![[QUOTE]](playback.gif)
New issues are distributed quarterly via the relcom.comp.newmedia newsgroup on UseNet, and via e-mail subscription.
We invite you to visit our other Web pages, including the official site for our "New Media for a New World" conferences. GlasNews articles, as well as GlasNet bulletins and material related to the October 1993 crisis in Moscow and "New Media for a New World," are available via anonymous ftp from ftp://ftp.eskimo.com/u/g/GlasNews.
To join GlasNews' subscription list, send the message "subscribe cepmail" to majordomo@eskimo.com. To unsubscribe to the list, send the message "unsubscribe cepmail" to majordomo@eskimo.com.
You can send us a message at glasnews@eskimo.com or at the Art Pattison Communications Exchange Program, 26411 218th Ave. S.E., Maple Valley, Washington 98038. Phone: Chairman David Endicott at 206-292-8255, Ext. 167, or 206-682-1697 (fax); Managing Editor Alan Boyle at 206-448-8035.
Tax-deductible contributions to CEP are greatly appreciated and acknowledged. Thanks to our latest contributors: The U.S. Agency for International Development through the Russian-American Media Partnerships Program and the Eurasia Foundation, Mark D'Anastasio, Michael T. Hoopes and Laura L. Hoopes.
Acknowledgments also to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, First Choice Health Network, Ray Berry, Kim Carney, Greg Cole, Jay Koski and Lorraine Pozzi for technical assistance.
The feet. I don't think I'll ever be able to forget the awkward bend of the feet of the dead, which were sticking out from underneath rumpled white sheets, antique quilts and soiled blankets.
It was June 1995, and I was a freelance reporter for The Associated Press, walking among the dead in the small village of Neftegorsk on Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East. A massive earthquake had struck the mining town of 3,000 in the middle of the night. The jolt was so ferocious it turned the sandy ground to mud, causing blocks upon blocks of poorly-built Soviet apartment buildings to collapse in piles of rubble. At least 2,000 residents perished.
As I walked among the dead and those who survived the devastation, I wondered if I would ever make it back home.
![[BOND'S VISA]](images/visa.gif)
Thirteen months earlier, I had left a job as a reporter in the Seattle area for a job in Vladivostok, not knowing a word of Russian and not really sure what I was getting myself into.
A chance encounter with the managing editor of the Russian Far East's main newspaper, The Vladivostok, led to my being hired as an editor for the Russian paper's fledgling English-language weekly called The Vladivostok News. Hungry for adventure, I jumped at the opportunity.
The first reaction most foreigners have to Vladivostok is shock. My first impression was no different. This ramshackle sea port of about 700,000 has the traditional trappings of most Soviet cities: Devoid of color, dangerous and depressing, the city is overwhelmed by oppressive concrete apartment complexes. Garbage, piles of broken concrete and general urban decay litter the area. The people seem, at first glance, surly and menacing.
That impression was reinforced during my first run-in with Vladivostok's krutois, or "tough guys."
Walking across a side street after only a month in the city, I was hit by a brand new Mercedes Benz. The Mercedes Benz should have been my first clue that this was not a good situation to be in. The driver had slammed on his brakes and just bumped me, knocking me onto his hood. But I had inadvertently pushed down the hood ornament. As I got off the hood and stepped onto the curb, the driver got out of the car and punched me in the mouth. He then went to nurse the front of his car while calling me every cuss word in the Russian language.
The driver was a classic krutoi: short haircut, double-breasted suitcoat and turtleneck sweater with a gold chain. This is the Vladivostok mafia's uniform.
I was reeling from the surprising blow and trying to steady myself, and the driver was sitting in his seat looking like he was ready to pounce on me when my editor, fellow American Richard Thomas, advised me that we should leave.
"He might have a gun," Thomas said.
I agreed with Richard: Retreat was the prudent move.
In the provinces of Russia, where sophistication is sometimes questionable, attitudes occasionally take on the air of feudal Europe. The rich rule here, whether they be businessmen, mafia or politicians. If one of the pedestrian peasants gets in the way of the high-priced chariots, he or she will be killed, and it will be the peasant's fault.
While there was the occasional brush with the vaunted Russian mafia, in general, like all Western foreigners, I was insulated from the real dangers of life in Vladivostok.
This is a city with a murder rate that nears Chicago's. Car bombings are almost weekly occurrences, and businessmen settle their differences with hand grenades and high-powered rifles.
It is not foreigners who must fear the mafia and Russia's decline to lawlessness, it is the Russian businessmen. They are the target of murder attempts and takeovers.
The charred remains of burned-out kiosks could be seen throughout the city, blackened symbols of the struggle between criminal factions who control the lucrative trade in goods at the small street-corner stores.
For a journalist, living in Vladivostok is to witness daily doses of the tragic and the absurd.
