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Clayton who?
It would have been hard to pick out Loges during the games. You might have found him behind a counter under a red tent just outside the Jubileini Sports Palace in St. Petersburg, hawking coffee mugs, cassette tapes and T-shirts. In fact, he was wearing one of those T-shirts, emblazoned with the logo for Radio 1, his flagship rock station in St. Petersburg.
Loges admits that he's hardly in Turner's league. But the 49-year-old
Seattle native is building up a wide variety of media properties in
Russia: He's the president of Radio 1, a joint stock company that in turn
recently acquired a flashy St. Petersburg music magazine, Rock Fuzz. Along
with his Russian and American partners, Loges also operates a Moscow
paging service called RadioPage (which counts Prime Minister Viktor
Chernomyrdin among its 8,000 subscribers).
And he's getting involved in rock video production for Russian television, a new paging service and radio station in Uzbekistan, and a syndication scheme for Radio 1's highly rated programming format.
Loges' experience is more in the line of public relations and business development rather than broadcast or journalism. In fact, he took on Radio 1 as a consolation prize after his partner in St. Petersburg - the regional broadcasting authority - couldn't find him a frequency for radio paging.
But so far, he has successfully picked his way through the mine field of Russia's media marketplace: He negotiated a deal that allows him to maintain operating control of Radio 1 - even though he brought the American stake down to less than 50 percent.
"It's just a matter of time before people say, 'Wait a minute - how much of our media should be owned by foreign companies?' " he observes. Indeed, that's just what happened in the case of broadcast stations.
He's also been successful so far in finding backers for his ventures in the former Soviet Union - a region that is not for faint-of-heart investors.
"If you're going to do business in Russia, you've got to be a visionary," he says. "You've got to look at the seedlings and say, 'Someday we're going to have some great lemonade from this lemon grove.' "
Here are some of Loges' more down-to-earth observations:
- There are eight paging companies in Moscow, a market of 13 million (comparable to Los Angeles, which has 20 paging networks and 110 paging companies). "We're the only one that has a joint venture with Moscow Telephone where the foreign party has majority ownership and operating control.... We have no paging competitor that's majority-owned by a foreign company."
- "We've found the Russian market really skews toward the newest and most expensive product - the premium product." In the paging business, that translates into top-of-the-line alphanumeric pagers at more than $500 each, and an average service bill of $42 a month.
- At RadioPage as well as Radio 1, Loges definitely caters to Russians rather than foreign emigres. Russians make up 90 percent of the customers for RadioPage in Moscow - and the staff of 170 is more than 95 percent Russian. The same rough proportion holds at Radio 1. Only one of Radio 1's programs is aired in English - the rest are in Russian, with Russian DJs. But the playlist is mostly American and European, seasoned with indigenous Russian rock.
- Radio 1 started out on the extended "Soviet FM" band, but soon the programs are to be simulcast on a second "Western FM" frequency. Loges plans to experiment with different target markets for advertising, with one frequency geared toward a mass market, the other more upscale. "So you'll hear a Snickers ad on one station but maybe a Volvo ad on the other," he says.
- In the radio realm, Loges is open to trying all the tricks in the promotional playbook, including live remotes, car stickers and sponsored contests. During the Goodwill Games, for example, Radio 1 conducted a "Million Za Snickers" drawing, giving away prizes of a million rubles or more.
- Loges, like many other foreign and Russian broadcasters, is thirsting after broadcast market information. He believes Radio 1 has the highest listenership in the St. Petersburg market - based mainly on the fact that his closest rival, Radio Maximum, is no longer trumpeting its own No. 1 audience ranking. Loges also is trying to come up with a system to track music preferences demographically, as Billboard charts and the like do in America. "Our problem in Russia is that we don't know what to put on the air because you don't have all that point-of-sale information."
- In terms of future expansion, Loges is more interested in selling programming than setting up more stations from scratch. "It's difficult to find good management, to train DJs, to set up production. We just don't see how we can open that many more radio stations that way."
As a model, he looks to Nor-Net Communications Ltd., a 14-station Canadian radio network. Most of Nor-Net's programming is produced at its headquarters in Wetaskiwin, Alberta, and simulcast throughout the network. The advertising sales force at each station works with a central office that draws up programming logs and feeds them via modem to each station's computer. Much of the broadcast schedule is automated, with the computer playing the proper ad at the appropriate time.
