Ivan Zassoursky

Career

Ivan Zassoursky started his career at the age of 17, in the early 1990s, as a reporter for the Russian daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta. In 1993 he became the head of the Economics desk at Nezavisimaya Gazeta. During this time, he completed his studies at the Moscow State University School of Journalism with highest honors. The following year, Zassoursky worked as the development coordinator at Obshaya Gazeta. In 1997, he briefly left professional journalism to serve as an advisor to Boris Nemtsov, the first Deputy Chairman of the Government of the Russian Federation. He already had political experience from the 1995 gubernatorial campaign in the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast.

In 1999, he published the book "Mass Media in the Second Republic" (Russian: Масс-медиа второй республики), an essay on the topics of mass media in 1990s Russia. The book touches on the transformation of mass media from a so-called fourth estate into a kind of agent of new centers of political power. "Mass Media in the Second Republic"" received the Moscow State University’s Shuvalov Award.

In 1998, while part of the faculty of journalism at the Moscow State University, Zassoursky submitted and successfully defended his dissertation for a PhD in Philology titled “Mass Media in Russia Under Conditions of Global Transformation: The Formation of a New System of Information and its Role in Russia’s Political System from 1990-1998”. During this period, Ivan Zassoursky was also the youngest Research Fellow in the MSU School of Journalism.

By the early 2000s, Zassoursky returned to devoting his full-time to professional journalism. He was particularly interested in the field of digital journalism, which was growing in popularity at the time, and blogging as new forms of the journalistic trade. He also became the co-director of the Russian-American Center at the State University of New York and conducted a lecture tour along the east coast of the United States. He then became the director of the Laboratory of Media Culture and Communications at the MSU School of Journalism, after which, a few years later, he was appointed head of the Department of New Media and Communications Theory Studies.

From 2001 to 2005, Zassoursky worked as Deputy General-Director of Public Relations and Marketing at Rambler, owner of one of Russia’s biggest web portals at the time, and, subsequently, he prepared the company’s research papers as Director of Special Projects. During the initial public offering of Rambler-Media, Zassoursky oversaw the distribution agreement between Rambler and ICQ.

In the fall of 2006, Zassoursky was invited to join SUP Media as the Director of Marketing. As a result of diverging interests, Zassoursky left the company the following year.

In December 2009, he was one of the first signers of an open letter calling for the reform of the Russian system of author’s right.

Chastny Korrespondent

In October, 2008, Zassoursky founded Chastny Korrespondent, a Russian web publication, the first to operate under a creative commons license in Russia. One of the main goals of this was the desire to help Russian Wikipedia, and to give talented writers the opportunity to showcase their abilities as citizen journalists. In November 2011, Chastny Korrespondent was the winner of the Runet Prize in the category of “Culture and Mass Communications”.