It is a region where Russian guards are killed by Chinese illegal aliens who cross the border with automatic weapons to catch frogs. The frogs are worth $1 each in Northern China, and one sackful of the medicinal and culinary treats equals the average monthly salary.
It is a region where natural disasters are seasonal occurrences and are only upstaged by the man-made disasters. These include the annual spring rite of the arsenal explosion. During the last six years, an estimated 10 military arsenals in the Russian Far East have exploded under mysterious circumstances. The biggest of these have happened during the spring months. The largest took place in 1992 when a massive arsenal located in a northern suburb of Vladivostok exploded for about 48 hours before the blasts finally died out.
There is no official death toll, but local journalists estimate that at least four people died. Thousands of residents had to be evacuated from their apartments as shells and antitank missiles rained down on the city, traveling as far as 10 miles.
The official reason for the explosion was that a guard threw a cigarette butt into high grass growing near the arsenal.
Two years later, on the same date as the 1992 explosion, an arsenal about 30 miles from Vladivostok exploded. In 1995, a third arsenal exploded in the hills north of Vladivostok along the Chinese border.
As foreigners writing in English for a small audience, the staff of the Vladivostok News was amazingly free from administrative interference or censorship. In truth, our owners had little if any idea what we were printing.
But the vestiges of the old Soviet regime still remained and creaked along. One of those longstanding fears was that all foreigners are spies. That went double for journalists. Certainly having the last name "Bond" was at times a hindrance to the free flow of information from interview subjects who tended to be more conservative.
"There are a lot of CIA spies running around. Tell him he can print anything he wants, but I won't talk to him," said the director of Vladivostok's largest ship repair factory when I asked him for an interview.
Beyond the Russian tendency toward "fear of foreigners," there was the problem that Russian government officials and businessmen have an aversion to giving out anything that might even be mistaken for accurate information. In Russia, getting the facts is not a right, but a privilege.
Ironically, the local Russian reporters whom I knew could get accurate information, but often chose not to print it. The problems facing their country were often met with a shrug by the tired and cynical press.
Journalism, to many Russian reporters, appeared to be a chore they had to complete between their video games and vodka. The first time I stepped into the newsroom of Vladivostok's main newspaper, I was struck by the fact that more than half the reporters in the room were sitting at their computers playing video games. I often marveled that they were able to get a daily newspaper out at all.
While hard-drinking journalists are part of the industry's folklore, there is little to prepare the uninitiated for the onslaught of Russian reporters deciding to tie one on.
But life is more complicated for Russia's jaded reporters than it is for their American counterparts. The world of Russian journalism sometimes has little resemblance to our own.
For instance, there are political concerns to keep in mind.
In Vladivostok, authorities had created an environment of fear that has muzzled the press. Reporters are aware that there are lines they cannot be crossed when writing critical stories.
This was made clear after an 18-year-old student journalist was abducted and tortured in 1994 following his broadcast of an unflattering profile of Vladivostok's mayor.
Intimidation in Vladivostok is not just limited to muggings. It comes in many different forms. Newspapers' licenses can be magically revoked. The state-owned regional press, which retains its monopoly on printing papers, has occasionally been accused of not printing newspapers owned by those opposed to the regional governor. Electricity can be cut off, and the tax police are always ready to audit a newspaper's books.
There are also the financial concerns. Money has become the name of the game in Russia, including journalism. This has helped pervert the political activities. For instance, The Vladivostok, the region's main newspaper, charged politicians a fee for running profiles about their candidacy, with a sliding scale based on where the article appears in the paper. The more a candidate paid, the more prominent the article, with a front-page story commanding the highest rate.
Reporters also commonly are paid by businesses and individuals to write positive articles.
Payments can flow in the other direction as well: More than one source asked me to pay them for their information after an interview had begun.
I was always able to avoid this, partly out of poverty and partly out of what was probably a misplaced American righteousness about journalism ethics. I've often thought that I was probably foolish to cling to bourgeois notions. I probably missed a few great stories because of them.
But on that cool June day in Neftegorsk, I found myself in the midst of one of the biggest news stories in the world.
One day earlier, I had arrived from Vladivostok to find Sakhalin Island's main airport outside Yuzhno-Sakhalin in chaos. Grieving relatives, relief crews and reporters from across Asia were all scrambling to get a flight to the remote site of the earthquake in the northern reaches of the island.
The journalists used any means necessary to get to the front of the line, including bribing airport officials to get seats reserved for relatives of the earthquake victims. A number of angry and anxious relatives spent the night in the airport, railing at the injustice of the situation and praying that their families were still alive.
"This is a disaster, not a damn game," one embarrassed journalist told to me before boarding a plane. "It's terrible, but we've got to get there."
Arriving late and not having the money for bribes, I spent the night in the airport with the families.
