Chastny Korrespondent

» see chaskor.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In 2009 Chastny Korrespondent became the first Russian publication to put its entire output under a Creative Commons license. Attribution 3.0, applied site-wide, which meant any other outlet or blog or encyclopedia could republish an article so long as it said where the article came from. The publisher said part of the point was to hand Russian Wikipedia material that satisfied its sourcing rules.

It had launched on 1 October 2008 out of Moscow, with Ivan Zasursky as publisher and first editor. Zasursky teaches journalism at Moscow State University and his father ran that faculty for decades, which shows in what the site published: long analytical pieces and interviews rather than an hourly news feed.

The masthead turned over several times. Zasursky handed the editorship to Yulia Eidel in September 2011, and it passed to Nataliya Trishchenko in February 2015 and to Angelina Gorbunova in 2018. On 31 March 2022 the site announced it was suspending operations, after fourteen years and around fifty thousand published pieces, with no stated reason.

~ the case file ~

~ attribution 3.0 ~

Free licensing was a strange decision for a Russian outlet in 2009 and it reads stranger now. Most Russian media at the time was walling its content in and metering it, and this one gave up exclusivity on purpose. The bet was that being copied was worth more than being the only place a piece could be read.

I cannot read any of it. Russian is not a language I have, and Chaskor was written for people in Russia arguing about Russia, so this grave is assembled out of other people's summaries of a site I have never opened. The single part I can verify without the language is the license, because a license is a machine-readable fact. CC BY 3.0 applied site-wide, thirteen years before the site stopped.

~ fifty thousand articles ~

Because of the license, the archive did not go the way most archives go. Anything that got republished elsewhere under attribution is still sitting in those other places, legally, whether or not chaskor.ru answers a request. That is what the 2009 decision bought, though nobody made it for that reason.

~ the thirty-first of march ~

The suspension notice went up five weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, in the middle of the fastest contraction Russian independent media has been through. Ekho Moskvy had already been taken off air on 1 March and Novaya Gazeta suspended publication on 28 March. Chaskor stopped three days after Novaya.

What the notice did not do was explain itself, and nothing published since has filled that in. The site stayed readable until 19 June 2022 and then went. The domain does not resolve at all now, which for a publication whose whole strategy was to be copyable is a smaller loss than it would otherwise be.

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