Cultural criticism and cultural journalism have been and remain the most common applications of cultural knowledge and skills. At the same time, this type of intellectual work is now obviously subject to precarization. The marketization of culture, the outflow of investment and the withdrawal of advertisers from the print press resulted in the closure of cultural departments and entire media outlets. The rapprochement with cultural industries leads to a situation where criticism is increasingly being supplanted, if not by marketing and promotion of cultural products, then by informational journalistic genres. Authors specializing in the evaluation of products of narrow segments of the field of cultural production (for example, theater, literature, contemporary art) are replaced by “well-rounded experts”, often with “pre-existing” education in journalism. The various arts in the “Culture” section give way to a wide range of topics that can be generalized by the term lifestyle. Due to the emergence of social media, video hosting and streaming platforms, the “amateur invasion” challenges professional authors, questioning the status of critics and journalists. These trends, expressed to varying degrees worldwide, are also typical for the Russian media market. At the same time, the launch of new culture-related media outlets in the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet under these conditions may, at first glance, inspire optimism. However, the displacement of cultural criticism and journalism to dedicated specialized platforms is often accompanied by a reduction in the number of readers/ viewers/listeners. The audience of these projects is fragmented, and they often rely on freelancers or use unpaid labour. The article examines in detail such processes in the field of cultural journalism in Russia as popularization, commercialization, journalistification, and ghettoization of cultural press. Besides, it describes some peculiarities of the structure of the national cultural journalism market, and suggests and conceptualizes an alternative term, “cultural media”.