Penza, 10 January 2017. PenzaNews. More than 100 negative news items – mostly about traffic accidents, criminal cases and incidents in Penza and in the region – were published from December 1, 2016, to January 10, 2017, on the website of the federal medium Gazeta.ru, which belongs to one of the most quoted Russian mass media according to the company Yandex.

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In November 2016, over 50 such news items about Penza were published – 2-3 a day. They were posted mostly on weekdays, in particular in the evening and at night, and very often the time gap between the event and the reporting was great.

In the end of December and in the beginning of this year, the volume of negative news items about Penza increased greatly. Thus, seven such news articles were published in the sections “Society” and “Auto”. At the same time, as well as before, the federal Internet medium refers mostly to the agency “Penza-Press”, which belongs to the media holding “Express” controlled by the regional government.

Media market experts agree that in such a way the rating of the local pro-governmental website is marked up so that it can reach or even outstrip the permanent quotation leader in the Penza region according to Yandex – the independent news agency PenzaNews.

However, according to observers, such use of negative news articles with references to one and the same resource is “extremely clumsy” because it harms the image of the Penza region and at any moment can harm the governor Ivan Belozertsev as the head of the constituent entity.

Moreover, the analysts are still sure that the new numbers of the “Penza-Press” rating, which will be available after the next update of the Yandex Thematic Citation Index, will not reflect the real picture of influence because the index will take into account the information of “artificial origin”.

Thematic Citation Index (TIC) is a technology employed by Yandex to determine the credibility of Internet resources in a quantitative output, based on the quality of links from other websites rather than quality.

TIC is calculated using a proprietary algorithm that takes into account thematic content of the resource and the linking sites.