Interesting article but this is nothing new. Russian villages have been dying for centuries- life was always better and easier in the cities. Putting forward gypsies as examples of a "Russia left behind" is disingenuous at best- gypsies live in their own societies by their own rules all across Europe.
Frankly I'm a bit tired of all the negative coverage of Russia by the NYT, The Economist and other respected establishments. I can drive through the Appalachians or towns in the South or Detroit and describe an "America Left Behind"- but we all know that those places do not represent the USA as a whole.
Edit: Russia has problems everyone knows that, I would just like to see more balanced coverage- talk to the middle class that has grown in the cities, the startup people in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other cities, compare how things are today to how they were in the 90s.
Interesting comment but this is nothing new. Hacker News threads have been suffering from "Eternal September" for years — opinions were always better and more interesting in the old days. Putting down original reporting as an example of "seen it all before" is disingenuous at best — according to the unwritten rules, one never scores points with "this is nothing new"; it's practically expected.
Frankly I'm a bit tired of all the negative comments about the NYT, The Economist and other respected establishments by simple reflex. I can scroll through comment threads or posts in the archives and describe an HN where "middlebrow dismissals" rule the roost — but we all know that those do not (or should not) represent Hacker News as a whole.
Edit: HN top comments have problems everyone knows that, I would just like to see more relevant thought coming out on top. Talk about the specific technology and techniques being used, a response to the article that demonstrates you actually read it, or compare these "new news" approaches to attempts that were made in the '00s.
>>Frankly I'm a bit tired of all the negative comments about the NYT, The Economist and other respected establishments by simple reflex. I can scroll through comment threads or posts in the archives and describe an HN where "middlebrow dismissals"
I think that this comment thread has become a good example of a typical hacker news discussion right now. The top comments don't add anything to the discussion and the vast majority of the rest are entirely political and repeat the same thing while being totally devoid of any facts or analysis. I could (and would have if I knew nothing about the topic) learn more by searching for information about the quality of life in the rural russian countryside than by reading this thread.
I find it fascinating that criticizing something for being a middlebrow dismissal is itself a necessarily a middlebrow dismissal: you're saying that his comment is okayish, but just not good enough. A bit hypocritical.
I grew up in Appalachia, and have spent a lot of time there.
I'd love to have you show me where there are towns without electricity, ambulance access, running water, easily accessible paved roads, hospitals within easy driving distance, broadband access, etc.
Even the smallest of towns I can name in Appalachia, have such things.
In fact, I grew up in an exceptionally poor part of Appalachia, with 15% to 20% unemployment at a time when the nation had 5% unemployment. Technically I grew up quite poor, and we had all the modern conveniences everybody else in America took for granted in the 1970s or 1980s.
Incomes have doubled since then, and are roughly three times that of the average wage in Russia, much less the average wage in the dilapidated Russia (probably 8 to 10 times higher than that).
I don't think you've actually spent much time in Appalachia. It's not a bustling and booming metro, obviously, but it's not even remotely comparable to what this article describes in Russia.
Russia has a GDP per capita of about a fourth of the US or other Western countries but it also has a very large inequality among regions and rural/urban areas. So the difference between rural GDP per capita in the US and Russia is something like 5-6. So when people in this thread are screaming how this is all propaganda and the rural areas of Russia are comparable to any area of the US they are claiming things that can't possibly be true.
It can be true, but Russia also has the largest land area in the world, and a population less than half that of the US. Fixing it is not a challenge I would take on lightly.
>Frankly I'm a bit tired of all the negative coverage of Russia by the NYT, The Economist and other respected establishments. I can drive through the Appalachians or towns in the South or Detroit and describe an "America Left Behind"- but we all know that those places do not represent the USA as a whole.
But... This is not about a cherry-picked stagnant area, this is about a main highway between Russia's two largest cities. It seems to be woefully neglected, while facilities used by Putin are done up to @#$%-the-expense standard. This is about the leadership of the country gone morally astray, and not caring about who sees it.
> Russia has problems everyone knows that, ...
Oh well, that's allright then. No point actually doing something.
Ever here the Bob Dylan song The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll? It's about a 1963 incident when a white Maryland farmer named William Zantzinger got drunk and started harassing a middle-aged black barmaid and hitting her with a cane. She collapsed and died and he got a six month prison term. In the early 90s Zantzinger went to jail again - this time for charging rent on shacks that were actually owned by the local government. These shacks didn't have running water and they were located 30 miles down the road from Washington, D.C.
