurov
editor Sergei Sokolov
Web link www.novayagazeta.ru (Russian)

Nowaja Gazeta ( Russian: Новая Газета , New Newspaper ) is a Russian newspaper that appears three times a week and is published in Moscow .

history

In April 1993, editor-in-chief Dmitri Muratow founded one of the first independent Russian daily newspapers together with colleagues from the former Soviet youth newspaper and today's tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda . Mikhail Gorbachev provided the money for the first computer from the Nobel Peace Prize he had received . In 1999, the daily newspaper now appeared in Novaya Gazeta , initially twice a week .

owner

In June 2006 the former President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev and the banker and former Duma deputy Alexander Lebedev (most recently the Just Russia Party ) jointly acquired 49 percent of the shares in Novaya Gazeta. The remaining 51 percent are still in the hands of the editorial collective. The funds raised through the sale of the share were to be used to expand the newspaper.

profile

In the Russian press landscape, Novaya Gazeta stands out for its articles on corruption, organized crime, their connection to Russian officials and their commitment to upholding human rights and a peaceful solution to the Chechnya conflict. According to Deutsche Welle , Novaya Gazeta is known beyond the borders of Russia “for investigative journalism under the most difficult conditions”. In 2006, the newspaper reported critically on what it believed the Russian government had specifically fomented hatred of Russians of Georgian descent.

The Committee to Protect Journalists had called already in 2007, the Novaya Gazeta as "the only truly critical newspaper with national coverage" in Russia. In the Arte theme evening under the title “Putin's Propaganda War”, Novaya Gazeta was named as the only free newspaper in 2015; The state controls all media except for one medium each of the genres newspaper, radio, and television, whereby the TV channel Doschd is barely distributed due to the lockout from cable networks .

The Novaya Gazeta reported about the fact that the then Prime Minister Putin as deputy mayor of his time in St. Petersburg had misappropriated humanitarian funds. She also alleged that the domestic secret service FSB itself carried out the terrorist attacks on two apartment buildings in Moscow in 1999 as a false flag operation in order to accuse Islamist terrorists and to create a cause for the start of the Second Chechen War . (See also: Explosive attacks on residential buildings in Russia .)

editorial staff

Dmitri Muratov was editor-in-chief for 22 years after he was elected during a reporting trip to Chechnya in 1995. He is one of those Russian intellectuals who have advocated democracy and human rights since perestroika . Some of the approximately 30 employees of the paper are very well-known journalists:

  • Pawel Felgenhauer , internationally recognized military expert
  • Vyacheslav Izmailov , former army officer
  • Julia Latynina , writer
  • Roman Schlain , reporter

These editors used to be the figureheads of established daily newspapers with a circulation in the millions. Since President Vladimir Putin took office in the spring of 2000, however, the media have been put under pressure because they have attracted attention because of their critical distance from the government and critical reporting on the war in Chechnya. Some of the journalists who worked there left and worked for Novaya Gazeta . The editorial team also relies on a dense network of correspondents in the Russian Federation and other successor states of the USSR. For security reasons, these sometimes remain anonymous. It is believed that senior officials of the presidential administration and members of the government sometimes provide the Novaya Gazeta with information.

Circulation and range

By 1999, the Novaya Gazeta appeared in the Russian Federation with a circulation of 400,000 copies. Since then, the domestic print run has fallen, but rose to a total of 600,000 copies by 2005 (excluding the Internet edition).

  • 171,000 copies in the Russian Federation
  • 429,000 copies (regional editions) in several Russian cities as well as in Kazakhstan and Israel
  • Unknown number of copies since October 2005 as a supplement to the Russian-language newspaper Lugantschane in Ukraine
  • 54,000 color copies of the monthly Novaya Gazeta since September 2005
  • 10,000 copies since August 7, 2007 of the weekly Russian-language European edition
  • 70,000 readers daily since 1996 of the Novaya Gazeta website

For comparison: Government-loyal papers like Izvestia sell around 500,000 copies nationwide, Komsomolskaya Pravda around 1.9 million. The Novaya Gazeta is sold almost exclusively in Moscow and the surrounding regions of central Russia. On the one hand, the nationwide distribution fails because of the costs, caused by distances of up to 10,000 kilometers, but above all because of a lack of demand.

