Well, this looks interesting...*

[scroll down for updates]

The New York Times appears to have established a Russian-language community on LiveJournal where they are going to post some of their coverage of Russia and solicit responses.* The first article posted appears to be one that hasn't appeared in the English-language NYT yet (and perhaps the idea is to produce content exclusive to this community or to use the community as overflow space - after all, the NYT's print version is limited in the amount of Russia stories it can run).**

Even more intriguing is the promise to translate the comments of Russian bloggers and publish them on the NYT's website in English. The subhead of the page reads, "Tell Americans and the whole world about Russia," and a note to users follows:

This community was created by the journalists of the New York Times with the goal of collecting the opinions of LiveJournal users. The opinions expressed by you on the pages of this community, even the most negative ones directed at us, will be translated into English for publication on the newspaper's website, www.nytimes.com.

This strikes me as a creative and very cool idea.* Of course bloggers of all political stripes will use it for various attacks - on the NYT, on Americans in general, and on each other - but it has the potential to be an extremely interesting forum. If this is the real deal, I hope that the NYT puts follow-through and resources behind it, because it seems like the kind of highly ambitious internet project that could fizzle out without some serious manpower, especially since they seem to have received over a thousand comments in their first day online. Somewhere tonight a translator is very busy...

The headline of the first article seems almost designed to provoke a shitstorm of commentary from indignant pro-Putin Russians: "Harsh measures in one region show how much less democracy there is in Russia under Putin."

Would NYT correspondents based in Russia really be so intentionally provocative as to kick off their interaction with the Russian blogosphere with just the kind of article which - while it's no doubt true - is likely to lead not to thoughtful discussion but irate recriminations?

I guess one (perhaps remote) possibility is that someone is trying to get the NYT's Moscow bureau closed down. On the other hand, the user info set up under Clifford Levy's name looks like it was written by a native speaker of English, and the forum's moderator appears to be a real, live blogger (as opposed to the always-suspect username set up yesterday with no posts to its name) - so maybe this project is the real deal.

Then again, you would think there would be some sort of announcement on nytimes.com's Russia page, and there isn't. So perhaps after all this is just an effort to make the NYT's Moscow correspondents look like "meddlers." It is really bothering me that a potentially "feel-good" project like this immediately makes me suspect some kind of black-PR plot...

I found out about this from Russian LJ blogger drugoi, a pillar of the Russian blogosphere, so I'm inclined to take it seriously, and my immediate reaction when I saw the page was that it's a great idea. But as I think about the kind of reaction such a project could get from official Russia, I have to wonder if the NYT's Moscow team would be bold enough to do something like this. In any event, I will try to find out what the deal is - though I'm sure that others will be writing about this before too long.


*...but part of me thinks it could just be a very interesting hoax. [Update - it's the real deal! See below]

** Apparently this is an article which will appear in a later edition of the NYT - and the plan is that Russian LJ readers will get to preview some of the paper's coverage of their country on an ongoing basis.


[Update]

I decided to translate another note that's on the front page of the community from its creators about its purposes:

This community is moderated. New topics are posted by the journalists, who are also the moderators of this community. Among other things, articles written for the New York Times will be presented for discussion - special reports which come out once a month as well as daily reports about events in Russia. We would also like to use this community to lay the groundwork for reports and travel around Russia, and we hope for your assistance and support.

We created this community to give our American readers the chance to learn what Russians really think. Our goal is to capture the largest possible range of different opinions, so we welcome any ideas, links and opinions in the comments to our entries.

Well, what can I say, it sounds like a lovely idea, but it does seem like a surprisingly grass-roots approach for an establishment publication like the NYT - narodnyi journalism with an element of public diplomacy!

Anyway, I applaud them if this whole thing is for real, although I might have picked a "softer" article to kick off the community (on the other hand, if you want to speak truth to power, why not start strong?), and I can't help but think that the project as a whole sort of plays into the narrative which has been created by xenophobic forces in Russia about foreign "meddlers." This of course says more about the cynicism of the people who created that narrative than it does about anything else.


[Update 2/23]

Well, it looks like this is the real deal after all. There's a new post today promising that translated comments will show up on nytimes.com soon:

Dear Readers!
We have already begun translating them, all manner of comments, and in a few hours we will start placing them on our website at www.nytimes.com in English. Millions of readers around the world will read your comments about Russia! As soon as the article is posted, we will provide the link. All of the comments in English posted at www.nytimes.com will include a link to the corresponding Russian-language comment on LiveJournal. You will be convinced that we are not afraid of criticism and will post a large number of negative comments directed at us.

