Dean of the Faculty of Journalism at Moscow State University Elena Vartanova – How Have the Media Changed Over the Past 10 Years?

“Over the past 10 years, the word ‘media’ has come to denote something broader than journalism as a profession that creates socially significant texts, and broader than mass media outlets,” Elena Vartanova noted.

According to the dean, based on the faculty’s academic research, a comparison was conducted of the ideas and concepts that were relevant in scholarly media publications in 2016 and in 2026. In 2016, the main focus was on traditional journalism and opinion writing, mobile media, advertising, and online media. As the nature of news began to change in the digital era, concepts such as media convergence, storytelling, and globalization became subjects of academic analysis.

By 2026, digitalization and everything associated with it—platformization, messengers, government public pages, generative AI models, and social media regulation—had come to the forefront. Over the past decade, the term “media consumption” has become dominant in the research agenda. Globalization has been replaced by cultural codes and the digital transformation of meaning.

According to Elena Vartanova, the main driver of media development today is digital transformation, which provides numerous incentives across various spheres of life and fields of activity.

“Digitalization is moving the media industry forward. At the same time, we still live in a society with significant inequality, which, while evident at the material level, is also highly significant in the digital environment. We know that access to financial resources influences our cultural capital and our presence in the digital sphere. Some people understand the digital environment well because they are trained to use it and are actively engaged in it, having the resources and sufficient technology, while others feel lost because they do not know how to use a computer or ‘press the buttons.’ Yet this is also an important life skill in a digital society,” she said.

As the dean noted, the digital transformation of media has made journalism online. “You will no longer see a journalist at a press conference with a pen and notepad. Modern correspondents keep all their information on their phones, tablets, and other digital devices; they use artificial intelligence to transcribe interviews and work with visual products. Today, we find it difficult to answer the question of whether a journalist even needs a desk. The mobility of life is changing—and perhaps journalists no longer need either a traditional office or even a multimedia newsroom,” Elena Vartanova said.

Digital transformation affects not only changes in journalists’ routines and content distribution but also new demands, habits, and interests of the audience. Industry experts observe a paradoxical trend: despite the dominance of the digital environment, demand for the traditional roles and functions of journalists remains high.

“Such diversification of demand for media has never existed in the old era. In the 1960s, the formative years of television—not only in the USSR but also in Western Europe and the United States—watching the evening TV news became a national ritual. Nationwide channels were part of everyday life; it was a new approach to creating a collective social experience. But do we have a collective experience today? Federal channels are seeing a decline in their average daily audience share. Media have divided everyone, and although people still watch television, we no longer have a space that unites us all. Even if we watch TV news, we all watch different channels. There is no single agenda; it is fragmented, and today few people trust any shared space,” notes Elena Vartanova.

Now the phone is the new environment of existence for the media consumer, although several media formats remain that allow audiences to achieve depth of understanding.

“‘Print,’ especially magazines and weeklies, remains important in terms of engaging with the cultural context. Just as feature-length films are more important than 30-second videos. Despite the fact that over the past 10 years we have seen the departure of some foreign advertisers, publishers, broadcasters, and content producers, the Russian content market has, in a certain sense, even been revived and become richer in reflecting our lives and shaping the information process. We now have interesting large-format A4 magazines with in-depth opinion writing, broad discussion, and the need to read and think in a ‘media-conscious’ way. So 2026 in print, surprisingly, looks more optimistic than even electronic media. And the departure of global media corporations from the creative industries (audio and film production) has given rise to contemporary original Russian cultural media production,” the expert emphasized.

Over the past 10 years, industry representatives have come to understand that the old media system (newspapers, magazines, television, radio, news agencies) has become insufficient for the market of new technology-dependent professions. Media themselves have “fragmented,” dividing into informational-analytical and entertainment segments. A new architecture of the media system is emerging, in which—while traditional media remain—new actors (bloggers, influencers, opinion leaders) operate and new relationships are formed between authors, regulators, audiences, technologies, and society.

“Ten years ago, we asked first-year students: ‘Is a blogger your friend or your enemy?’ No one asks that anymore, because today a blogger is an equal participant in the same digital environment in which journalism, cinema, and advertising exist. The environment has become entirely new; it includes many different participants, including artificial intelligence,” the dean emphasizes.

Today the audience has become a full-fledged actor in the media space. The advertising market is driven by digital services—from social media and platforms to video hosting services and messengers. Media advertising is growing: the channels and platforms for its delivery have changed, but audience demand for information, opinions, and communication remains.

The concepts discussed back in 2016—digitalization, mediatization, conscious media consumption, digital inequality—have changed their content over the past 10 years, becoming broader and deeper and beginning to analyze media from different perspectives, while largely retaining their foundation. According to Elena Vartanova, this is because people still depend on media, integrating them into their civic and professional lives, while increasingly falling under the influence of digital platforms’ recommendation systems that shape their consumer wish lists.

“To navigate the realities of modern society effectively, we must master a new type of literacy—media literacy. We must know not only how to press the buttons, but also how to critically interpret what comes to us through those buttons. For the audience that remembers the Soviet school system, this is easier, since a cultural component—critical thinking, refined aesthetic taste, models of literary expression—was instilled from childhood. Today’s children study in a different school, where a teacher-blogger communicates with students and their parents in chat groups. The environment has changed, so children must be educated differently. A child’s first experience in the digital environment should be shaped by parents, then continued by the education system, and afterward the child should enter a sufficiently safe media environment formed by various public and private media structures. To cultivate a culture of conscious media consumption, we must offer content that helps people enter and comprehend the information world. Today, the type of literacy that allows us to understand media and work with them both critically and positively is becoming no less important than the ability to read and write,” Elena Vartanova concluded.