Obviously the United States is not Russia and our leaders aren't kleptocrats. But they have been willing to ignore abject poverty for generations. I suspect that the dismissive, contemptuous attitude that many middle and upper class Americans have towards, say, the inner cities, would not be unfamiliar in Moscow or St. Petersburg.
'Willing to ignore abject poverty' was a part of conservative ideology which states that people must be directly responsible before God, not government, and government is not in place to support the people. This was the better part of conservative ideology as i see you, and times when it was dominant on U.S. political landscape were the best times in U.S. history.
> this is about a main highway between Russia's two largest cities
Go ahead and drive around in Brooklyn or NYC, the roads are much worse compared to Russian highway or Moscow streets, also it's not like in US where the most goods travel by highways, in Russia goods travel by trains, so there is not as much need in road highway compared to US.
Also I have no idea what does the gypsy wedding has to do with Russia? Gypsies have the same wedding rules everywhere they live..
Most goods in the US travel by train. Even more so than Europe. It's the main reason why passenger rail in the US is shit. Rail companies make more per mile transporting freight than they do passengers so freight gets priority.
I understand.
Africa(-Americans) & Oakland can almost never catch a break either... trying to explain the imbalance is an uphill battle. If you only got your world-view from western-TV, you'd think America is paradise with perfect people, aside from blacks & mexicans. Everyone outside of it are savages not worthy of respect or consideration; perhaps a bit of pity though...
> If you only got your world-view from western-TV, you'd think America is paradise with perfect people, aside from blacks & mexicans.
That's not the view of the US I get from Spanish news: there's a /lot/ of coverage of gun crime, obesity, etc. This is "balanced" by the amount of US TV shows that are imported, of course.
The US gets a lot of bad press here. Obesity, corruption, disfunctional government, inequality, surveillance, religion, puritanism, gay hate, gun violence etc are much more in the focus in the news about the US than the positive sides of the US are.
Most Norwegians thinks of the US as this slightly weird, ignorant country that believes it's still the best at everything and doesn't bother with the rest of the world.
> Most Norwegians thinks of the US as this slightly weird, ignorant country that believes it's still the best at everything and doesn't bother with the rest of the world.
Most Canadians think the same. Visiting the US several times, having family that lives there and listening to Bloomberg radio every morning and afternoon during my commute reinforces that opinion...
While I have no doubt the US has some benefits (high pay in certain industries), overall it seems like a strange, ignorant, backwards place. The fact that the Republicans have shut down the government to block health care (which is pretty much universally regarded as a good thing) makes it seem even more backwards (especially when watching a protest on TV in which someone was waving a confederate flag in front of the White House...).
Of course 'health care' is a good thing, that's a fairly meaningless platitude. This particular implementation being good or bad has yet to be determined. I personally don't find the ACA to be a 'good' system, but I wish they would just shut up and let it succeed or fail in production.
Also, a large part of why you have cheap healthcare and access to lots of drugs because we paid the cost to research and make them. With the ACA, a lot of that (potentially) goes away, though from the look of the early prices it seems the cost of healthcare has gone up for most, and near free for some, meaning the healthcare industry still gets massive profits. I'm wondering if it was good for the rest of the world to have our healthcare system be so expensive.
Hopefully not, I'm pretty tired of being terrified of becoming sick enough to need medical care.
> Also, a large part of why you have cheap healthcare and access to lots of drugs because we paid the cost to research and make them.
Not entirely sure about that. It seems like many (most?) of the 'important' drugs worldwide were either developed by educational institutions or laboratories (some belonging to corporations) from a wide variety of countries, not just the US.
The only reason it is currently profitable to make drugs at all (and the reason we've seen research in so many) is that US consumers will buy them at market rate with IP protection, i.e., too expensive for most places. If we didn't exist as that profit center, many would not have been put through clinical trials and brought to market.
I'm scared to get into healthcare debate, but I will say that while I understand the importance of clinical trials, if there wasn't any.... then the drugs would just be brought to market regardless even if it means people die. In Nigeria; even just in ChinaTown San Francisco, you can get some questionable origins drugs. But indeed, all bets are off when you take that stuff. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, maybe DOOM! Not saying this is a good thing, but the drug market would continue without USA, IMHO.
