A big month for Putin: the puppet master par extraordinaire not only announced his plans to run for President once again, but celebrated his 59th birthday across 15 cities, and unearthed two magnificent  ancient Greek urns whilst engaging in a spot of deep sea diving.

Admittedly, the urn discovery was staged for viewer consumption, much in the same way we imagine his jovial convivience with Dmitry ‘I’ll let him go for it – he’s more popular than me’ Medvedev to be. As for the exuberant birthday festivities, the most insightful nugget of proletariat support swept up by television reporters seemed to be, “Well I just trust him, just because he is going to be our future president, and we should trust our future president, just because.”

Indeed, the aftermath of his announcement to run was paved with campaigns designed to win the public’s trust. “We must speak openly”, he said during the press conference, “about the dangerous level of social inequality, violence, corruption, about the feeling of injustice and vulnerability that people feel when they are dealing with government bodies, courts, and law enforcement.” That his government is more often than not deemed to be the source of said injustice is of little consequence to pundits who expect his inevitable return; the language of social justice and democracy has minimal currency in a political atmosphere in which the state, and those steering it, wield more power than individual rights.

Corruption under Putin, claims ex-leader of the opposition Boris Nemtsov, has taken on a “systematic and institutionalised form”. Most point the finger of blame at the increased power the state enjoys as a result of policies put in place by Putin himself; Kremlin statistics report that in 2005 alone, the number of bureaucrats jumped astronomically from 143,500 to 1,462,000; essentially one in place for each hundred residents. Given that a law enforced by the Duma in 2009 allows officials to charge for public ‘services and functions’, a move widely considered to have legalised if not at least encouraged bribery, it comes as no surprise that the organ of the Kremlin is mired top to bottom in corruption.

Yet the prime minister and former KGB agent seems to have won the votes, if not the trust, of the Russian people, with polls indicating 41% would be happy for him to rule once again. What, then, really is his secret?

Russian media outlets have played a decisive role in Putin’s enduring success. Although independent press is handled on the whole quite carefully, the three largest television networks, reports the Committee to Protect Journalists, ‘are now in the hands of Kremlin loyalists”. Channel Russia was theirs from the start, with ORT and NTV splitting their stocks between the government, as well as Gazprom, an oligarch-owned natural gas extractor nationalised by Putin in 2000. The prescribed image transmitted from Russian television sets is, more often than not, one resembling strength, manly charisma and dedication to an independent Russia freed from the scourge of the oligarchy and foreign intervention. Given the absence of a weighty and authoritative check and balance system that would otherwise be provided by the media , the cult of personality surrounding Putin is left open to mass consumption.

In a country in which personality politics prevails, strength and imperviousness are traits that have historically been held in high esteem. As Russian journalist Peter Sadovnik put it, “Whether it’s single-handedly rerouting massive oil pipelines or reorganizing the federal bureaucracy, Putin has not so much resurrected a dead superstate as responded to Russians’ long-festering desire for a ‘strong hand”. His affiliation to the powerful Russian Orthodox Church has also helped him along the way. The latter’s continued presence at state events, matched by his presence at important religious festivals, holds an allure that must not be underestimated given that 65% of ethnic Russians consider themselves to be Orthodox Christians.

One could however argue against presumptuous or even arrogant assumptions on the part of the western press, in response to recent events that have so discredited the Russians’ ability to choose their own leader. Although the bear wrestling, tiger shooting PR stunts have proved to be a noble effort, it would be naive to assume that an election could be won on attributes limited to image alone. Although perhaps an uncomfortable truth for the US press in particular (with some media outlets labelling him “communist” or “Tsar”), Putin has been credited for the country’s recent economical advances. Having inherited a turbulent economy from the government of former president Boris Yeltsin, whose ill thought out policies after the fall of the USSR are credited for giving birth to modern oligarchy as we know it, Putin raised wages and restored pensions, a move that vastly improved the everyday living standards of the population. His intentions to diversify Russia’s economy by dismantling its dependence on oil and gas exports have been well received by the elite and lower earners alike; he intends to target business owners by raising their piffling 13% flat tax rate.

Despite his lasting popularity, Putin  warned the press that the campaign process would be “dirty”. What exactly was meant by this is still to be seen.  “As Churchill said”, he added, “democracy is the worst form of government but there is no better one.” That Putin’s model of democracy will win out is of little dispute. The opposition is weak and fragmented, and any drastic developments in public psyche are unlikely. Come March 2012, the ballots will be scored, most probably dashing any hopes of dislodging Mr Putin for the next two consecutive terms.

How much truth do you think there is in speculation that print newspapers will cease to exist?

I think there’s a newspaper market which has stayed alive because lots and lots of newspapers create a big audience when you put them together. So when people talk about newspapers dying, I think newspapers as a concept will die, and we’ll be left with newspaper brands.  The Sun, for example, delivers to more people in a day than the X Factor does, so in advertising terms it’s bigger than ITV. So actually, you’ll have newspaper brands that manage to survive while others will be forced into closure because the economics don’t work, and the premium brands will probably be migrating faster into digital formats.  I think there are 3.4 million iPads in the UK at the moment, but there are only 1.6 million quality newspapers sold every day. The ability for the quality brands to have a newspaper and an iPad version is there already. So then, even though they may not exist in print form, they may well exist as papers on iPads. The bottom end will probably go out of business, but The Mail and The Sun and some free newspapers will probably be alive for a long time. The fact that you’ve got a mobile phone and an iPad isn’t going to stop you picking up a free newspaper and reading it on the way home, which is very convenient. At The Evening Standard, we print 800,00 papers a day and every single one goes.

