Authorial Online Magazines: Between Mainstream and Opposition

The article explores authorial online magazines that appeared in the media space in the 2010s and analyses on their features as a special group of publications outside the framework of the traditional media typology. The magazines use interactive websites and public pages in social networks as platforms, and were created by professional journalists who left large media holdings for various reasons (censorship restrictions, change of ownership) in the context of demassification of the audience, individualization of media consumption and the technical availability of creating Internet resources. Authorial online projects were called “small media” in the media industry. The Internet Development Institute has declared them as media without any license that require regulation. The projects are classified as youth or lifestyle magazines; “craft media” created for local communities; “discursive media resistance” in a few academic studies. The conducted typological analysis shows that small media are different both from fanzines (amateur subcultural publications with protest potential) and from institutional media in the presence of common features. The main condition for their agency in the media sphere is the refusal to register the media (quasi-legitimacy). On the example of such well-known small media as Nozh; Batenka, da vy transformer, and moloko+, the features of this model are considered. The renunciation of the “media” status gives the authors the opportunity to work beyond the restrictions of censorship and the requirements of investors (1). The editorial system is organized on a horizontal basis (2). The online audience has hundreds of thousands of readers. This is an urban educated class, mostly residents of megacities (3). Small media are moving away from the principles of journalism as an industry: newsbreaks, news traffic, genre canons (4). The main functions of small media are the involvement, creation and development of the community, culture and education, transactivity, offline practices (5). Sociocultural content meets the standards of quality press in the absence of a news and political agenda (6). The business model is crowdfunding or branded advertising production (7). Authorial online magazines do not promote a one-sided agenda to the audience and do not deform the picture of reality, as opposition fanzines usually do. They also successfully compete with the mainstream of institutional media, which is understood as a set of official current industrial and content standards accepted in the media sphere. It is not a marginal subcultural audience that comes to the alternative apolitical small media platforms, but numerous social groups that have left the public space under the conditions of state pressure on the media.

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