Penza, 11 May 2012. PenzaNews. The governor of the Penza region Vasily Bochkarev lost three positions and took the 11th place in information openness rating of heads of the regions, made by “National Service of Monitoring” together with “Institute of Independent Political Researches” in April, 2012. As it was reported earlier, following the results of 2011 he took the third place.

Following the results of April, governor of the Vologda region Oleg Kuvshinnikov, head of the Ivanovo region Mikhail Men and governor of the Astrakhan region Alexander Zhilkin got the three top positions of information openness ranking.

The governor of the Kirov region Nikita Belykh (Volga Federal District), the head of Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug Dmitry Kobylkin (Urals Federal District), the governor of Primorsky Krai Vladimir Miklushevsky (Far Eastern Federal District), the governor of the Novosibirsk region Vasily Yurchenko (Siberian Federal District) and the head of Ingushetia Yunus-Beck Evkurov (North Caucasian Federal District) became leaders in the federal districts.

The head of the Kostroma region Sergey Sitnikov, the governor of the Smolensk region Alexey Ostrovsky and the head of Mordovia Nikolay Merkushkin are not open to the media and became the last in the list.

According to the head of “Institute of Independent Political Researches” Alexander Ulitin, in April heads of the regions started to communicate more willingly with the representatives of mass media, especially in social networks.

“Activity of the heads of the regions in social media is a stabilizing factor: if earlier the factor of information openness of the governor depended a lot on high-quality response to information occasions, now Twitter and LiveJournal allow to moderate unsuccessful work of press services and mass media,” added the head of “National Service of Monitoring” Artem Bulatov.