"I think Canada provides a lot of models (for Russia) because it's a Northern Hemisphere country with a low-density population, like Russia," Loges says. Out of necessity, Nor-Net "developed how to have local radio without having the labor cost bury you."
The early days of those networks must have seemed like the early days of Christianity, or the vision of primitive socialism, in which networkers would contribute according to their abilities and take according to their needs. The 1991 Kremlin coup - and the way that computer users were able to circumvent the coup leaders' efforts to shut down the flow of information - became a prime example of the liberating power of online networks.
It seemed too good to be true - and it was. As the power of networks became more widely known, so did the less palatable aspects of online communication, ranging from downloadable pornography to hate literature, bomb-making instructions to drug marketing. And, in turn, governments began looking for ways to put the genie back in the bottle.
Thanks to the emerging standards for encryption, it may not be possible to put the genie completely back in the bottle. The new methods can turn digital information into a code virtually uncrackable unless the reader has the right key. But governmental efforts to limit the use of networks or encryption can stunt the growth of electronic commerce and social discourse - while doing little to stop those who use computer communications for illegal purposes.
Those efforts are proceeding in Moscow as well as Washington, on the local as well as the national level.
In Moscow, there are reports of a new presidential decree that would ban any encryption scheme not approved by the Federal Agency for Governmental Communications and Information (FAPSI), which was spun off from the breakup of the Soviet KGB.
The decree says that FAPSI's new role in controlling computer security is aimed at "intensifying the struggle against organized crime" - under the reasoning that Russia's mafias are using computer networks to keep their communications hidden from prying eyes. But many networkers fear that the new regulations could be used broadly against even simple archiving programs or password protection software.
There are also reports that as part of a privatization scheme, FAPSI intends to buy a 50 percent stake in Relcom, the former Soviet Union's largest computer network. If all this comes to pass, it would seem roughly analogous to having the National Security Agency - which oversees electronic intelligence in the United States - become part-owner of CompuServe.
"Given the KGB's history of respect for intellectual property, FAPSI in this role is like a fox in charge of a chicken coop," The Moscow Times noted recently.
In Washington, too, wary officials are debating ways to control the use of computer networks. One campaign has to do with encryption: For years the government has been promoting the use of the Clipper Chip standard, which would let federal investigators enter an electronic "back door" to gain access to otherwise-secure computerized information. At present the government has backed off from forcing the Clipper Chip upon the marketplace, and other data encryption standards are taking hold.
Even as the Clipper Chip controversy has faded into the background, another debate has come to the fore. The Communications Decency Act of 1995 takes aim at obscene and indecent content distributed over computer networks - just as earlier legislation addressed such content transmitted over telephone or broadcast networks.
But there are far more questions about the legislation currently being considered. The logistics of enforcing restrictions is one thing: For example, most of the global Internet is not liable to United States law, and there are computerized bulletin boards even more difficult to monitor than the Internet - particularly when encryption is taken into account. The larger issue has to do with public control over private communications: Even a love letter sent between wife and husband could be judged illegal over a broad interpretation of the act. And online services could be forced into becoming deputized snoops for the government.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has put together a Information on the aborted "Harmful to Minors" bill is available via Washington state's Web site - including the text of the bill that was vetoed, the Senate report that briefly describes the background of the bill, and a chronology of the bill's travels to the governor's desk.
It's clear from all this activity that cyberspace is no longer an electronic Eden: Rather, it's turning into a political battleground, bound up with such issues as pornography and privacy, public good vs. private gain, individual liberty and social mores. Bid farewell to the Brave New World - and say hello to the Real World.
The Friends and Partners service also has set up a program to match couriers and senders automatically. If you are looking for a courier to take letters to, say, Vladivostok and Kazan, you can send an e-mail message to ilya_shl@solar.rtd.utk.edu. The subject line of the e-mail message should read: OKAZIYA REQUEST. The body of the message should read: Dest: VLADIVOSTOK KAZAN. If you are willing to take letters to those particular cities, the subject line should read: OKAZIYA OFFER. The body of the message would be the same: Dest: VLADIVOSTOK KAZAN.
In the examples cited above, the computer would automatically send the e-mail address of the person making the "offer" to the person making the "request" for a courier.