Violence against Novaya Gazeta journalists

The small editorial staff were repeatedly victims of violence by unknown perpetrators. Eight journalists from the newspaper have been seriously injured or killed since May 2000.

Murdered Novaya Gazeta employees:

  • Igor Domnikow : The specialist in corruption cases in the oil industry was knocked down with a hammer on May 12, 2000 by previously unknown perpetrators in front of the entrance to his house and left unconscious in a pool of blood. Domnikov died on July 16 without regaining consciousness. Both the police and Domnikov's colleagues are sure that the attack is related to his professional activity.
  • Yuri Shchekochichin : The deputy editor-in-chief wasadmitted to the Moscow Central Hospital on June 21, 2003 in a life-threatening conditionwhile researching the connection between tax fraudsters and the domestic intelligence service FSB . He died on the night of July 3rd. The official cause of death was a violent allergic reaction - although he had never suffered from an allergy. The relatives were never given the results of the autopsy.
  • Anna Politkovskaya : The journalist exposed crimes committed by the Russian army and its allied Chechen paramilitary groups during the Chechnya war. On October 7, 2006, Politkovskaya was shot several times in front of her home in Moscow. The unmasked perpetrator was filmed and identified by a surveillance camera, but was never caught by the police. The publisher set aside 25 million rubles ($ 930,000) for clues about the Politkovskaya killers and promised: "As long as there is 'Novaya Gazeta', its killers will not sleep easy".
  • Anastassija Baburova : The freelancer wasshot dead on the street in Moscow onJanuary 19, 2009 after attending a press conference together with the human rights lawyer Stanislaw Markelow .
  • Natalia Estemirova : The journalist worked for the human rights organization Memorial in Chechnya and occasionally wrote articles for Novaya Gazeta . She was abducted on July 15, 2009 and found shot dead the same day.

Injured Novaya Gazeta employees:

  • Oleg Lurje : The special correspondent of the "Enlightenment and Research Department" and author of numerous articles on corruption by high-ranking civil servants was beaten up on December 16, 2000 by two strangers. The perpetrators took no money or valuables from him.
  • Sergei Solovkin : The South Russia correspondent was attacked on March 12, 2002 in Sochi on the Black Sea in front of his house. The perpetrator fired two shots, but missed him. Solovkin returned fire with his own pistol, which he legally owned as a former detective inspector. After the assassination attempt, Solovkin left Russia and moved to Germany.
  • Mikhail Komarov : The deputy editor-in-chief of the external editorial office in Ryazan was attacked and beaten up by two men in front of the entrance of his house on November 3, 2003. The perpetrators did not take any property of the victim. Komarov was taken to hospital seriously injured.

Novaya Gazeta reporters are also regularly exposed to threats. According to research by journalist Elena Milaschina and her colleagues, more than 100 people were arrested as alleged homosexuals in Chechnya in February and March 2017 and placed in secret prisons and tortured. At least three people are said to have been murdered. After the report was published, Adam Shahidov, an adviser to Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov , described Novaya Gazeta journalists as "enemies of our faith and our homeland". The journalists were threatened with retaliation and the Chechen Mufti Salah Meshiev said that “God's vengeance” would hit the reporters.

In October 2018, Novaya Gazeta journalist Denis Korotkov published an article about the activities of Yevgeny Prigozhin . The article was based on interviews with a former Prigozhin employee who said he had ordered several attacks against Prigozhin's opponents and the murder of an opposition blogger in northwestern Russia. In addition, Prigozhin employees from the Wagner group traveled to Syria, where they tested an unknown poison on Syrian civilians who refused to fight for Bashar al-Assad . The man interviewed by Korotkow had disappeared. Strangers sent the sawed-off head of a goat to the newspaper's office with the message "For the editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta - With regards to you and Korotkov". A funeral wreath was laid in front of Korotkov's apartment, on which it read “Traitor to the Fatherland”.

