BDG: How Newspaper Closed through Pressure Develops Online

The news­pa­per had been one of the top places for crit­i­cal inde­pen­dent press; there worked many famous jour­nal­ists, includ­ing Svi­at­lana Kalink­i­na and Iry­na Khalip. The news­pa­per had to with­stand a wave of harass­ment. In May 2003, pub­li­ca­tion of the news­pa­per was sus­pend­ed for a month in rela­tion with a crim­i­nal case (insult­ing the pres­i­dent), ini­ti­at­ed by the Gen­er­al prosecutor’s office.  In March 2006, Beloruskaya Delo­vaya Gaze­ta was closed through the ban to pub­lish it in Belaru­sian print hous­es and dis­trib­ute through state monop­o­lists. The news­pa­per had the cir­cu­la­tion of 65 – 70 thou­sand copies a week.

In 2015, Ali­ak­san­dr Lukashen­ka was sur­prised to hear a ques­tion from a cor­re­spon­dent of BDG.

“I am sor­ry,” said the pres­i­dent. “Where is the BDG that we read avid­ly 20 years ago?” “Twen­ty three years ago,” put it cor­rect­ly the cor­re­spon­dent Ale­na Nest­siarovich. “The print ver­sion was closed, as we all know.” “Why? Again dic­ta­tor­ship?” The cor­re­spon­dent excused that she did not work there at that time. “Wasn’t I the rea­son for that it was closed?” asked the pres­i­dent. “Closed, well, closed,” said Ale­na. “Was I guilty?” “Nobody said you are guilty.” “I just put it clear because it had dis­ap­peared; now the press sec­re­tary has not brought it to me for a long time.  I always get BDG only in reviews – BDG online, and there is no news­pa­per. So, there is no news­pa­per?” “No news­pa­per, only online.”

BAJ tried to find out how the news­pa­per is liv­ing online, and the chief edi­tor of the web­site BDG.by Ale­na Nest­siarovich kind­ly agreed to answer the ques­tions.

“Now it is an infor­ma­tion­al and ana­lyt­i­cal resource rather than a news web­site. We decid­ed to pub­lish more valu­able arti­cles, so called long-reads, and make a stricter selec­tion of news, based on the inter­ests of busi­ness audi­ence. This is our under­stand­ing of con­ti­nu­ity, because BDG used to be famous for its qual­i­ty ana­lyt­i­cal texts. Con­cep­tu­al­ly, the nich­es is still free. In fact, we are doing now what Piotr Mart­sau want­ed to do with the web­site (the newspaper’s founder and chief edi­tor Piotr Mart­sau died in 2014). He said he want­ed to trans­form the web­site into an ana­lyt­i­cal media resource, based on mod­ern tech­nolo­gies and new oppor­tu­ni­ties. We start­ed to work over it, redesigned and changed the approach to con­tent selec­tion.

Whom the web­site belongs?

The web­site is sup­port­ed by Martsau’s friends, also his daugh­ter Lisave­ta agreed to take part. The edi­to­r­i­al office include both expe­ri­enced jour­nal­ists, who have worked for BDG for a long time, and young authors as well.  The web­site oper­ates under a legal enti­ty, the edi­to­r­i­al office is locat­ed in the same build­ing, how­ev­er, it occu­pies only a small room – it used to be a whole floor.

What are the newspaper’s plans? Are you going to do one more busi­ness affairs mass medi­um?

The web­site has oper­at­ed all the time since the paper ver­sion was closed, but with lim­it­ed resources and pos­si­bil­i­ties. Now we are try­ing to make it a payable project. This is what Piotr Mart­sau always want­ed to do, includ­ing the paper ver­sion times. We would like it to be a seri­ous expert and ana­lyt­i­cal resource aimed at busi­ness and polit­i­cal cir­cles in our coun­try.

We like a lot the projects like Probusіness.by or Marketіng.by – expert ori­ent­ed web­sites for busi­ness audi­ences. We think that Belarus now lacks media projects and plat­forms like that – they should be much more in num­ber.

We want to make a web­site cov­er­ing busi­ness issues based on ana­lyt­i­cal and prac­tice ori­ent­ed approach. I mean we are now talk­ing about the prob­lem deal­ing with busi­ness jour­nal­ism, espe­cial­ly invest­ment and finances jour­nal­ism.

We hope that in future, with par­tic­i­pa­tion of BDG, there will appear also edu­ca­tion­al projects in the sphere of mod­ern busi­ness jour­nal­ism. It would live up to expec­ta­tions of invest­ments and busi­nessper­sons from oth­er coun­tries who con­sid­er an oppor­tu­ni­ty to oper­ate in Belarus.

Besides, we are going to become an offline plat­form for direct dia­logue of busi­nessper­sons, offi­cials, rep­re­sen­ta­tives of dif­fer­ent civ­il orga­ni­za­tions. These will be expert meet­ings on spe­cif­ic issues requir­ing urgent solu­tions.

Last year, the news­pa­per Belorusy I Rynok split into two mass media. Thus, you have two new com­peti­tors, don’t you?

I read their arti­cles. They are inter­est­ing, use­ful and raise respect and inter­est. But our approach will be dif­fer­ent, more towards analy­sis and prac­tice. In all we think that ris­ing com­pet­i­tive­ness in the seg­ment of busi­ness media is a good trend. But, in our view, it is yet to come to Belarus, for now com­pe­ti­tion here is very small.

We are look­ing for authors active­ly, although, with the view to the set goals, our demands to jour­nal­ists are quite spe­cif­ic. We take only those jour­nal­ists t our team whom we trust. Piotr Mart­sau always stuck to the point that our jour­nal­ist should be not only a tal­ent­ed and high­ly qual­i­fied jour­nal­ist, but also a good per­son.

We think that with trust­ed per­sons, we will have inter­est­ing work. With them, we can not only become self-payable, but also to cre­ate a suc­cess­ful prof­itable project use­ful for the soci­ety.

On Feb­ru­ary 7 this year, BDG turned 24.

Pho­to by mediakritika.by