Evening Newspapers

a type of daily periodical press that supplements morning publications in the system of mass information media. In Western Europe and the USA evening newspapers appeared in the beginning of the 19th century; in Russia, in the mid-19th century (Vecherniaia gazeta of the morning newspaper Birzhevye vedomosti, 1866-81). Soon after the October Revolution the first Soviet evening newspapers were published in Moscow and Petrograd (Vechernie izvestiia of the Moscow Soviet of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, 1918-24; the evening edition of Krasnaia gazeta, Petrograd-Leningrad, 1918-36). As of Jan. 1, 1970, there were 31 evening newspapers in the USSR (see Table 1). In addition, the newspaper Izvestiia publishes a Moscow evening edition.

The development of city evening newspapers is attributable to the colossal growth of the volume of information and to the necessity of efficiently disseminating it, and also to the differences in the working and leisure time cycles of city readers. Soviet evening newspapers contain the latest sociopolitical news and inform the reader about the state and prospects of residential construction, the provision of public services and amenities, everyday services, and about events in the cultural life of the city; substantial space is devoted to announcements (about admission to educational institutions, the defense of dissertations, the current repertoire of theaters, and so forth). The format of evening newspapers is marked by a saturation of illustrative material. In capitalist countries the main source for the support of newspapers, including evening newspapers, is revenue from advertising. Therefore the bulk of the material published has an advertising and entertainment orientation, and less space is devoted to news of sociopolitical life. In a number of countries, evening newspapers make up the larger part of the daily press (for example, in the USA in 1968, 1,463 out of 1,833 daily newspapers were evening papers).