Even more convincing with respect to the authenticity of nytimesinmoscow are that Lenta.ru ran an article about it yesterday and that ZheZhe titan dolboeb (a.k.a. Anton Nossik) also introduced his readers to the new community yesterday, discussing the NYT's plans for the project:

This newspaper regularly writes all kinds of things about Russia, and not exactly in the same tone as the English-language version of RG [presumably he means Rossiiskaya Gazeta, although the only official English-language newspaper I know of is the paid supplement that comes out once in awhile in the Washington Post], and had suffered up to now from a lack of feedback. In order to solve this problem, the NYT's editors decided to do the following:

Translate articles about Russia into Russian

Publish these translations in the nytimesinmoscow community before they appear in the paper in the original English

Collect comments from Russian-language bloggers on their articles

Translate these responses into English and publish them on the New York Times website. The idea is that American readers will learn our opinions about the [NYT] articles from which they get their information about Russia. In addition, the authors of these articles, and the editors who order them, will learn about our opinions.

So, we are being invited to participate in the portrayal of Russia on the pages of the New York Times.

Shall we?

In another post, Nossik talks about reaction in the Russian blogosphere to this new project:

In their blogs people are naturally trying to guess what portion of the comments will appear in English on the American newspaper's wesbite. People with a totalitarian Soviet consciousness are convinced that they will only translate those responses with a particular slant (this must be what they think would do if they were the editors). I remember that when we talked with the NYTimes about creating this community, they planned to translate around 500 comments to each article. Considering the quality and quantity of the responses they are receiving, we'll see how many they actually translate.

Nossik also discusses why the kickoff post (with its 1600+ comments) has not made it into Yandex's top-30 rating, and notes that it has been linked by many highly rated ZheZhe bloggers. I recommend checking out the posts - and comments thereto - by peresedov and nl (+ this one, humorously headlined to parallel the title of the NYT article, "Harsh comments to one post show how much less democracy there is in Putin's Russia") to get an idea of what the RuBlogosphere is saying about the NYT's new community.

My own conclusion is that this is a very interesting and creative step, with the potential to realize the full interactive power of the internet. Unfortunately, though, the comments section risks being engulfed in crap written by the usual ZheZhe know-nothings, each trying to prove he is the greater Russian "patriot" by trying to outdo all the others in shouting down external criticism. There is some irony in the fact that, depending on the selection of comments translated, the most ardent anti-Westerners have a good chance of damaging Russia's image among an English-language readership.

The concept of pre-posting an article online and collecting comments before running it in the paper is of course a fascinating one for anyone who thinks about how the media interact with the societies they cover. So this new project provides a basis for discussing a lot of "big ideas" - not just the tenor of the US-Russian relationship and the negative image of the US (evident from the comments) which has been successfully created within Russia with the assistance of the Bush Administration; but also thoughts about whether opinions expressed in the blogosphere have anything to do with general public opinion, how old-school newspapers can use new media, and the proper or desirable role of journalistic institutions, and whether they should try to do something more than just tell stories and sell papers.

Only time will tell if the NYT is able to successfully invert Peter the Great's founding of St. Petersburg (hailed as the opening of a window to Europe) and open a window for its English-speaking readers into the minds of Russian netizens and bloggers.

For some reason, I just thought of the Donahue-Posner Telebridges of the 1980s...perhaps not the most auspicious association, but I'll certainly be following the NYT's foray into the Russian blogosphere with interest.

A final note on all the translated bits above - I did them in a hurry, so if anyone thinks I missed a nuance anywhere, please feel free to say so in the comments.


[Update 2/24 ]

144 translated comments by Russian readers to the article (now available here in English) have been posted on the NYT's website. Let the dialog begin!

[Update 2/25]

A couple more posts on Russian blogs about this project - here (with lots of interesting comments) and here. And there's another publication with a Russian Livejournal version - Esquire, although the situation is rather different from the NYT's because Russian Esquire also comes out in print and has a standalone website.

The NYT is translating American readers' comments into Russian and posting them in the LJ community. I doubt they will undertake the translation burden for the responses to these comments (which are of course responses to Russians' comments which the NYT translated into English), so of course the translator-assisted online dialog cannot continue ad infinitum.

And there's an NYT article discussing the response of Russian commenters ("An Article Brings Sharp Responses from Russians"), which does a fairly good job of capturing the overall tenor of the discussion at the LJ community. This English-language comment to the original post was also insightful in categorizing the commenters and explaining some of the reasons for the harshness:

[Y]ou're facing an uphill perception battle. Your article is a piece of investigative journalism; to you - but not to your audience. Most of what's published in this genre in Russian are thinly veiled, slanted opinion pieces masquerading as reporting. Your work, to a greater or lesser extent, will be read in the same vein. American audiences have developed a degree of innate trust in the quality of what ends up in a major newspaper. Russian, conversely, have developed a degree of innate distrust. You can probably appreciate how a largely anecdote-driven critical piece written by a foreigner (worse, an American) would be seen in that light, regardless of its factual accuracy.

Uphill battle or not, and even though the individual comments from either country are unlikely to provide any great insights or breakthroughs in the bilateral relationship, on the whole this project will be one to watch in the future, since the NYT has promised to continue pre-publishing Russian translations of articles from their "Kremlin Rules" series. I think, though, that this will be my last update to this post!