For more information, contact Ilya Shlyakhter at ilya_shl@mit.edu.
The university's partner in this effort is The Gainesville Sun, a daily newspaper in Florida. Sun.ONE's experimental bulletin board service is accessible by phoning 904-846-2000. It offers both a plain text interface, as well as a graphical interface so that anyone with a modem equipped computer can access the system. In addition to the BBS access, a developmental site is on the World Wide Web at http://news.jou.ufl.edu.
Editor-in-chief of both publications is Paul Goble, who has served with the United States Department of State, Radio Liberty and the Carnegie Endowment. The Monitor and Prism are distributed to subscribers worldwide via e-mail, fax and postal mail. And beginning June 1, these publications and additional material produced by the Jamestown Foundation will be accessible on the World Wide Web.
The Jamestown Foundation, established in 1983, is a nonprofit educational institution devoted to the study of the former Soviet bloc countries and to dissemination of information about them. Jamestown has published the Moscow-based magazine Crossroads, a monitor of post-Soviet reform, and has sponsored the publication of numerous books, articles, and studies by natives of the region.
The foundation's e-mail address: JFoundn@jf4.jamestown.org. Fax: 202-483-8337. Postal mail: The Jamestown Foundation, 1528 18th Street NW, Washington, DC 20036.
The Open Media Research Institute in Prague, Czech republic, publishes the OMRI Daily Digest, a roundup of news briefs gleaned from the former Soviet Union as well as central and southeastern Europe. This publication, which is freely distributed via an e-mail listserv, a Usenet newsgroup and the World Wide Web, is the continuation of the RFE/RL Daily Report under new management. It remains a valuable resource for those on the outside seeking a comprehensive roundup of what's being reported inside what used to be the East Bloc.
The Daily Digest is now being translated into Russian within hours of its distribution in English, and distributed via three Russian e-mail networks. For information on the Russian edition, contact WPS in Moscow: 955-2950 or 955-2708 (phone), 955-2927 (fax) or wpsreg@sovam.com (e-mail). To receive the English-language digest via e-mail, send the message "SUBSCRIBE OMRI-L firstname lastname" to listserv@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu. To view the Web version, aim your browser at http://www.omri.cz.
The OMRI Daily Digest for May 24 relays several reports hinting at the turmoil within Russian media institutions: word that the highly respected Nezavisimaya Gazeta (Independent Newspaper) is suspending publication and needs an estimated $10 million to turn the newspaper into a profitable operation; the Federation Council's efforts to block the creation of Public Russian Television, the successor to the Ostankino state television network; the Federation Council's rejection of a law on state support of the mass media; and an explosion at a newspaper office in the Tula area, in which one person was killed and three were injured.
On the subject of Nezavisimaya Gazeta's troubles, meanwhile, the Monitor notes that many such publications are in dire financial straits, while business weeklies, soft-porn magazines and nationalist and communist publications are gaining circulation and revenue. The Monitor cites the example of the once-moribund Communist Party paper Pravda, which is now planning to expand its weekend edition to 14 pages.
"Zhurnalistika i Voina" ("Journalism and the War: Coverage of the Chechen Conflict by the Russian Mass Media") is a book-length report written by the research group of the Russian-American Press and Information Center, under the sponsorship of the Open Society Institution. The research group includes experts from the Journalism School of the Moscow State University, Public Opinion Foundation and Glasnost Defense Foundation. For more information, contact Renny Hart: renny@glas.apc.org.
Moscow News' English edition is now being published in the United States through the auspices of East View Publications Inc., based in Minneapolis. East View and Moscow News also plan to distribute MN on CD-ROM. East View is an importer of books, periodicals, maps and microfilm from the former Soviet Union and central and eastern Europe, and the company is involved in digital delivery of newspapers across the former Soviet Union.
For information about Moscow News and advertising rates, contact Tatiana Lepekha at Moscow News, 200-2010 or 200-1588. At East View: Eugenia Petrovits or James Beale, (612) 550-0961. Fax: (612) 559-2931. E-mail: Eastview@eastview.com. For overseas subscription orders, contact Yvonne Fritchie at East View: (800) 477-1005, fax to (800) 800-3839; or Elena Volkova at Moscow News, 229-5190, fax to 200-0650.
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