'Free press' costs money!

In Siberia, the media struggle for survival without government subsidies.

I was giving Journalism 101 to a group of Siberian journalists. You know, newsroom objectivity and editorial page subjectivity and the wall of separation between the news side and the advertising department, complete with a blackboard delineation.

But I quickly learned that what the two dozen Novokuznetsk print and broadcast media people wanted to hear was information about the revenue side of the media business. Where, for example, do newspapers in a free-market economy get the money to finance their operations?

I quickly switched gears along with the honest explanation that the business side of journalism is not my forte.

I was there last September as part of a Pittsburgh-based team financed by the U.S. Agency for International Development to help that steel-making city of 400,000 in south-central Siberia plan its transition from a command to a market economy.

But as the discussion progressed, understanding the audience's concerns was easy. How are media in the provinces, once heavily subsidized by the government in the Soviet era, to survive now?

The economy is such that subscription rates cannot be increased without. hurting circulation. And the department stores, small merchants, and private banks don't exist to furnish local advertising - key to financing the media in the free world. Nor is there national advertising available as yet. The one asset is classified advertising.

Furthermore, most newspapers don't have their own printing facilities and have to depend upon government publishing houses - with normal bureaucratic red-tape at best, and deliberate foot-dragging at worst on such matters as doling out newsprint. The situation is such that, for example, the leading newspaper Kuznetskiy Rabochiy cannot afford to let its circulation rise much above 100,000.

At the end, I promised to obtain information on the revenue-side breakdown in American newspapers and send it to Novokuznetsk, which I later did.

Apparently on the basis of the Novokuznetsk seminar, I was invited to speak to another USAID-financed conference, this time in May in Vladivostok, Russia's famed warm-water port on the Pacific. The main seminar was for environmental writers from two coastal regions - Primorskye and Khabarovsk. (Siberia is vast; these two look tiny on the globe but cover an area larger than Washington, Oregon, and California combined.)

That seminar was a stow in itself, given Siberia's huge forests and wildlife biodiversity. But along with it, a seminar for editors similar to the one I conducted in Novokuznetsk was scheduled.

Here came another surprise from the floor that caught this editorial-side journalist off guard. How much taxes do American newspapers pay?

Later I learned the reason for the question. The editor's newspaper in the Khabarovsk territory was being taxed 90% of its income. Obviously, hostile officials had found more than one way to skin the cat.

I came away from these Siberian experiences realizing the difficulties publishers, editors, and writers face in trying to make a free press a reality in a Russia still hampered by its totalitarian past. And it made me appreciate anew the importance to American journalists of those people on the other side of the necessary wall of separation - the advertising department.

NCEW life member Clarke Thomas, a retired senior editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, was NCEW president in 1977.