«Our people know three things: how to run the state, play football and publish Nasha Niva»

From July 1, NN will become a month­ly news­pa­per. How will it influ­ence the web­page nn.by?

It will have only a pos­i­tive impact, as we will be able to allo­cate more edi­to­r­i­al and jour­nal­is­tic efforts to update the web­page. It has long oper­at­ed in a lit­tle autonomous regime. It means that it is in con­tin­u­al evo­lu­tion, there are often changes in for­mat. We devel­op fur­ther the mobile ver­sion, or some oth­er things, some­times not evi­dent for read­ers, but which would make the web­page more user-friend­ly.

Do you divide your team into those who work for the paper and those who work online?

No, we can­not afford such divide. Peo­ple imag­ine Nasha Niva as a gigan­tic enter­prise with 100 employ­ees. Our team is very small: two ten peo­ple in the best case. Plus our respect­ed non-staff authors, of course. So, we work in a kind of syn­er­gy. It means that jour­nal­ists and edi­tors work on both the paper and the web­page. The dif­fer­ence is only in the for­mat of the texts.

So, who leads the out­let today? Who hires peo­ple and deter­mines the edi­to­r­i­al pol­i­cy?

We do not have a strict ver­ti­cal, like in state-run struc­tures. Every­thing goes on very demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly. There are edi­to­r­i­al meet­ings, joint dis­cus­sions of some issues, includ­ing tech­ni­cal ques­tions. There are meet­ings of a nar­row­er team of employ­ees. But, any­one can come up with an idea, and it will be dis­cussed.

The paper ver­sion “will be aimed for peo­ple with a dif­fer­ent tem­po of infor­ma­tion con­sum­ing”. It looks like it will be aimed for old­er peo­ple. Do you have infor­ma­tion about your actu­al audi­ence?

Research of audi­ence of a paper ver­sion is quite a com­pli­cat­ed task in our sit­u­a­tion. The research costs expen­sive, and major con­clu­sions are made as a feed­back via mail­box, by phone. Indeed, read­ers of the paper ver­sion are old­er than those online. These are old­er peo­ple who have not learnt the use of the Inter­net. Basi­cal­ly, our switch from week­ly to month­ly for­mat is linked to the fact that such peo­ple start learn­ing it… And part of our audi­ence sub­scribe to the news­pa­per as a prin­ci­ple, so as to sup­port its pub­lish­ing, although they also read it online.

We intend to give some­thing exclu­sive in the month­ly out­let, which will appeal to read­ers regard­less of age and online engage­ment.

Nn.by is con­nect­ed dai­ly by 30–35 thou­sand IP-address­es, with 40 thou­sand in peak time. It makes around 7 mil­lion views a month, accord­ing to Akavi­ta and Google Ana­lyt­ics. Most vis­i­tors come from Belarus. The avail­able instru­ments of age mea­sure­ments show that 70 per cent of our online read­ers are peo­ple from 15 to 44 years old; near­ly half of them are with uni­ver­si­ty edu­ca­tion.

Nasha Niva works as clock every day, like an assem­bly line. This is work that, to our great joy, bears its fruit.

The first restored issue of Nasha Niva was pub­lished 25 years ago. Which peri­od from these 25 years has been the most favor­able for the news­pa­per, in your view?

I can­not assess all those 25 years, as I came to Nasha Niva some­what in 1999, being a young stu­dent. But since then, I could wit­ness there was no an easy time. Every time there were some trou­bles, inter­rup­tions, as well as achieve­ments. Togeth­er with the coun­try, we have been liv­ing through the dif­fi­cult times of build­ing up our inde­pen­dence and our press.

Some­times, NN is accused of being “yel­low”, so to say, the news­pa­per for intel­lec­tu­als has turned into a Belaru­sian-lan­guage tabloid. How do the edi­to­r­i­al office take such crit­i­cism?

I would be hap­py to have a tabloid in Belarus. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, there is no chance to talk about it now.

Our peo­ple know three things: how to gov­ern the coun­try, how to play foot­ball and how to pub­lish news­pa­per Nasha Niva…

And if we do not pub­lish Beigbed­er or Sartre – well, there are spe­cial­ized web­sites who deal with it per­fect­ly.

Such talks that Nasha Niva used to be elit­ist, and now it is not elit­ist, they stem from one mis­take: peo­ple mix up the elite and the Bohemia. They are dif­fer­ent notions.

How to sur­vive for a Belaru­sian out­let in today’s eco­nom­ic con­di­tions? Is the switch to paid-for online con­tent pos­si­ble, at least par­tial­ly?

We are devel­op­ing in this direc­tion. I think the paid-for dig­i­tal switch, at least par­tial, is inevitable. Still, in Belaru­sian real­i­ties it can lead to loss of audi­ence. Gen­er­al­ly, those who start pro­mot­ing paid-for con­tent will lose part of their read­ers who will turn to free resources.

But we are work­ing through this vari­ant, prob­a­bly, many Belaru­sian web­sites will end up with this solu­tion…

News­pa­per Novy Chas announced launch­ing a busi­ness sup­ple­ment with the sup­port of local busi­ness. In your view, is it pos­si­ble gen­er­al­ly to engage busi­ness struc­tures in sup­port of non-state socio-polit­i­cal out­lets?

 We used to face with the tac­it ban for busi­ness struc­tures. There were allu­sions, and from top offi­cials also, warn­ing busi­ness against spon­sor­ing non-state news­pa­pers. There were lists of mass media banned for dis­tri­b­u­tion in large trade net­works, and we faced with this, too. But, times change, now the BRSM (state-run youth union) catch­es up with the trend of vyshy­van­ka (folk embroi­dery has become pop­u­lar recent­ly), and ste­les in Min­sk stand with not red and green, but white, red and green flags.

A busi­ness­man should real­ize that inde­pen­dent out­lets work to strength­en Belaru­sian inde­pen­dence. And this is his root inter­est, because it is much more pleas­ant and sim­pler to do busi­ness in the Repub­lic of Belarus rather than in “Min­sk People’s Repub­lic”. And those who do not want to sup­port one’s own press – will feed the press of Dmit­ry Kise­ly­ov…

What have been the most suc­cess­ful edi­to­r­i­al projects of the recent years, as edi­tors’ choice? What top­ics bring the most views?

Before the inter­view, I looked through the rat­ing of the mate­ri­als for the year – top reads. These were arti­cles about elec­tions, Svi­at­lana Alex­ievich, blogs of Andrei Hor­vat, who moved to live in a vil­lage, the scan­dal of prepar­ing sol­diers in Belarus sup­port­ive of Russ­ian expan­sion, and sto­ries about top offi­cials’ prop­er­ty… Briefly, the burn­ing issues for the mod­ern soci­ety.  

I gen­er­al­ly think that the most suc­cess­ful project of recent years has been the web­site nn.by and every­thing con­nect­ed to it.