Language skills at Moscow Times

[Matt Bivens]

Hello,

As a former editor of The Moscow Times, I was surprised to hear Frederick
White's assertion that Moscow Times people he dealt with had limited
Russian language abilities; and his comment that this made him wonder how
we covered the news.

>From 1998-2001, when I edited the paper, our reporting and editing staff
was about evenly split between native Russian speakers and Russian-fluent
expats. Occasionally we would hire a promising-seeming expat who was not
up to our standards for Russian fluency, but who did seem to be in the
process of rapidly learning it. But even then, my informal rule of thumb
was that in a newsroom of about two dozen journalists we could tolerate
maybe *one* such non-Russian-fluent reporter at any given time. Such a
reporter would often be assigned reporting tasks involving expats; perhaps
this is how Dr. White came to form his opinion. He may also have come to
know copy-editors and proof-readers -- we hired native English speakers
only for those positions, and required strong knowledge of Russia and
Russian only for top copy editors.

For my part, I'm fluent in Russian after 10 uninterrupted years living and
working there (1991-2001); but my wife, a Ukrainian from St. Petersburg,
still speaks better Russian than I do.

Regards,
Matt Bivens

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------