Platform Adaptation of Russian News Media Content

This chapter explores adaptation of news content of two Russian quality media, Kommersant and RBC, to three digital platforms. Content platformization takes place everywhere in the world, and Russia is not an exclusion. However, there is a huge research gap in Russia as to how news production companies adapt their content to various platforms with the regard to topicality, sentiment, introduction of interactive features, and “news values” (i.e., content selection criteria). If they adapt significantly, this would pose a question on how they preserve their roles as gatekeepers of public agendas. To explore the combination of the adaptation variables for the two papers on three platforms (Telegram, VK.com , and Instagram), we draw conclusions on whether these quality media preserve their roles as the quality standard carriers. We show that their adaptation strategies provenly differ, RBC fostering the same approach across platforms and Kommersant developing a platform-per-platform strategy in terms of news values. At the same time, technical adaptation to platform affordances and interactivity is very similar and shows the signs of “platform normalization.”