It does not look like Russia tries really hard to do something positive recently. There are many smart and interesting people in Russia or from Russia (I speak about culture and science) but they are only small part of Russia (I don't even speak about culture and science people who work for evil side). Putin, FSB and oligarchs is Russia.
IMHO Western media could be even more negative but that's most probably because I'm from one of Baltic states and we really have got (and still are getting) a lot of injustice from Russia.
> a main highway between Russia's two largest cities
It is not.
Moscow and St. Petersburg are 900 km apart and they never had a highway between them. Instead it's a patchwork of provincial roads most of the way. He could've chosen any city 900 km away from Moscow and his cherry-picked story would've stayed absolutely the same.
More balanced coverage shall include epidemic heroin usage, mass alcoholism and total degeneration and population decline, criminalization and corruption, ruined and sold out industry and social system at the very least.
As for Detroit, come on, we have thousands cites like that, actually, all except Moscow, Spb and Novosib.)
> As for Detroit, come on, we have thousands cites like that, actually, all except Moscow, Spb and Novosib.
Obviously you know nothing about Russia if you say that...I can list you hundreds of cities where life is much better than many US cities and city areas...I am myself from a city called Pyatigorsk (Stavropol Region) and we have a much better roads, much less garbage on the streets and a lot less crime compared to NY (especially Brooklyn and parts of Queens and NYC which to me looks like a sewer)
NYC has unprecedentedly low crime for its density and size [1]. There might be places in the US that allow you to draw parallels with Russia, but NYC is a pretty awful example.
Claims even lower rates for most of those crimes stats for NYC. From what I can find, New York has vastly lower crime rates on most things except homicides.
I was following a common transnational methodology violent crime by focusing on homicide. It turns out that definitions and reporting of other violent crimes is wildly different in different jurisdictions. For example, if you were a young black male New Yorker who had just been mugged, you would be wise to keep it to yourself considering the policy of the authorities toward people who look like you. There isn't much you can do to avoid coming to the attention of authorities if you're murdered, though.
Vehicle theft is pretty reliable, but motorcars per person and storage technique can vary.
I have done some work on looking through crime rates before. For example, Dublin and Stuttgart have the same crimes per year per thousand people, but, although Dublin is mostly nice, it has its sketchy areas, and you couldn't pay to get mugged in Stuttgart.
Comparing murders is like comparing the danger of drugs by comparing death rates (big report in the UK a couple of years ago); the long term effect on society of a heroin addict, stealing, disease, impact on family, etc., is so much different than a single healthy kid suddenly dying of a disco biscuit on a Saturday night.
With stop and frisk out the door along with other proactive policing strategies on the side lines now it will be very interesting to see if that crime rate stays low.
Isn't ethnic crime endemic to Pyatigorsk? What I've heard about your city makes me not want to go there. Is it not the dumpster bin for Chechnya and Dagestan?
"They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty".
Comparing the crime rate of a city with 130 000 inhabitants with New York is a bit unfair : ) Compare it with a town of similar size, and put some actual statistics upfront
Unfortunately this is the sad truth about Russia, everybody who thinks otherwise hasn't been to these places or Russia at all.
It's really hard to think of anything positive, except for the unbelievable ability of (some) Russians to daily cope with this reality and stay sane and positive.
I lived with a Russian family a few years ago for a month in one of the ten largest cities in Russia. As an American, I found many aspects of their society to be rather hostile, but I found at least one region to be a beautiful area of the country with interesting, warm, and dare I say _happy_ people. I think many of us can trivially find reasons that the state of Russia is less than ideal, but the way you describe it is a bit off the mark.
The country is incredibly beautiful and the Russian people incredibly resourceful considering the living conditions. Another trait of Russians is the importance of status and pride which results that we tend to keep face even though the conditions we live in aren't reflective of the lifestyle we try to portray. I was born in Russia and have lived there for a large portion of my life. While my direct family was relatively well off we've had our fair share of misery in the family. To get back on point, whenever we had visitors my parents would prepare the best meals even though there was a scarcity of food, but being hospitable to guests was more important than the possibility of not having food for the rest of the week. My point is that visiting Russia can be a distorted experience compared to actually 'living' there.
Yes all those problems exist, but compare the situation today to the mid-90s and I would argue that people as a whole are better today than back then- we see very little of that kind of coverage.
