Facts Apart, Opinions Apart

Why an opinion page makes good business sense for a newspaper in Russia's "red belt"

By Jeremy Druker
Transitions, Vol. 4, No. 7, December 1997.

WHEN Bryanskoe vremya added an opinion page in 1994, its editors, who are also the paper's co-owners, felt that move simply made good economic sense. As Deputy Editor in Chief Aleksandr Levinskii explained, the strategy of attempting to appeal to a broad audience by presenting balanced news coverage along with a plethora of viewpoints sets his paper apart from some regional Russian newspapers, which depend largely on political parties or benefactors for their existence and thus espouse only the views of their funders.

ON THE FOUNDING OF BRYANSKOE VREMYA

In 1990, Bryanskoe vremya was founded by six journalists as the first independent paper in the [Bryansk] Oblast. Until then our region had only one paper, the Communist Party organ Bryanski rabochi. Today, we have a staff of about 30 people who co-own the paper. Circulation has increased almost threefold, from 12,000 copies to 32,000, and the size of the paper has increased from 12 pages to 32 pages. Several other local papers were founded by government bodies or businesses, but ours is the only one that is supported by ad sales, subscriptions, and newsstand sales.

ON IMPROVING THE PRODUCT

Eventually, our management realized that a newspaper is a commodity like any other good. We hit upon our main, very simple principle of survival, and perhaps of commercial success: the more individual "tastes" we can satisfy, the better our sales will be and the better we will live. What, we asked ourselves, could improve our commodity for our consumers?

When our paper began, it was very politically opinionated--pro-liberal and pro-reformist. We came to understand that if we continued to "package" every fact as "pro-Gaidar," "pro-Yeltsin," etc., the paper would eventually go bust. That was especially true because Bryansk Oblast is part of the so-called red belt: the Communist Party-dominated regions surrounding Moscow.

We realized we didn't have to teach our readers how to live, didn't have to push readers to our conclusions. We had to give as many facts as possible and augment them with eloquent details. With that decision, we stopped playing "prophets" and started selling a commodity that could appeal to all readers, whether leftist, rightist, or centrist.

ON SEPARATING FACT FROM OPINION

In most stories, whether news reports or profiles, a reader won't find the writers' judgments. Our staff has concluded that self-quotation does not produce a quality paper. Our editorial staff adopted that ideology after five years of publication. We learned (and are still learning) to work with facts.

The opinion page was born when we felt we had become quite objective in our news coverage and wanted to add some pointed, albeit attributed, viewpoints. On all our other pages facts were sacred, but on the opinion page we wanted a page of free commentary. The first contributors to the page were local politicians who realized the page was the best place to promote their ideas to the electorate. We invited journalists from other media to submit pieces. Later, doctors, academicians, actors, and painters contributed commentaries, and readers began sending letters to the editor.

There was a moment when some readers condemned the paper for losing its political "face," but little by little such criticisms have almost disappeared.

ON CONTRIBUTORS TO THE OPINION PAGE

We have about two dozen regular contributors, including a military journalist, a spokesperson for the local electrical plant, a political analyst, a painter, and a businessman.

Two local deputies in the State Duma who had been elected as Communist Party representatives later found that the Communist faction of the Duma was more concerned with "political gambling" than with legislation, and they expressed their dismay on our commentary page, disclosing the shadow mechanisms of Communist rule in the Duma. We published their arguments along with a letter from local former Communist Party activists.

We received many responses to pieces written by Anatolii Lukashov on military reform. We published his comments on housing for former military staff alongside letters from former military men who disagreed with Lukashov's conclusions. Natalia Safronova writes every second week on family life or the economy. In one of her most recent columns, she discussed investment in the region and argued that investors are afraid to enter the Bryansk economy because local managers still behave as if the mechanisms of a "free economy" were identical to those of the Soviet era: they don't expect to repay loans or share profits. Until their mentality changes, she wrote, the Bryansk region won't attract investors.

ON THE SUCCESS OF THE OPINION PAGE

I believe we've succeeded in creating a paper where objective reporting and commentary are clearly separated. We've developed clear rules: readers understand that in one place we give facts only and they are free to come to their own conclusions about those facts, and that elsewhere in the paper we offer commentaries by familiar writers, commentaries readers are free to support or reject. Above all, the paper will never promote its writers' opinions as indisputable facts.

By separating fact from opinion, Bryanskoe vremya tells its readers that it respects their right to know the truth and to make independent judgments. Maybe that's an idea that is catching on. The editor of a paper in the neighboring city of Sarov recently contacted me to ask how to start an opinion page and said that his paper would publish such a page in October.

Jeremy Druker is a staff writer at Transitions.

Transitions, Vol. 4, No. 7, December 1997.