Nikel for Your Thoughts

One day in late July, I was halfway through a morning workout at the gym, feeling guilty about all the editing I should be doing and the phone calls I should be making. My thighs burning from the churning of a ridiculously medieval torture machine, I flipped a page in the copy of Business Week I was reading.

Time stood still. Space tilted.

Before me was a full page advertisement for Norilsk Nickel. Aimed at the American stock trading crowd, it was a bright, sky-blue ad that touted – in that understated way typical of such ads – the company’s absolute dominance of its market sector.

The guilt dissipated. I was not working out, work was chasing me.

As it turned out, that afternoon, I was scheduled to do a first read-though of Eric Helque’s article on the closed city of Norilsk (page 38). It is not a very upbeat story, as Norilsk is vastly overpolluted, underfunded and bitterly cold most of the time. But it is a story worth telling. And that’s what really matters most, after all.

Eric’s article on Norilsk, in Northern Siberia, is just one of four stories in this issue that take us to four remote corners of Russia. Jessica Jacobson shows us an isolated village (and former Gulag colony) in Central Siberia in her article on Narym (page 48); Joshua Hartshorne takes us to the shores of beautiful Lake Baikal (page 22); and Laura Williams shows us what it is like to live with the storks of Western Russia (page 54).

Exploring in another dimension, Jennifer Cherkasov takes us inside the Russian orphanage system (page 30). And she knows what she is talking about. She and her husband have set up a non-profit to help Russian orphans build the skills they will need to survive in the wider world.

In fact, there are two common threads running through Jennifer, Joshua and Laura’s articles in this issue. First, they are all about individuals and private, grass roots organizations striving to make a difference in their communities, whether saving storks, the world’s deepest freshwater lake, or orphans. But, second, all three of these stories are written by people who are actively involved with the issues and organizations they are writing about.

“That poses some interesting journalistic ethics issues,” you say “Can people involved in an issue really offer an objective view of that issue?”

Well, no. They cannot. Nor do we expect them to. We are always alert for undue bias that any author may have, whether they are involved in an issue or not (we actually tend to find that those less involved have the greater bias). But then we never strive to tell “objective” stories. They don’t exist. Instead, we seek to tell balanced stories that are both unusual and interesting. And often those on “the inside” are the best ones to do that.

In any event, enjoy the issue and please share with us what you think of our articles, be it about their content, bias, photos, design or whatever strikes your fancy.

Meanwhile, I hope to see many of you at our Annual Festival in Amherst September 18!

Paul Richardson