OTM Goes to Russia

Hi all! Welcome to On the Media’s Russia blog. Apparently, the many hours we at OTM spend together, here in the scenic foothills of the Brooklyn Bridge, aren’t enough. And so a few of us contrived an excuse to travel. Brooke and I will be arriving in Moscow on Monday morning (local time) for 12 days of reporting and carousing, but if I have my way it’ll be mostly reporting. OTM technical director Dylan Keefe will join us the following Saturday … to resuscitate my laptop, mix some interviews and pieces and lobby the Russian government for our release.

If you look over to your right – under the About This Blog section – you’ll see that one of our goals is transparency. So, why Russia and why now? Some of you may know that Brooke was an NPR correspondent in Moscow for three years, from 1992-1995. Boris Yeltsin was in his first term as president of the newborn Russian Federation, a period marked by both traumatic economic reform and vigorous free speech (if you haven’t already, listen to our April 27 segment Bear Down). To say that situation is now effectively reversed – that is, a stable economy with seven percent GDP growth and increasingly strangled, if not altogether suffocated, speech – would not be an overstatement.

Broadly speaking, we’re traveling to Moscow to report on the (ill) health of Russian media. And nowhere is media more anemic than on Russian television. But more about that soon.

Meanwhile, welcome again, and I hope that you’ll come here often and talk back.