The reporter goes to see a businessman and says: “For five thousand dollars I will do a piece about your business”. The businessman pays up and the reporter writes a piece.

The reporter takes it to the editor who says: “For three thousand dollars I will publish this piece”. The reporter hands him the money.

The editor looks at the piece and contacts the businessman’s main competitor in the market and says: “For seven thousand dollars I can prevent this nice piece about your competitor from being published”.  The competitor pays. The article is spiked. The editor returns three thousand dollars to the reporter. The reporter returns five thousand dollars to the original businessman.

End result: the reporter has made nothing. The newspaper has made seven thousand dollars. One businessman is happy. The other has ended up no worse off than he started.

This purely illustrative example was told to me last night in The Snail, a restaurant in Tallinn, by the Estonian Richard Branson, a major media owner throughout eastern Europe.

He lived under the Soviet yolk until Estonia was liberated in 1992; Tallinn is only a day’s journey from St Petersburg and Estonia is still has a 30% Russian population. I do not think that he was joking.

Entry Filed under: Media