NEWSru.com

» see newsru.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

moscow is a short flight from ankara and the russian-language web was still further from me than california. cyrillic was the wall. i read the english and turkish internet, and whatever sat on the other side of that alphabet arrived translated and late, usually through a wire agency. newsru was one of the biggest sites i never once opened.

it launched on 28 august 2000 under the ntu.ru domain, the online arm of ntv, which at that moment was the only large russian television channel reporting independently of the kremlin. anton nossik built it. he is the closest thing the russian internet had to a founding figure, the man behind lenta.ru and gazeta.ru in the same window, and he died in 2017, four years before the site he started.

the channel did not survive. gazprom-media took ntv in 2001 and its owner vladimir gusinsky left the country. the website went with him rather than with the channel, changed its name to newsru.com, and became the surviving piece of a media empire that had been dismantled around it. it kept running from outside the structure that killed its parent, which is a strange way to last twenty-one years.

the end came on 31 may 2021. the statement was blunt about the reason: the situation in the economy and in the legal field made it impossible to keep doing the work properly. the editor, yelena bereznitskaya-bruni, said they would not find funding any time soon for the thing they knew how to do, which was objective news.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

for most of its life newsru ran as an aggregator with a newsroom attached. it summarized what everyone else had published and added its own reporting, updated all day, presented flat and fast with no interest in looking like a magazine. the design barely moved in two decades. that was a feature for the audience, who wanted the day's events in one column without a homepage editor deciding what mattered.

the editorial position was simply that it printed what happened. in the russian media environment after 2012 that is not a neutral choice, and it is why the site kept being described as opposition media by people who worked at outlets that took the state line.

~ how the money went ~

nobody banned newsru. no prosecutor closed it, no court blocked the domain. it ran out of advertising.

the site said the drift started after 2014, when its picture of the day and the state media picture of the day stopped resembling each other. large advertisers quietly stopped buying. the last stage was the foreign agent rules, which by 2021 required outlets to attach a heavy legal disclaimer to any mention of a person or organization on the list, and that made a page unattractive to the brands still willing to be there. the pressure worked through the media buyer rather than through the police, which is a cheaper mechanism and harder to point at.

~ what got buried with it ~

the site said it would keep its archive online, about 1.1 million news items covering everything from august 2000 forward. that is a day-by-day record of two russian decades written as they happened rather than as they were later described.

the staff moved to the israeli sister site, newsru.co.il, which serves the russian-speaking population there and is still publishing. the russian edition stopped. an outlet that survived the seizure of its parent company and the exile of its owner was finally closed by an empty ad server.

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