By the time I arrived at Neftegorsk, exhausted rescue crews had been digging in the rubble for three straight days. The miracles were few and far between. Much more common was the lifting of massive concrete slabs only to find people crushed to death. The survivors walked about in a daze near their apartment blocks trying to salvage valuables or waiting for family members to be uncovered.
One man told me how he had been asleep with his wife in their third-floor apartment when the the quake hit at 1 a.m. He remembered that his building swayed as if it had turned to liquid. Then he doesn't remember anything till he woke up shivering in the night cold and looking up at the stars. He felt the remains of a woman lying near him. She had been cut in two. It might have been his wife, he didn't know for sure.
Looking down at the ill-fitting jeans and shirt he was wearing, he said with an apology that this was all he had left. He found the clothes in the rubble of his building.
"I asked forgiveness from the dead people who owned these clothes," he said.
Temblors were constant in Neftegorsk, forcing even the hard-bitten foreign correspondents to freeze in their tracks. Government officials and a representative for the local oil company that had built the town and employed most of the residents made promises at a rally the following day to help the survivors, saying everyone would be compensated for their lost relatives and property. But the surly crowd didn't believe them. They remembered the government's poor performance a year earlier when earthquakes and tidal waves devastated many villages on the Kurile Islands, south of Sakhalin.
As the crowd's anger began to grow, a major tremor rippled through the area, forcing a frightened silence.
Journalists often feel as if they are invisible to danger when covering a major story. There is a sense of being insulated because you are an observer and not a participant. But for me, Neftegorsk left me with a different sense: the sense of just how easy it is to die for no particular reason. It came to me as I was shaken awake by a strong aftershock the night before leaving the island. In Neftegorsk, there was a sense that we were pressing our luck. It was time to go.
Trying to leave from the small airport north of Neftegorsk was like a miniature version of the fall of Saigon. Families with children, officials and journalists were all clamoring for a seat on any plane that would take them to the mainland.
Deals were being made everywhere. Shadowy characters with "connections" were secretly selling tickets to a chosen few foreigners in the airport parking lot. Airline pilots were taking money from customers behind the ticket office to sneak them on planes. Inside the ticket office, crowds jammed against the glass at the ticket counters for hours, fighting for a chance to buy a ticket from the indifferent airport staff.
After half a day of persistence and last-minute luck, I got a ticket off the island. As the plane lifted off the runway and headed toward the mainland, I felt the sense of doom lift from my shoulders.
Neftegorsk turned out to be the culminating experience for me as a journalist in the Russian Far East. Yes, it was a tragedy of immense proportions and one more sign of Moscow's inability to properly care for their people.
It may sound shallow and callous, but for me, Neftegorsk was, like my entire experience in Russia, a fascinating mixture of gut-wrenching sights, absurd moments and exhilaration.
I'm still sometimes amazed I made it out alive.
Jeff Bond left Russia in August 1995 and now lives in Seattle with his wife and daughter. He works as a public relations specialist for the Washington State Major League Baseball Stadium Public Facilities District.
![[BACK TO MENU]](menu.gif)
Two newspapers from those regions - The News Tribune in Tacoma and Vladivostok News - have exchanged information and journalists as part of a cooperative venture over the past five years. That cooperation has extended to The News Tribune's online service, TribNet, which includes general information about Vladivostok as well as articles from Vladivostok News.
Now the Art Pattison Communications Exchange Program is helping The News Tribune and the News expand their online venture: Journalists from Vladivostok will learn more about distributing news and commercial information over the World Wide Web, and the online resources available to Vladivostok News and its affiliated publications will be upgraded.
The project's organizers hope to provide opportunities for other regional newspapers in Russia to participate in the online service.
Funding for the project comes from the Media Development Program, which used to be known as Russian-American Media Partnerships. The program is administered by two nonprofit organizations - Internews and the Russian-American Press and Information Center, a project of New York University's Center for War, Peace and the News Media. The Media Development Program draws upon a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The Russian-American Press and Information Center will be responsible for overall management of the Tacoma-Vladivostok project.
The Tacoma-Vladivostok project is aimed at developing:
The Art Pattison Communications Exchange Program has received a $100,000 grant from the Media Development Program to cover the project's start-up costs and the first year of operation. An additional grant is being pursued for a conference on online media to take place in Vladivostok. Such an event will build on the success of the organizers' "New Media for a New World" conferences, conducted in Moscow in 1994 and 1995.
David Endicott, chairman of the Art Pattison Communications Exchange Program, stressed that the Tacoma-Vladivostok venture is a pilot project that may be expanded to other Russian newspapers.
"We're excited about this project because the results from this regional program are likely to have major national and even international implications. The Tacoma and Vladivostok newspapers share a vision of communications which may help enrich lives of millions of people both in Russia and America. We're honored to be able to help them achieve that vision," Endicott said.
