The Siberian Times

» see siberiantimes.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The stories reached me. The source never did. A frozen worm revived after 40,000 years in the permafrost, or a hole opening in the Yamal tundra with nobody able to explain it. These went around Turkish news sites in translation for years, and I could not have named where any of them originally came from. It was almost always the same website.

The Siberian Times launched on 12 July 2012, describing itself as a major new source of news and features from Russia's largest region, edited by Svetlana Skarbo out of Novosibirsk. Its beat was genuinely underserved. Siberia is bigger than most continents and English-language coverage of it barely existed, so a site that reliably produced readable stories about mammoth tusks and thawing ground found an audience immediately.

The pickup was extraordinary for something that size. The Daily Telegraph ran its stories, and so did The Independent and Radio Free Europe. The Smithsonian covered the reanimated permafrost worms. For roughly a decade, if a piece of Siberian weirdness crossed your screen in English, it had probably passed through this one site on the way.

~ the dossier ~

~ the funny part ~

In October 2019 Meduza published an investigation into a Russian government media report claiming that half of Western coverage of Russia was negative. Checking the bylines in that report, they found an unusual concentration of one name: William Stewart, a British journalist who had been in Moscow since 1992 and whom one Russian media analyst called the record holder for articles filed by a foreign correspondent.

Stewart, it turned out, was also the engine behind The Siberian Times. He operated through a UK-registered company called East2West, funded the site largely out of what he earned selling stories to The Sun and the Daily Mail, and employed freelancers with Russian stringers picking material out of the domestic tabloid press for rewriting. The Novosibirsk dateline was real in the sense that the events happened there. The newsroom was a business model.

Mashable once described the output as allegedly real with a bit of hyperbole. That is about right. The stories were rarely invented outright, they were just selected for maximum strangeness from a Russian press that produces plenty of it, then presented in English with the doubt sanded off. Then the Telegraph would rewrite the rewrite, and by the time it reached a Turkish aggregator the chain of custody had gone entirely.

~ the postmortem ~

It stopped on 1 april 2024, without a farewell and without a stated reason. There is no acquisition to point at and no lawsuit, just a site that went quiet after eleven years and eight months and then stopped resolving.

What it demonstrated is worth keeping. One person with local fixers and a working sense of what travels can supply an entire language's worth of coverage of a region the size of Siberia, and every serious newspaper downstream will run it without asking who is upstream. The site is gone. The arrangement that made it possible is now how a great deal of foreign reporting works, minus the mammoths.

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