PublicPost

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

~ the eulogy ~

A state-controlled bank and Russia's most stubbornly independent radio station put money into the same website in november 2011. That sentence is the entire story of PublicPost and it explains both why the site was interesting and why it had nineteen months to live.

The idea was the Huffington Post model transplanted to Moscow: a blog platform bolted onto a newsroom, with unpaid contributors filling the wide part of the funnel and staff reporters doing the reporting. It went live on 28 november 2011, a few days before the parliamentary election that produced the largest street protests Russia had seen since the 1990s. The timing was either very good or very bad depending on which year you judge it from.

Nargiz Asadova was the first editor. Nikolai Klimenyuk took over later as acting editor and is the person who described afterward what had actually happened. The site ran blogs alongside interviews and investigations, which is a format that works when nobody important minds, and stops working the moment somebody does.

I read none of it. Russian is not a language I have, and the Russian internet has always been a place I saw through other people's translations rather than directly. What I can follow without the language is the shape of the ownership and the shape of the ending, and both are legible from a long way away.

~ the dossier ~

~ a bank and a radio station ~

Interfax and Sberbank supplied the funding. Ekho Moskvy supplied Alexei Venediktov, whose radio station spent two decades being the one place in Russian broadcast media where opposition politicians got asked real questions, and who was himself a founder of the project.

It is a combination that only makes sense in a specific window. Sberbank is majority state-owned. Ekho Moskvy was majority-owned by Gazprom Media and still ran an editorial line the Kremlin hated, an arrangement everyone understood to be a tolerated exception rather than a right. In 2011 that exception still had room in it for a co-funded liberal news startup. By 2013 it did not, and by 2022 Ekho Moskvy itself was gone.

~ the january it started going wrong ~

Klimenyuk's account puts the turn in january 2013. Officials began reacting badly to specific pieces: coverage of the law banning American adoptions of Russian children, and interviews with United Russia deputies that ran the answers exactly as given. Reporting on how the courts actually worked drew the same response.

None of that is a shutdown order and there is no document anywhere that says close this site. What there is instead is a founding group of institutions with a great deal to lose, an editorial product generating friction, and a decision six months later that the project was ineffective. Ineffective is a word that can carry an enormous amount of weight without ever having to be defended.

~ four days to delete two years ~

The official closing date was 30 june 2013 and the last day of operation was 1 july. On 4 july the content came off the internet entirely.

That last detail is the one worth sitting with. A publication that decides it has run out of money leaves the archive up, because an archive costs almost nothing and closing a publication is not the same as unpublishing it. Deleting nineteen months of reporting four days after you stop is a different decision made for a different reason. Whatever the site had done to become ineffective, somebody wanted it to stop being findable.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »