The development of the IT industry in the countries of Eurasia increases the audience interested in new technologies, startups, tech investment and sectoral legislation. How is IT journalism developing in Eurasia and what are the challenges facing the tech media? These questions were discussed at the StrategEast.Live panel discussion “IT Journalism in Eurasia”.
Starting the conversation about the role of media in the development of the IT ecosystem in Eurasian countries, Artiom Kontsevoi, CEO, dev.media (Belarus) underlined that the role of tech media in his country is much more significant than in more economically developed countries: “Technology sector is still quite new for the society. While this sector is developing rapidly, media encourages this development and promotes this sector within the society. What is important, it stimulates people to switch to IT as being a relatively small country, we can not compete with scale, but rather with our brain and attitude, and tech media plays a good role in it”.
In turn, Vera Chernysh, CEO and Managing Editor, MC.today, ITC.UA and Highload (Ukraine) does not consider media to be a catalyzer for the digital ecosystem development: “When the ecosystem exists and flourishes then the market does. It was a surprise to me, when traveling to Kazakhstan I found out that lot of local startupers read our media, although it has been created purely for Ukraine and don’t right about Kazakhstan at all, we are Ukraine-centered only. But Kazakhstan doesn’t have any local tech media, so they were reading us. Investigating the idea of entering Kazakh market with our media, we found out that there are only around 15,000 developers there, and the biggest part of the IT sector is government-owned. Which means there is basically no market for a tech media”. According to Ms Chernysh, market comes first, media comes second, but then media is a platform to show the current state of affairs and inspire further growth.
Tagai Tazabekov, Founder and CEO, Limon Media (Kyrgyzstan) agreed that the role of the media is to encourage people to grow in IT, although there are some specific points: “In Kyrgyzstan, we have our own way. In our country, with a population of 6,5 million people, and almost 20% of them work in Russia. When we started our way in IT journalism, we understood that we have very small IT community and consequently – very small audience to sell our advertisement. That is why we decided to talk not only about IT, but also about success stories such as young Kyrgyz guy who started working at Google with a salary much higher that overage. Such things sound very inspiring, as people are for success here”.
Discussing the challenges the tech media face, the speakers mentioned hardship in finding enough professional IT journalists and voiced an idea of creating an IT journalism school with partnership of international development agencies. Albeit, some of participants sounded somewhat skeptical about it. In particular, Mr. Kontsevoi admitted that such schools were launched in Belarus in collaboration with tech companies were not quite successful and one the reasons of it is that IT media compete for people not with other media, but with tech companies. According Mr Tazabekov, it is more important to create great culture in the media, than to hire many people.
The discussion was moderated by Stanislav Kovalchuk, Project Manager at StrategEast.
