REN TV

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REN TV
Launched January 1, 1997
Website Ren-TV.com

REN TV (Cyrillic: РЕН ТВ) is one of the largest private federal channels in Russia. Founded by Irena Lesnevskaya and her son, Dmitriy Lesnevskiy, who had been running REN as a production house for other national Russian television channels, it has broadcast since 1 January 1997. Its target audience is a young to middle-age city worker. Even though it focuses mostly on the audience in the 18 to 45 demographic, REN TV offers programming for a wide range of demographics, since the target viewer has a family and respects family values. The channel has won 13 TEFIs – awards presented by the Academy of Russian Television.

REN TV's network is a patchwork of 406 independent broadcasting companies in Russia and the CIS. REN's programmes are received in 718 towns and cities on the territory of Russia from Kaliningrad in the West to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk on the East. It has a potential audience of 113.5 million viewers – with more than 12 million of them living in Moscow city and Moscow Oblast. REN works with 10 broadcaster affiliates and 19 cable operators in the CIS and Baltic states; 181 cities can receive REN TV's signal.

Contents

[edit] Ownership

Until 1 July 2005 the channel belonged to its founder Irena Lesnevskaya and her son (30%) and the Russian utility Unified Energy System headed by Anatoly Chubais. In 2005, Bertelsmann's RTL bought 30% of REN TV with steel maker Severstal and oil and gs company Surgutneftegaz each buying 35%.[1]

Severstal's Alexey Germanovich on 18 December 2006 ceded the chairperson of REN TV's board to Lyubov Sovershaeva, President Vladimir Putin's former deputy envoy to the North-West federal okrug[2] and chairperson of the board at ABRos Investments, a subsidiary of St Petersburg's Russia bank. ABRos had bought a considerable stake in REN TV. [3] The bank, whose chairman, Yury Kovalchuk, was a close friend of President Vladimir Putin, owned 38% of its home town's TRK Petersburg TV channel – and was likely to buy more of that company, analysts had told 19 December 2006's Kommersant-daily.[4] REN TV and TRK Petersburg would merge into a single media holding, though they would operate independently, industry observers had told the daily.

Russian media had reported that oil and gas group Surgutneftegaz had sold its stake in the channel to ABRos, which had increased its stake in the media company from 45% to 70%. '[T]here are indications that Bertelsmann was interested in selling up, after about 18 months in the Russian TV market,' the broadcasting news website added.[5]

[edit] News coverage

In November 2005 REN TV fired Olga Romanova, the anchor of its daily 24 news flagship.[6] Despite much publicity around the incident, her independent manner of reporting was continued by Marianna Maksimovskaya, formerly an anchor and news presenter for Vladimir Gusinsky's NTV Station. As of March 2008, Maksimovskaya was still in charge of news broadcasts on REN TV. Due to her activities, REN TV remains arguably Russia's only major TV outlet with liberal views, discussing the problem of state censorship and showing interviews with leaders of Other Russia.

Prior to her departure from the channel, Romanova had told the US-funded Radio Free Europe on 25 November 2005 that the channel's head, Alexander Ordzhonikidze had pulled two recent stories for, she felt, political reasons. One censored item had covered an investigation into Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov's son's involvement in a road accident in which a woman died. Romanova spoken about the alleged censorship on Ekho Moskvy radio on 23 November 2005 – and the next day Ordzhonikidze barred from entering the channel's building.[7] A second 'banned item had been about the building in central Moscow of a US $15 million church and clock tower by Zurab Tsereteli, the Internmational Press Institute noted in its report on 2005.[8]

Ordzhonikidze had said on Ekho Moskvy that REN TV's news output had low ratings – and management had decided to try other anchors on the evening newscasts, Russian state news agency RIA Novosti reported. "Besides, it's hard for one person to anchor all the nightly newscasts every day of the week. [They] might just feel ill," he had added.[9]

In solidarity with Romanova, several of her journalist colleagues quit the channel in December 2005. Head of news and deputy channel director, Yelena Fedorova, told Radio Free Europe's Russian Service why she had resigned.[10] "A lot of content-related directives have passed by me. As a journalist, I cannot put up with that, I cannot live with that," she told state news agency RIA Novosti on 5 December 2005. Editor Olga Shorina and producer Tatyana Kolokova were also planning to leave the channel because, they said, it was impossible to perform their professional duties.[11]

[edit] Scheduled content

The company, which produced several high-profile feature films, notably the Golden Lion-winning Vozvrashcheniye in 2003, is still a production house and has made much of the network's scheduled content, including numerous TV series:

  • Soldiers (Russian: Солдаты) – following recruits drafted into the Russian Army for their mandatory two years of military service.[12]
  • Students (Russian: Студенты) – following the social lives of several Moscow State University students.[13]
  • Tourists (Russian: Туристы) – following several couples on vacation on a beach resort in Turkey.

REN TV also shows purchased programming, includ55ing:

[edit] References

  1. ^ Worldwide operations, RTL corporate website. Retrieved on 2007-07-28.
  2. ^ "New leader in Northwest Russia appointed 2006-10-05", Health care, 5 October 2006 (Newsletter from the North-West of Russia, The East Europe Committee of the Swedish Health Care Community), p. 4. Retrieved on 2007-07-28. Cites for Sovershaeva's former role.
  3. ^ (Russian) Масс-медиа: Друг президента стал акционером "Рен ТВ" (Mass-media: drug prezidenta stal aktsionerom 'Ren TV', "Mass-media: Friend of the President became a shareholder of REN TV", Lenta.ru (Rambler Media Group) 19 December 2006.
  4. ^ President’s Mate Takes Over Ren TV], Kommersant-daily, 19 December 2006. Retrieved on 2007-07-27.
  5. ^ Abros ups stake in Ren TV, broadbandtvnews.com, Cambridge, UK, 20 April 2007. Retrieved on 2007-07-28.
  6. ^ (German) Russischer Sender feuert kritische Journalistin ("Russian channel fired critical journalist"), NDR Fernsehen, 7 December 2005.
  7. ^ Julie A. Corwin, Russia: Prominent Journalist To Defend Journalists' Rights, Radio Free Europe, 29 November 2005. Retrieved on 2007-07-27.
  8. ^ 2005 World Press Freedom Review: Russia, International Press Institute, Vienna. Retrieved on 2007-07-27.
  9. ^ REN TV anchor Olga Romanova to sue management, RIA Novosti, Moscow, 25 November 2005. Retrieved on 2007-07-27
  10. ^ Interview: REN-TV News Editor Explains Her Resignation, Radio Free Europe, 6 December 2005.
  11. ^ REN TV editor resigns, RIA Novosti, Moscow, 5 December 2005. Retrieved on 2007-07-27.
  12. ^ Soldaty Soldiers, official site.
  13. ^ Studenty, official site.

[edit] External links

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