Training a catalyst to a little progress (03/01/06)

Last fall I was asked a tough question.

I’d been speaking to a local service club about free press development efforts in the former Soviet Union when it popped up.

“Are they making any progress over there?” a man asked.

For what seemed like a long minute, I weighed my answer.

Much of the work I’d done in that area in 2005 involved Belarus, a country where the journalists have figured out free press but the government doesn’t want it. In other countries that once made up the U.S.S.R., basic concepts like fact-based reporting and treating the reader like a customer have been a tough sell.

So I couldn’t give a very encouraging answer. “I don’t know” is what I think I answered.

Today, I’d be a tad more positive — not wildly optimistic, but hopeful.

The difference between today’s answer and the one last fall came during a two-week project in February in Russia.

It began with a two-day conference sponsored by the New Eurasia Foundation and funded by the British government. After the conference, I traveled to three small cities in “deep Russia” to work with independent newspapers.

And what I saw and heard gave me real reason to be encouraged about the degree of progress and the potential for even greater change.

Training, it seems, works.

Time and again, both at the conference and at the newspapers I worked with, training was cited by journalists and business managers.

It’s not the only piece of the puzzle, of course.

You still need to have a key individual willing to lead a newspaper in the right direction, toward independence and professionalism.

And you need a market capable of supporting a newspaper’s business model, providing a stream of advertising revenue that creates self-sufficiency and ends dependence on government and political parties.

But training was the common denominator.

It was cited in Artemovskii, where Alexander Mikhailovich Sharafiev is leading a team that has built a weekly newspaper with 68 percent market penetration in a rough-hewn city of 60,000 surrounded by idled mines.

It was cited in Zheleznogorsk, where Anatoli Polozkov has steadily and craftily transformed a newspaper formerly owned by city government into an independent publication. The city’s still a part-owner, but with just 24 percent of the stock it can do little but collect dividends.

And it was cited in Revda, where Valery Alexandrovich Bezpyatykh puts out a twice-a-week paper that has built a substantial subscription base in a city known for its copper smelting and non-ferrous metals.

Three tough cities and three tough publishers. And in each case, training proved the catalyst for change.

“Are they making any progress over there?”

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