It's all the same, but different

Mark Chernoff had a phrase for it: Everything is exactly the same, and everything is completely different.
Mark was a Peace Corps volunteer back in 1998 when we first worked together in Moldova, trying to figure out ways to assist and guide and support independent regional newspapers there.
He’s a successful attorney in Phoenix these days, but his words still ring true.
When you go back to Moldova, even after seven years in my case, everything is exactly the same and completely different.
Progress has been made in the tiny landlocked country sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine since the collapse of the former Soviet Union, but much of that progress is cosmetic.
At best it is marginal.
The streets are marginally cleaner. There are now curbside bins for recycling, paid for by a brewery, as well as regularly spaced dumpsters.
Traffic is marginally safer. There are speed cameras on a few streets, but folks have learned to slow down just as much as they have to. And while it’s uncommon these days to see someone actually driving on the sidewalk the way they did back in the late 1990s, you’ll still have to step around plenty of cars parked on the sidewalk if you are a pedestrian.
The highways are marginally better. There’s one fabulous stretch of road that you and I paid for as part of a Millennium Corporation project that takes you most of the way to Soroca. But it ends short of that northern city, and the last 3 or 4 miles are as bad as ever.
So how, in an environment like this, do you measure progress? Good question.
Best answer: Inch by inch.
I was reminded of that several days ago when I went back to Rezina to visit my old friend Tudor Iascenco.
Tudor is the publisher of Cuvantul, Rezina’s independent weekly newspaper. He’s been a pioneer in helping to establish an independent press in his country since the end of the Soviet Union, and it is no exaggeration to admit he is one of my heroes.
I first went to Rezina to visit Tudor back in 1998, accompanied by that Peace Corps volunteer Mark Chernoff and Carolina Istrati, who now coordinates mass media projects for the U.S. Embassy in Moldova. Mark, Carolina and I were just feeling our way, trying to get a handle on things.
In Tudor, we found a model publisher we hoped could be replicated all over the country.
And to some extent, we were right.
Tudor developed round table discussions in which he explained how he had taken his staff from a government-supported newspaper and gone independent. He also played a pivotal role — along with Mark and a Paris-based U.S. correspondent named Judy Yablonkey — in establishing API, the association of independent press.
That first visit to Rezina back in 1998 was something of a ground-breaker. More visits followed. I’m not really sure how many times I’ve been there. I think I’ve had lunch with Tudor three times at a spooky Soviet-style restaurant named Dumbrava. And I recall with fondness a lunch at his apartment when his wife had cooked a spring lamb.
So this month’s visit was part of a chain. If I find myself in Moldova, I am going at some point to Rezina.
We arrived about 11 a.m. I was accompanied by a gamin-like staffer from the Independent Journalism Center, Adriana, and almost instantly found myself in conversations with Tudor and his editor-in-chief Elena in the very same room I had sat in with Mark back in 1998. Everything is exactly the same and completely different.
So we talked. We talked about the challenges of the news business. We talked about the Internet. We talked about the transitions ahead.
But that’s not exactly correct. He talked. I listened. Other than to provide some positive words of encouragement, my job is primarily to ask questions.
The answers were not encouraging. Tudor explained the impact of currency devaluation in the late 1990s, and he noted that the situation is still difficult.
Asked to compare his newspaper’s situation today to its situation back in 1997, he told me that because of the worldwide recession that hit in 2008 his operation is roughly where it was almost 20 years ago. They are surviving, but they are struggling.
But Tudor remains optimistic. He has established a “tip jar” on the newspaper’s website so that the huge Moldovan diaspora — roughly 20 percent of the country’s population in 1998 has emigrated to other parts of the world in search of opportunity — could help keep the news outlet going financially when they used the site to keep in touch with events back at home.
His newspaper continues to be among the best and most independent in the country. And he continues to provide a leadership role in API.
Or as Mark Chernoff might say, everything is exactly the same, though completely different.