Will the switch to other, cheaper and more rapid forms of news transmission affect the quality of information in some brands?

I think the really, really wealthy newspapers will be fine – Manchester United will carry on playing good football with amazing stars, where some of the others will have to compromise, meaning the quality won’t be so good and they’ll have to close. The key thing is where you decide to make the call, and where you compromise quality, because you might decide you’re not going to turn up and have journalistic football matches, you’re just going to take content from other places. There’s a body called the Press Association, which will sell you content, so instead of having your own journalists, you buy the information off them. You can choose to have it written for  you, or you can repurpose it and sub it yourself. So many people are buying in feature based stuff and review type stuff – the free newspapers especiallly do a lot of that (not the Standard but Metro and a lot of others).  So, you’ll find an erosion of quality in certain areas but its probably areas that readers aren’t that fussed about. The amount of money that is put into editorial quality is still astronomical. 

How much does advertising revenue affect the editorial content of a paper, and how might this change in the future?

People will always talk about editorial independence, and they’re absolutely obsessive about it – this is why we talk about the ‘church’ and the ‘state’ when we talk about the split between the editorial and commercial side of a paper. People insist that the commercial side, who buy the advertising, cannot influence the newspaper editorial – that’s something that is certainly more rigid in some papers than others. There’s obviously a bit of blurring in certain newspapers, where you can see brands have infiltrated areas where they wouldn’t naturally have done so.  An example is sponsorship. It happens in sport especially, because people are used to sports brands; it’s the Natwest Series and the Barclays Premiership. It would be unfair of me to name these papers, but there are certainly proprietors, editorial teams and certain newspapers who are blatantly much more prepared to write articles on behalf of commercial people. There are lots of others that are absolutely steadfast and wouldn’t compromise their editorial for anything – there might be a headline about Tesco doing terrible things or Marks and Spencers doing terrible things, and they are jeopardising losing all advertising revenue by writing that, but they will, and actually advertisers respect that. They respect the fact that the editorial can’t be influenced.

David Cameron now has a LinkedIn profile, and frankly I find myself wondering why. I’m pretty sure that a CV is trivial once you’ve governed a country (if you need any proof of that then just look at Tony Blair). Apparently the page ‘lists his jobs to date in Parliament, and before entering politics, then mentions his wife and kids’, and so just seems to be part of the latest offensive in the Tories’ new plan to rebrand themselves and woo the electorate before 2015.

This isn’t a bad thing – the humanisation of politicians and ongoing pedestal-felling which is taking place, influenced by the unstoppable growth of online media such as Twitter, is in my opinion vital to the development of national and international conversation. On the other hand, politicians must ensure that they do not begin spending more time considering the medium of conveyance than the content of the message itself.

Technology certainly has its benefits in terms of the efficiency with which we can now communicate internationally. When we replaced the sluggish system of physical post with email, we unlocked a world of communicative opportunity at both the personal to a global level.

As time has gone on, however, we seem to have lost sight of the original purpose of digital communications, and have begun to consider them as activities in their own right. This shift in attitude which is not only unhealthy for productivity, but is also leading to a very warped view of what it means to interact with our fellow hominids. Just ask yourself how much time you’ve actually spent using Facebook as a utility over the past week. It’s all well and good for us to send a quick message to a mate, but when we then browse the latest low quality and somewhat embarrassing bop photos for hours on end, and combine this with organising a party and wishing your second-cousin-twice-removed a superficial happy birthday, we’re obviously getting sidetracked.

Intel and CSIRO have themselves recognised the dangers of email and begun to experiment with ‘no-email’ days. This is a great idea (as long as the next day doesn’t become a ‘double-email day’), as internal email is a largely pointless feature in modern open plan offices, and only serves to reinforce the peculiar view these days that digital communication is actually more effective than having a real conversation. The fact is that two intelligent and articulate humans will accomplish far more in a face to face meeting than they ever could in a drawn-out and broken email correspondence. Add to this the observation that white collar workers often have the habit of not replying to emails after their first reading, and the picture becomes an even more ridiculous caricature of human interaction. Imagine a meeting where everyone takes 15 minutes to respond when they’re spoken to. It’s absurd, but it happens far too often these days via email. Furthermore, I don’t think any of us can pretend to believe that these traits we see in business correspondence are not to some degree apparent in all of our lives.

This is a serious issue which we must all be aware of, particularly politicians, in a time when every week seems to bring a new international crisis or scandal. There simply isn’t the time to be faffing around with narcissistic image mongering and hiding incompetence under a thrice gilded techno-lily. We must not allow the next generation to enter the world of work with such a warped idea of human interaction, or the world, and specifically the West, will grind to an embarrassing conversational halt.