State harassment against the publisher

The comments and analyzes, especially the explosive stories of the Novaya Gazeta , repeatedly cause displeasure among the state administration and the government. That is why the Novaya Gazeta is under constant pressure from the Russian authorities. Her lawyers handle 20 to 30 multi-million dollar lawsuits against the newspaper annually. The Novaya Gazeta but has so far never lost a case. Again and again there are "urgent controls" by the Russian financial authorities or the fire protection authorities, in which the editorial work is disrupted. The Roskomnadzor media regulator can shut down media that commit two violations of the law within one year; of two reports within one year, the second concerned a swear word in a literary text in July 2015. Swearing has been banned in Russia since 2014, when the law came into force, it was often said that it would be used against statements critical of the government.

Actual or potential advertisers are said to have been put under pressure. The German Wave reported that a multinational company was even threatened to be better to dispense with ads in the newspaper. The company then paid the agreed amount for the advertisement - but insisted that the advertisement not be published in the newspaper.

On November 11, 2007, the local editorial office in Samara announced the closure of the local edition of Novaya Gazeta . The background to this is the confiscation of all office technology by state organs. The editors were accused of using software on their computers without a license. However, representatives of Novaya Gazeta see the police measures as an attempt by the state to stop the newspaper in Samara from working in the run-up to the elections.

In the fall of 2014, the newspaper received a warning from the regulators about “extremist activity”. The inspectors had seen extremism in Julia Latynina's text "If we are not the West, who are we?" The article on some unflattering characteristics of Russia about the “return to great Russian culture” advertised in the state media ended with the words: “All successful civilizations went through brutality and barbarism. But it would never occur to any successful civilization to regard bestiality as the norm. This only occurs to fascism . "

In July 2015, the newspaper received a second warning. It can thus be officially closed at any time. The reason was a violation of the ban on public cursing, which had been seen as a return of censorship with its arbitrariness even before its introduction .

Announcement of the discontinuation of paper output

On March 12, 2015, editor-in-chief Muratow said in an interview that the cessation of the paper edition is likely after May 9, since the main shareholder has ceased payments and there are practically no advertisers. "Novaya Gazeta" could not compete with "state-subsidized" media.

The newspaper appeared twice a week at the beginning of 2019. The internet offer was deliberately made barrier-free so that the Novaya Gazeta research remains accessible even in remote areas with readers who hardly pay for information.

Awards

Charles Medal for European Media
  • On December 12, 2006, the media organization Reporters Without Borders (ROG) awarded Novaya Gazeta the "ROG Human Rights Prize" for its special commitment to freedom of the press and freedom of expression.
  • On May 11, 2007, Novaya Gazeta was awarded the prestigious 2007 Henri Nannen Prize for its services to freedom of the press .
  • In 2010, the Four Freedoms Award in the category of freedom of expression was given to Novaya Gazeta .
  • In 2010, the Lew Kopelew Forum in Cologne recognized the editorial staff of the newspaper by awarding them the Lew Kopelew Prize for Peace and Human Rights, because the paper stood for independent, enlightening, courageous and unswerving journalism.
  • On May 14, 2011, the newspaper and its editor-in-chief were awarded the “The Intrepid Word” prize by the Federation of Luther Cities.
  • In 2012, Novaya Gazeta received the Charles Medal for European Media .

See also

literature

  • Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova: Russia's Liberal Media: Handcuffed but Free. Routledge 2018, ISBN 978-1-138-23728-5 .

documentary

  • Askold Kurow: Novaya. 2019, 75 min.

