Stuck in Lenin's elevator

This morning, we visited the the Slobids'kyj Krai newspaper, which sent three staff members to Saturday's CAR workshop. It's a paper in transition.

On the one hand, the paper is owned by the regional government (the Kharkiv oblast). It's heavily dependent on government advertising and subsidies. The SK is the oldest paper in Kharkiv -- it's marking its 90th anniversary. (The editor, Volodimir Revenko, showed us a historic edition with Lenin on Page One.) The SK may be the only paper in Kharkiv that publishes in Ukrainian. (Ukrainian is the official government language -- and that may be why it's the language of the SK. But there could be another reason: The SK serves the Ukrainian-speaking rural areas around Kharkiv as well as the Russian-speaking urban area.)



The government is thinking about privatizing the Slobids'kyj Krai -- making it a private business. Mr. Revenko seems OK with that. He's a longtime journalist (30 years), and has good news instincts. He wants to expand his audience (go after younger readers) and his advertising base. But his staff consists mostly of older journalists who (Mr. Revenko says) are pretty set in their ways. He says he can't get them to do enterprise stories (he wanted a piece about conditions at a local orphanage, for example).

We talked about the situation for about three hours -- over tea, then cognac (Ukrainians are big on toasts). Mr. Revenko said that because of the government pay structure, his reporters have little incentive to work harder or differently, and that he can't fire them. He's instituted a quota system for stories, but that hasn't helped. Selma and I suggested things like building quality into the quotas. (For instance, if a reporter must do seven stories a week, make it clear that only two of those stories can rely on press releases and only two on government meetings. Or require reporters to quote a certain number of sources -- and a certain number of "real people," not government officials -- in stories.)

We all agreed that there are no easy solutions. Selma and I might come back to work with the SK on some things. In late March, we're going to start working with young journalists who want to do (or are already doing) freelance articles for the SK and other papers. Maybe our plans for a "young journalists' academy" can help change the newsroom culture.

The SK is located in an office building (I'm guessing seven stories) with several other newspapers; it's on the fourth floor, I think. We left at 2:30 to go to a meeting with the university students who want to produce "BOOOM!" But as we were going down in the elevator, it jammed between floors, and we were stuck for about 20 minutes. Fortunately, Mr. Revenko was with us; he called maintenance on his cell phone, and they manually raised the elevator car to a floor and pried open the doors. We finished our descent by stairs.



The SK provided a driver who took us to the university, where we had a good meeting. Almost all of the stories for the first issue of BOOOM! are in hand.

After dinner on Monday, we met with students at another university (an economics-engineering school not far from a metro station and a McDonald's) who also want advice on producing a newspaper. We spent an hour or so critiquing some of their stories.