Several city newspapers are being threatened into obscurity by tight budgets.


Cash Woes Threaten To Shut Newspapers

By Yevgenia Borisova
STAFF WRITER

Nearly every newspaper in St Petersburg could be effectively shut down in two week's time by an impending financial collapse at the city's government-owned printing presses.

Already the State Newspaper Complex has refused to publish major dailies, accusing them of not paying their debts. They include Chas Pik, which did not appear last Wednesday, Smena, which did not appear Friday and Saturday and Vecherny Peterburg, an evening paper that had to scramble Friday to publish with a tiny privately owned press, Deviz, which prints The St Petersburg Times.

Deviz, although it is the city's second largest printing press and charges much less than the government presses, has limited printing capacity. Newspaper publishers said Deviz could not be expected to handle the flood of publications - ranging from large local print runs of national papers like Izvestia to minor weeklies and monthlies - handled at the State Newspaper Complex.

The general director of the State Newspaper Complex, Yevgeny Filippenko, said last week that his presses were on the verge of bankruptcy because the 84 newspapers printed there owe a total of 3 billion rubles (about $600,000).

Filippenko said that left him without money to buy ink and paper, to pay salaries or taxes, or even to pay the light bill. He said Lenenergo, the local power company, is demanding payment by Sept. 23 or it will cut off service, and he therefore threatened to shut down unless he receives 2.5 billion from his creditors - or from anyone - in the next two weeks.

Filippenko's production deputy, Gennady Terentyev, said the lion's share of debt is owed by four of the city's five major dailies: Chas Pik, Smena, Vecherny Peterburg and Nevskoye Vremya.

Terentyev said Smena and Vecherny Peterburg each owe about 500 million rubles, Chas Pik about 360 million and Nevskoye Vremya about 150 million. Vedomosti, the fifth daily, owed just under 50 million.

National publications like Izvestia and Komsomolskaya Pravda also do significant local print runs at the government presses, but Filippenko said they are model customers who pay on time.

Publishers of the four big debtors met with Filippenko and Andrei Mokrov, head of the governor's Mass Media Committee, to discuss the crisis. The publishers jokingly called Filippenko "the suffocator of freedom," and suggested he print money instead of newspapers to solve his problems.

But they eventually agreed to work out a debt repayment schedule, which most of them turned in Monday. An exception was Nevskoye Vremya, which frantically prepared its schedule Friday evening - a condition Filippenko set for allowing the paper to publish its Saturday edition.

How loyally the newspapers will adhere to those repayment schedules remains to be seen. Ivan Titov, financial manager of Smena, said, "We signed the schedule, but who knows how it will be fulfilled."

Mokrov and the newspaper publishers also decided Friday to lobby the Legislative Assembly to bail out the printing presses with emergency funds. The Assembly's chairman, Yury Kravtsov, said Monday that he was "concerned" by the issue and would put an emergency funding proposal on the agenda Wednesday.

Kravtsov said the lawmakers would also discuss a proposed law under which the city would provide regular financial support to newspapers. All of the publishers gathered Friday and Monday said they wanted and needed such City Hall donations.

Not everyone agreed they should get them. Anna Sharogradskaya, head of the Russian-American Press and Information Center, said it was pointless to support several similiar newspapers when they all write much the same articles and express the same points of view.

"It is not the number of newspapers that makes the difference, although one newspaper left would be a disaster. But if there will be two papers and they will be different - it might be fine," she said.

Yasen Zasursky, the dean of the Journalism Department at Moscow State University, said newspapers had themselves to blame for their financial woes, because they are often badly managed, do a poor job courting advertising and fail to write what's interesting to readers.

He accused Russian editors of lacking "the habit of thinking about their readers' interests."

Zasursky also said many papers were carrying bloated staffs, and were losing out to television by failing to provide more in-depth analysis of events readers see on the evening news.

But representatives of Petersburg's dailies said they were suffering not from bad management, but from a bad economic situation.

The major daily newspapers suffered a significant drop in advertising in late 1995, and their debt has been increasing since then, according to Mikhail Mikhailichenko, Mokrov's deputy.

Tatyana Kaporina, the financial director of the St Petersburg supplement to Komsomolskaya Pravda, said advertising was a vicious circle: Readers cannot afford to buy the goods that advertisers can afford to advertise in her paper.

Following an explosion of print media in the glasnost years, newspapers in both St Petersburg and Moscow have struggled to stay afloat.

In Moscow, Pravda was first saved from collapse by a Greek millionaire, who recently withdrew his backing, crippling the paper again. Nezavisimiya Gazeta closed for weeks due to financial troubles, and was re-launched recently with backing from the Moscow United Bank, which now owns a controlling stake.