«Patriots» out of work: where will the journalists of the closed «Troll Factory» go?

As you know, one of the results of the failed mutiny of the Wagner PMCs was the actual closure of the Patriot media holding and the troll factory, which also belonged to Yevgeny Prigozhin. The media reported that Patriot is looking for a new owner. At the end of last week, it was reported that the main media of the holding were blocked: RIA FAN, Nevsky Novosti, Politika Segodnya, Ekonomika Segodnya and Narodnye Novosti

It was also reported that the employees of the holding were promised to pay salaries only for June. The dismissed journalists have already been pitied by the propagandist Margarita Simonyan, who reported in her blog: «Collective, do not offend colleagues from the dissolved media holding (Patriot media group), plz. If they are looking for a job with us (in RT) and are smart, take it. We need to support people. They have something to do with it».

The MK editor-in-chief also volunteered to help former Patriot employees find work Pavel Gusev and Dmitry Sherikh, chairman of the St. Petersburg branch of the Union of Journalists of Russia, according to whom, the SOHR will appeal to the heads of other media to help dismissed colleagues with employment, as well as provide other information support.

At the same time, the CHEKA-OGPU channel, citing its sources, reported that many are already interested in Prigozhin's media assets, including the Patriot holding and the Troll Factory. About their fate, according to the channel, negotiations are underway with the former top manager of Prigozhin, Mikhail Burchik, who, in fact, created the «Factory», but left it back in 2020.

«In whose interests Burchik collects media assets — so far kept in strict secrecy. Whether it is Prigozhin himself who conducts such a combination or there will be a new owner is still unknown …» experts write.

But political consultant and sociologist Roman Romanov believes that there are few prospects for dismissed journalists. In his opinion, the media market of the North-Western Federal District, where these media structures are based, is small and almost always in a state of oversaturation — there are no extra jobs and extra money here.

In addition, according to Romanov, the specifics of the Patriot should also be taken into account:

1. Prigozhin's projects have been subjected to silent obstruction by other media for many years. They were not liked to quote, it was not accepted to interact with them. Therefore, with high formal citation rates, in the media space «Patriot» remained largely an isolated thing in itself (how these indicators were achieved is a separate conversation). With the exception of the scandalous appeals of Prigozhin himself, we can recall few materials that would cause at least some public outcry.
2. There was also some prejudice against the Patriot employees among the media managers of other media. Working in Prigozhin projects was often a complicating factor rather than a neutral or positive one when hiring in other places.
3. At the same time, according to the information I have, they paid in Patriot most often at the lower limit of the market or even lower — with high loads, high requirements for work intensity and stress resistance and not very high — for refinement, style and quality. And this, too, may be perceived by some media leaders as a problem: the brutal, gruff style of the «Patriot» does not suit everyone.

At the same time, Romanov also notes the positive qualities of the Patriot employees — high stress resistance and the ability to work a lot and for a long time for not very much money.

He believes that some of the employees will be distributed to local (mainly St. Petersburg) editorial offices, and some will go either to Moscow or to their homes in the provinces.

But the holding itself is unlikely to be useful to anyone, since it was not built into stable networks of interaction with other media players. In addition, the governor of St. Petersburg, Alexander Beglov, should only rejoice at its closure, since he suffered a lot from Prigozhin journalists.