If we assume that media is subservient in large to the state (one can certainly insert a joke about Russia here, but I actually mean "Western" media), in accordance to Chomsky's model, this would not be surprising.
It seems with Snowden's leaks. Every week or so there is new punch thrown into America's eye. Snowden just got some kind of award. He got some time in limelight. American government is shut down. Common, how long till we hear about how horrible some other political rivals are "Russia's poverty problem" sure makes me feel a little better about NSA spying and idiots in Congress fucking around with the budget. I wouldn't mind maybe a few more "China is a terrible place" stories too for completeness.
It's ironic that your implication is that the media should focus entirely on US problems to the exclusion of any other country's problems - and you think this will be unbiased
What is ironic is the coincidence of "look at shitty Russia with 14 year old brides" when a) US government is shutdown b) Snowden documents keep revealing NSA's dirt form under the carpet.
Only with a judge's approval -- which I doubt would be forthcoming -- particularly if the putative groom sat glumly through the hearing playing video games.
The internet is pretty much ruined in many ways now. Apart from the snooping, public opinion has become an open battlefield. Comments for any political article on any popular site are now full to the brim with obvious shills of all stripes.
we still have wikipedia, that alone justifies the cost of the internet. as a data scientist, I am particularly thankful for wikipedia and it's brethren like freebase as a real, up to date corpus and to some extend ontology.
It was a weird contrast. The photographs were beautiful. But the tone of the article was definitely biased against something about the Russian government's involvement in the economies of the places that were visited.
When I read the negative comments, I personally thought of many places I've been in the US (where I'm from) which reminded me of what I was reading. The comments about the Russian villages both seemed like they could be true and like they were a little hypocritical.
Well, this is the NYT, so I wouldn't expect much of that, or from any major news publication that is heavily influenced by the government of where it calls home. I think one can reasonably get balanced coverage by sourcing from different places with the biases of the host nation in mind.
That's the thing, I'm a subscriber to the NYT and I like a lot of their coverage, especially their in depth pieces and interesting multimedia heavy articles like this one.
But if they're providing me biased info about a topic I know a lot about, how can I trust them on the topics I know little about?
But if they're providing me biased info about a topic I know a lot about, how can I trust them on the topics I know little about?
That's exactly the feeling I have about all non-specialist media. All of it, even NYT, BBC, The Economist, and NPR. I know a lot about a few things, and they never can get the details right, or often even the main points right.
I still consume the stuff - for entertainment, I guess. It's good to keep in mind that it's at best an approximation of the facts.
Well personally, I wouldn't inherently trust any source by itself, on any topic, to make me not want to look up more information (no matter how they display it). I think for every type of publication (major, minor, etc) I always think about who finances them, where they're hosted, who their audience is, and what emotions they are trying to evoke in that audience by the language/graphics they use (how much they try shape the perceptions of the reader).
But the article does talk about cities. In fact, one part specifically targets cities 'as a vacuum' that sucks the life and quality of life from rural regions.
If I can hazard to interpret what you mean - I think you are saying for NYT to compare the net benefit (how people in cities are better off).
However, I'd call in to question whether we should focus on the net benefit vs. the very fact that Russia has fundamentally discarded its rural regions and the like.
I've middle class friends living in small cities in Russia and they all tell me that, despite Russia not being the "2nd greatest country" anymore, life is much better. Some of the older people still think the Soviet era was awesome and miss it. But most of the newer people (<30yo) think everything is much much better.
I think this article went to some extreme places and made it look like Russia outside Moscow/StPtbg is just dying. Disingenuous at least.
I have, and I grew up downwind from it. Parts of it are nice (e.g. Boone and Asheville where I grew up in NC), but off the beaten track are villages that look like they haven't progressed in the last hundred years. I've been to the rural parts of Pakistan too and it's frankly surprising how similar parts of Appalachia can be to it.
This article is outrageous propaganda, I knew that the US government had issues with the Russian government, but it saddens me to see that most posters here have nothing but hatred towards Russia.
Just the fact that the NYT picked life in a gypsy settlement (no water, no electricity, child weddings) to generalize about the life in Russia makes it obvious to me that the journalists had no other intentions but to villify the Russians.
What they did not tell you is that gypsy settlements look the same in France, Germany and other industrialized countries. (Yes - children not going to school, no electricity, no water, weddings of 13 year olds and so on)
Are any of the facts mentioned false? Is the author implying that all of Russia is like this?