David Zeeck, executive editor of The News Tribune, said: "We're pleased to be able to share our expertise with these Russian newspapers as they prepare to enter the field of electronic publishing. We look forward to their becoming the first newspapers in the Russian Far East to go online."
Vladivostok News editor Hashi Syedain said, "This grant will put a regional Russian newspaper publisher at the cutting edge of electronic publishing. People around the world are clamoring for information about the Russian Far East. The Web is the perfect way to provide it, in a country of vast distances and with an underdeveloped distribution infrastructure."
The Art Pattison Communications Exchange Program, part of the Seattle-Tashkent Sister City Association, aims to foster contacts between communications professionals in the United States and the former Soviet Union. The program, founded in 1987, is the publisher of GlasNews and has organized numerous exchanges involving journalists from Russia, Uzbekistan and Lithuania.
The News Tribune, founded in 1883, is owned by McClatchy Newspapers and has a daily circulation of 128,756 in Tacoma and the surrounding area of western Washington state. Sunday circulation is 148,241.
Vladivostok News was created as a weekly English-language edition of The Vladivostok, the largest-circulation daily in the Russian Far East. Vladivostok News Corp., which operates both newspapers as well as other publications, is a joint stock company.
For more information on the Tacoma-Vladivostok project, please contact:
For that reason, you'll find little if any advertising in Russian online publications. But you do find an increasing number of sites requiring you to register, to pay a subscription fee or leave your credit card number.
Some ventures already have died on the vine - for example, Wyoming's Trib.Com discontinued its offering of Itar-Tass dispatches in English because it couldn't find advertising support.
Many others, however, are just starting to test the waters. Here is an update about two companies that have forged alliances with several Russian papers:
East View Publications offers searchable databases of articles from the daily newspapers Nezavisimaya Gazeta and Sevodnya. Subscriptions to Nezavisimaya Gazeta are $30 for three months, Sevodnya is $36 for three months. You can search articles by keyword within the months that you've subscribed to - and you can pick your months, from past and future as well as the present. Vlad Strezhnev, who heads East View's department of electronic publications, explains that if you're interested in studying coverage of December 1995's parliamentary elections, you can select December as one of your subscription months.
When you sign up for a subscription, you're asked to enter billing information - and you receive your invoice and password by postal mail. Strezhnev says it's also possible to send passwords by e-mail if desired. The password will give you access only to those months to which you've subscribed.
Strezhnev is hoping to sign up additional Russian papers for the online database. For example, East View is currently negotiating with the weekly Moscow News and hopes to offer subscriptions at about $5 a month. East View also distributes a press digest by e-mail.
East View's eventual plan is to offer a news database service a la Lexis/Nexis, with per-query or per-hour charges rather than subscriptions for individual newspapers. Right now, however, the venture is no gold mine: Strezhnev says Nezavisimaya Gazeta Online has about 30 subscribers, about a third of them businesses, a third professional researchers and a third individuals.
Russia-On-Line takes its cue from America Online and the Microsoft Network, though it's a bit more pricey: It provides direct Internet access for Russian computer users, for a $50 setup fee and $35 a month for the first seven hours. It also is building a stable of information resources available to members as part of the standard service or for an additional fee.
As of early March, Izvestia and Finansovaya Izvestia were part of the basic service, with add-ons ranging from Express-Khronika ($10 a month) and Commersant ($20 a month) to Moscow News Confidential, a newsletter delivering exclusive political information form $1,450 a year.
Russia-On-Line has a clever way to entice international users to sign up: The basic services are free for "indirect" users entering ROL via the Internet rather than through dial-up in Russia. But you still have to enter personal information and send your credit card number to ROL's Netscape commerce server to set up your free account.
Few if any of the online alliances mentioned above are exclusive. For example, Nezavisimaya Gazeta is also available via GlasNet, although GlasNet's offering was snagged recently by technical problems. Moscow News is distributed via e-mail, mostly to academic institutions, via American Cybercasting for $88 a year. Izvestia's database has been put online by Russica-Izvestia. And a Web version of Commersant has been promised for some time now, although as of early March the first issue had not yet been posted.
Up to $500,000 has been set aside to help build the printing plant, which will be a partnership between Volgograd publisher Gorodskiye Vesti and an American newspaper management consulting firm, Boyles, Morgan and Camino. According to a report in March's issue of Media Developments, BMC already has established several independent printing plants in Eastern Europe.
The printing plant will be a partnership between Gorodskiye Vesti, a company that publishes five, editorially independent newspapers in Volgograd, and Boyles, Morgan and Camino (BMC), an American newspaper management consulting firm. BMC has already established several independent printing plants in Eastern Europe and Belarus.
Other projects include:
Media Developments is published monthly by the USIA Media Assistance Clearinghouse in Russian and English. To subscribe, contact Nicholas Pilugin at the clearinghouse. Please specify whether you want the Russian or English edition.