Buying Loyalty

Under Governor Alexei Dyumin (September 22, 2016–May 14, 2024), government control of local media in the Tula region developed into a fully functioning system. Government contracts for what officials called “information support” effectively became a mechanism for purchasing the loyalty of newsrooms.

This episode is about how that system worked — and why journalism in the region gradually stopped depending on its readers.

Tula, late 2010s

Under Governor Alexei Dyumin, the Tula government’s public-relations bureaucracy was fully assembled and professionally staffed. Some of the region’s best specialists were brought into the system, and substantial resources were devoted to it. The machinery was in place. All that remained was to impose discipline.

Dyumin understood the language of subordination perfectly well. After his arrival, the regional government increasingly operated according to barracks-style rules.

The regional Committee for Press and Mass Communications used public funding to keep Tula’s newsrooms in line, strategically distributing money through contracts for “information support” — essentially paid media coverage of government activities. The logic was simple, though carefully concealed: neither the quality of the journalism nor the size of the audience mattered very much. 

What mattered was the newsroom’s loyalty.

Anton Ageev, then Tula Region’s minister of internal policy, once complained to me that the quality of journalism about municipalities and local officials had become so poor that nobody wanted to read it.

Of course nobody read it, dear Anton Valeryevich.

Much of this “journalism” consisted of government-commissioned copy. And the problem was not simply that the articles were paid for. The problem was how they were produced.

Let me give you an example.

The Tula city administration once commissioned us to cover a summer festival on the city embankment. There was a fair, archery, medieval armor to try on, gingerbread being baked, and honey and kvass to taste. Mayor Dmitry Milyaev was supposed to walk through the stalls, sample the gingerbread, talk to residents, and demonstrate his involvement in the city’s everyday life.

My reporter covered the event as a reporter should. He followed the mayor through the fair, produced a photo story, and wrote an article.

Under the local bureaucratic custom, commissioned pieces were sent to the client’s press office for approval before publication. We did the same this time.

The response was that the “correct” article had already been written and “approved.” They would send it to us, and we were expected to publish it on the Moskovsky Komsomolets in Tula website without changing a word.

I objected.

Beyond my lofty objections about government interference in editorial work, I also had arguments that an average Russian official could understand more easily.

First, the bureaucratic text they sent us read less like a report from a lively city festival than a sack stuffed with officialese and clichés.

Second, we were not the only outlet commissioned to cover the event. That meant several newsrooms had received the same magnificent press-office masterpiece, along with the same instruction not to alter it.

Search engines recognize identical texts as duplicates. They are unlikely to show all those copies to readers.

No one was going to see these masterpieces.

“That doesn’t matter to us,” I was told. “Our job is to have this specific text appear in several media outlets. We’ll copy the links, print the pages, and report back to management.”

Fortunately, I was running an online publication rather than a print newspaper, which gave me a few tools for being stubborn.

I published the officials’ version in such a way that it could be reached only through a direct link. We sent that link to the client for their reports. They were satisfied.

For our readers, meanwhile, we separately published our own editorial story with the photo report. That was the version search engines could see.

The officials’ embarrassing masterpiece remained invisible.

I did this quite often afterward.

Some employees of ministerial and parliamentary press offices who wrote these masterpieces for us were not particularly enthusiastic about their own work either. They even had a professional term for such publications:

“the mass grave.”

A “mass grave” was a long, tedious article assembled from pre-approved comments by officials and legislators after meetings, hearings, or visits with constituents.

It was not written to be read.

It was written to be reported.

Everyone understood this — including the officials featured in these stories.

So Anton Ageev’s complaints about the quality of journalism covering municipal affairs were entirely justified, precisely because much of it was not journalism at all.

These texts did not grow out of curiosity about reality. They were not born from observation or questions. They were assembled like flat-pack furniture from standardized parts — for a report, not for a reader.

I suggested two simple changes to Anton.

First, distribute government media funding competitively. Let newsrooms propose projects and let the client choose the best one. At least then public money might begin rewarding quality rather than the habit of bowing to officials.

