Rambler Media Group is a tech company that owns the search engine Rambler and the news portals Gazeta.ru and Lenta.ru. The company used to own some other media outlets, including Afisha, Championat, WMJ.ru, Secret Mag and LiveJournal. It discontinued some of these operations. Rambler also owns a digital advertising sales platform and an online ticketing platform.
Media assets
News portals: Lenta.ru, Gazeta.ru
State Media Matrix Typology: Captured Public/State-Managed (CaPu)
Ownership and governance
Rambler is fully owned by the Russian state-owned banking group Sberbank, which first bought a stake of more than 46% in the group in 2019. A year later, it increased its stake in Rambler to 100%.
Source of funding and budget
Rambler Media Group is financing itself mostly through ad revenues. Yet, the bank that owns the company, Sberbank, bankrolls major parts of its editorial work, according to Russian media experts interviewed for this report.
Editorial independence
Over the course of the past eight years or so, the owners of Rambler Media Group stepped up pressures on the journalists working for the group’s media outlets, whose editorial agenda had been aligned with the Kremlin’s orders. In 2014, Alexander Mamut, the Russian oligarch who owned the group until it sold it to Sberbank, fired Galina Timchenko, the chief editor at Lenta.ru, because she was working on articles that had not been previously approved by the Kremlin. Lenta’s newsroom resigned in protest.
It seems that the sale of the group to Sberbank, a process that took place in 2019-2020, was prompted by a request from the Kremlin, which at some point stopped trusting Mamut, media experts interviewed for this report revealed.
In the past few years, the media outlets run by Rambler Media Group, especially Lenta.ru and Gazeta.ru, have become vocal propaganda channels in the service of the Kremlin, according to Russian media observers.
No domestic statute and no mechanism of independent assessment or oversight that validates the editorial independence of Rambler’s media outlets have been identified.
October 2023