New media in the city system of creation and distribution of news content

Section: New Media

During the last decade new media have adopted some of the functionalities of the traditional media and have become an integral part of the city-based media systems. This development has led to their increasing involvement in the news distribution system. There are three approaches to the study of new media at the Russian academic discourse: political activism and the theory of cumulative deliberation; analysis of individual cases of new media and generalization of material from several regions (cities) and definition of typology, genres and models of individual city’s publics and channels; an in-depth analysis of the relationship between traditional and new media and the place of the latter in the media system. Our approach involves studying the development of news (or journalistic) discourse at the city level of the Russian media system (on the example of one city – Sochi). The results were obtained on the data collected during content analysis of 1644 posts in the social network VKontakte and at the messenger Telegram (publications have been taken for one week 05.12.2022 – 11.12.2022). The authors of this study have been searching answers to the questions: What characteristics do original Sochi’s new media have and how do they function as a system? Which approaches to distributing news content do they use? On what basis is it possible to typologize these news sources? The results showed that despite the numerical superiority of noninstitutionalized new media over traditional media, at the moment the former are not currently forming a full-fledged news environment as a separate self-sufficient segment of the urban media system. The authors claimed that it is possible to distinguish and describe at least five different types of original new media due to their maim characteristics: “classic editions” – public pages / channels of traditional media / media companies and official bodies – are not very popular, but quite active in producing original content; “dezhurnaya chast” – niche thematic resources (most often in the “emergency” format) – in demand among the audience, partly producing visible share of own original content; “journalists from digital platforms” – media with a conventionally “journalistic” slant – are small in number, produce content by themselves quite actively, use more “journalistic” techniques and initiate single socially significant topics; “leaders-aggregators” – the most popular resources among the audience – post the largest volumes of advertising and content (primarily borrowed); “little aggregators” (“repeaters”) – numerous smaller “clones” of media of the previous type, most often even more secondary. The main functionality of the resources under the study is seen primarily in increasing the coverage of legacy media’s news materials, rather than in their production. They are, in essence, a (non-institutionalized) “filtering system” that does not have uniform and clear rules for selection and editing, through which information collected and “packaged” by other actors of the urban media system is dissiminated.

DOI: 10.55959/msu.vestnik.journ.1.2025.3368

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To cite this article: Kanaylova A. O., Makeenko M. I. (2025) Novye media v gorodskoy sisteme sozdaniya i rasprostraneniya novostnogo kontenta [New media in the city system of creation and distribution of news content]. Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta. Seriya 10. Zhurnalistika 1: 33–68. DOI: 10.55959/msu.vestnik.journ.1.2025.3368