The anniversary of the Tatar Journalism: Its progress and losses

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the review of the Tatar journalism, starting with that of the period of its emergence to our time. The major historical events having impact on the inception and growth of the Tatar language periodical press are listed. At the beginning of XX century a ramified system of national newspapers and journals representing the interests of all sections of the population, different political parties and movements emerged. Business and specialized publications succeeded in this system. The article also retraces the dynamics of the abundance of mass media in Tatar in different historical periods. After revolutionary events of 1917 the domain of the Tatar journalism sharply became narrow, only newspapers and journals propagating communist ideology were being issued. But influenced by democratic changes at the end of XX century lots of new mass media that promoted political pluralism and a problem-subject variety emerged again. Quantitative analysis of the current Russian-language and Tatar-language media of the Republic of Tatarstan demonstrates deep imbalance of these indicators not in favour of the national print and electronic publications. The issues of functioning current media in Tatar have been raised in this work. The most acute problems are the decrease of audience size, subject limitation, low efficiency, the thesis of necessity of the regional and national development at the expense of government assistance.