Web links

Commons : Novaya Gazeta  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Appointed Novaya Gazeta's Editor In Chief For Second Time  ( page no longer available , search in web archivesInfo: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , RFERL, November 18, 2017@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.rferl.org  
  2. a b Ulrich Heyden: Mikhail Gorbatschow joins "Nowaja Gaseta" ( memento of the original from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Eurasisches Magazin, June 30, 2006 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.eurasischesmagazin.de
  3. Gorbachev Buys Into Kremlin's Most Vocal Critic ( Memento from June 15, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
  4. Gorbachev is a partner in Novaya Gazeta , Russia News , June 9, 2006
  5. ^ Announcement of the radio station Echo Moskwy of June 7, 2006 about the sale of company shares to M. Gorbachev and A. Lebedew (Russian)
  6. Claire Stephan: Nowaja Gazeta: The probation period lasts ( Memento of the original from May 18, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.arte.tv archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , ARTE Info - Elections in Russia - 2007
  7. a b c d e Gesine Dornblüth : An island of truth and independence in the sea of ​​conformism and lies . Deutsche Welle , October 10, 2006 (Russian)
  8. ^ CPJ to Honor Five Journalists , CPJ International Press Freedom Awards, 2007
  9. Putin's propaganda war ( memento of the original from October 12, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Arte , September 15, 2015 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.arte.tv
  10. "Nobody goes anywhere" , Novaya Gazeta, November 14, 2017
  11. a b c d e f Editor of the Russian daily newspaper "Novaja Gazeta". ( Memento of May 13, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) on henri-nannen-preis.de (viewed on January 14, 2009)
  12. Elke Windisch: Bulky Truths , Der Tagesspiegel , October 14, 2006
  13. a b Novaya Gazeta of October 24, 2005, No. 79: Communication on circulation size and cooperation with the Ukrainian newspaper Lugatschane (Russian)
  14. Dossier on the "Newspaper of the Future": Global News. In: taz , September 15, 2007
  15. Novaya Gazeta of October 24, 2005, No. 79: Communication on circulation size and cooperation with the Ukrainian newspaper Lugatschane (Russian)
  16. "Novaya Gazeta" with the European edition . Federal Association of German Newspaper Publishers , August 8, 2007
  17. a b c d e f Chronicle of the attacks and murders of the Novaya Gazeta journalists ( Memento of the original of February 22, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In Novye Izvestia online (Russian) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.newizv.ru
  18. “Human rights activists murdered in Moscow” , SF Tagesschau , January 19, 2009.
  19. ^ Juri Ginsburg: How the journalist Sergei Solowkin escaped execution in the health resort of Sochi . In: Berliner Zeitung , July 27, 2002
  20. ^ Protect journalists from Novaya Gazeta . Reporters Without Borders, April 19, 2017.
  21. Russian Paper: Indicted Prigozhin Ordered Beatings, Killing . In: The New York Times , October 22, 2018.
  22. Novaya Gazeta Reports Claims Of 'Putin's Chef' Involved In Attacks, Killing . In: Radio Free Europe , October 22, 2018.
  23. ^ Novaya Gazeta Could Face Closure After Second Government Warning , The Moscow Times, July 21, 2015
  24. David Nauer: Damn it, Mr. Putin! , Basler Zeitung, June 19, 2015
  25. newsru.com
  26. ^ Written warning from Roskomnadzor, October 10, 2014
  27. If we are not the West, who are we? Novaya Gazeta, September 9, 2014
  28. Nowaja Gazeta receives another warning from the Russian media regulator ( memento of the original dated December 8, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Eurasiablog.de, July 21, 2015 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / eurasiablog.de
  29. Films in Russia: The Fear of Scissors , RBTH, December 18, 2014
  30. orf.at Kremlin-critical newspaper "Novaya Gazeta" threatens to end, ORF.at 13 March 2015
  31. Russia's amazing media diversity , NZZ, February 2, 2019, page 9
  32. Reporters Without Borders awards human rights award , report on the homepage of Reporters Without Borders , December 12, 2006
  33. Roosevelt Institute, List of Prize Winners ( Memento of the original from March 25, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved December 14, 2012 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.rooseveltinstitute.org
  34. Kopelew Prize awarded to the editors of "Novaya Gazeta" ( memento from November 22, 2010 on WebCite ), Tagesschau.de on November 21, 2010
  35. The winners of the Luther Cities Prize - “The Intrepid Word”. (No longer available online.) City of Worms , archived from the original on April 12, 2009 ; Retrieved October 26, 2010 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.worms.de
  36. ^ Charles Medal . In: FAZ , March 16, 2012, p. 33
  37. Documentary on Russian newspaper wins prize. SZ.de, September 26, 2019.
  38. Stefanie Groth: "Novaya Gazeta" - work under constant threat. NDR, ZAPP, November 20, 2019. ( YouTube )