Second — and even more simply — government officials could take their feet out of the newsroom and let journalists do their jobs.

Anton did not listen to me.

And I do not think he could have changed much even if he had wanted to.

Government contracts were not designed to support journalism in Tula. They were rewards for loyalty.

The money — and, more importantly, the way it was distributed — did not improve the media environment. It damaged it. It lowered the quality of content and eroded basic journalistic ethics.

Newsrooms became dependent not on their readers but on government officials. And they quickly learned to anticipate what those officials wanted before anyone had to say it aloud.

Still, every newsroom wanted its share of the financial pie. Running a publication is expensive, and reporters’ salaries do not pay themselves.

Annual contracts with the Tula regional government, the regional legislature, and the city administration provided a stable base of revenue while requiring relatively little editorial effort.

By 2021, the rates for online publications looked like this:

A 2,500-character news item paid 5,000 rubles — roughly $63.

A 5,000-character article paid 10,000 rubles — about $125.

Newspapers could receive as much as 90,000 rubles for a single piece — approximately $1,125.

For comparison, a staff reporter writing for a regional publication earned around 35,000 rubles a month — approximately $437.

But officials did not really want to buy individual articles.

They wanted to buy the newsroom’s overall loyalty.

Government officials tended to treat public money as if it were their own rather than taxpayers’ money. From their perspective, if a newsroom accepted payment for specific publications, that newsroom was now expected to act in their interests more broadly.

The logic was straightforward.

If Moskovsky Komsomolets in Tula published one or two paid articles a month for the Tula Regional Duma, where United Russia held the overwhelming majority of seats, then we were not supposed to criticize the ruling party elsewhere on the site.

We were not supposed to interview its political opponents.

We were not supposed to cover protest rallies.

The partners expected absolute loyalty.

From their point of view, I was taking their money while continuing to talk to people they disliked and write about events they preferred not to acknowledge.

For this, I was considered ungrateful and, as Deputy Governor Irina Volkova once put it, “incapable of reaching agreements.”

Translated from bureaucratic Russian, this meant something very simple:

I was violating the system’s unwritten rule of one-sided loyalty.

The money, in their logic, did not buy an article.

It bought behavior.

Anton Ageev and his ministry were part of this system of media control.

One of his responsibilities was to collect information about problems affecting residents — problems that might rise to the surface and damage the overall picture of success and prosperity in the Tula region under Governor Alexei Gennadyevich Dyumin.

The most dangerous problems for Anton were often the smallest, most ordinary local conflicts, because those were the easiest to turn into public scandals.

Complaints about failing sewage systems. Apartments without adequate heating. Neglected neighborhoods. Questionable uses of public money.

Such stories could eventually reach the governor. And that meant they could raise questions about the minister’s effectiveness.

Anton traveled to the affected communities, spoke with residents, promised to investigate, tried to defuse conflicts, and persuaded people not to file complaints or contact journalists.

Generally, he was good at his job.

But not always.

First, because there were simply too many problems.

Second, because people did not always believe officials.

And third, because Anton had a traitor in his midst — a snake he had invited into his own house.

That traitor was me.

Sometimes residents and civic activists contacted me directly — either in my role as a journalist or as chair of the Public Council, an advisory civic body attached to the regional ministry.

They came to me because they had grown tired of waiting for officials to help them.

What they needed was publicity.

Not scandal for the sake of scandal, but attention to a problem — because without public attention, very little moved in the region.

In bureaucratic language, this was called “making noise” or “rocking the boat.”

I checked every complaint that reached either the Public Council or the newsroom.

I sent formal inquiries to government agencies. I traveled to the affected communities. I brought some of the issues before Public Council meetings.

And I wrote about all of it on the Moskovsky Komsomolets in Tula website.

That was where Anton and I began to disagree in a way we never managed to resolve.

He was angry.

He thought he was bringing a quiet, accommodating lecturer from the pedagogical university onto the Public Council.

Instead, he got someone who kept bringing into public view the very things the system had been designed to hide.