As a journalist I find it very surprising when people react to specific articles (often "negative" to their own beliefs) by imagining a grand conspiracy.
There are numerous realities in every country and every company. A skilled journalist can tell any one of those in an interesting manner. But that doesn't imply there aren't other stories.
For instance, the USA is currently
(a) leading the "software disruption" war
(b) shut down and about to default because of partisan politics
(c) spying indiscriminately on almost everyone in the world
(d) incarcerating the largest proportion of its citizens
(e) meddling in the affairs of numerous countries
(f) reshoring manufacturing that had been outsourced
(g) saddled with a fighter jet program that is outrageously expensive and possibly average
(h) trying to reform one of the most convoluted & corrupt healthcare systems in the world
Is the author implying that all of Russia is like this?
I did find that to be the implication, yes. e.g. At the edges of Russia’s two great cities, another Russia begins. - this implies that only the two largest cities in Russia are first world, and another decaying world begins beyond the pale. Perhaps that's an accurate description, but given the treatment of stories like the NSA surveillance in the NYT (severely lacking, and often just parroting the government line without question), Iraq wars (again, severely lacking), and the lack of similar treatments of similar US problems with decaying infrastructure, I'm inclined to think that there are plenty of other stories about Russia to be told which don't paint it as a third world country in decline, and that this is a somewhat biased, limited portrait. I cancelled my subscription recently because of the limited coverage of world events - it's just too one-sided, but perhaps that's inevitable when you're reporting from within a superpower.
Which of these are reality? Which are propaganda?
Well, quite. We rely on journalists to sift through information and give us a balanced story based on their perception of the truth. That means we need journalists to step outside the view of the world that their country, culture and government gives them and try to see it afresh, without preconceptions. So we have to trust them to some extent, and when that trust is abused to present things through a distorted prism, it is disheartening.
Still, this is quality journalism (particularly the mix of map/graphics/text), and perhaps to say it is propaganda is a bit harsh, I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I do find the lack of balance and parochial worldview of the NYT and US press disturbing at times. The temptation is to see the world through a US prism without taking into account other viewpoints. Sometimes the NYT get it right though - for example this article on healthcare comparing systems around the world:
I'm a neutral party, neither American nor Russian. To me it was very clearly a very well produced and written story about life along a 12-hour train ride between two cities. I concede that my views might have been different had I been Russian.
It is the second part of your comment that I disagree with more strongly.
> We rely on journalists to sift through information and give us a balanced story based on their perception of the truth. That means we need journalists to step outside the view of the world that their country, culture and government gives them and try to see it afresh, without preconceptions.
I'm afraid this is a dated and soon to be extinct definition of journalism. Instead of an artificially inserted "balance" (which too is subjective), its better to look for truth, transparency & engaging storytelling. As a reader I'd prefer Glenn Greenwald's biased but fierce, well-researched & take-no-prisoners style stories than, say, the BBC's articles. As readers we have our own biases, and so do journalists (and their publications).
> I do find the lack of balance and parochial worldview of the NYT and US press disturbing at times. The temptation is to see the world through a US prism without taking into account other viewpoints.
This one is easy. The NYT's key market is the USA. Most of its journalists are from the US. Naturally, their writing will tend to have that bias. As readers we just need to be aware of that and calibrate their versions of the truth accordingly.
"balance" (which too is subjective), its better to look for truth, transparency & engaging storytelling.
That's what I mean by balance, we probably substantially agree there, but perhaps the misuse of the word 'balance' in US media to mean presentation of false dichotomies has distorted the term in this context. I don't think allowing opinions means you disclaim all responsibility to objectivity. Just because you can't achieve objectivity doesn't mean you shouldn't strive for it. A search for truth involves striving to rise above parochial and partial concerns, particularly in reporting on wars or nations in conflict.
Naturally, their writing will tend to have that bias.
As editors and journalists, they should strive to rise above it, that's their job, not the readers'. That's not to say they shouldn't have an opinion, but that it should be informed, clearly stated and not an attempt to distort the truth as they see it or insert their own narrative. Personally I think it's time for a new global journalism, without attempts to filter the truth and pick a side amongst often unpalatable narratives presented by national governments.
Well, life outside Russia's big cities really is completely different than the Moscow megapolis, I've seen that and the article illustrates that point quite well.
And read the article - it's not anti-Russian in any way, it simply shows how economic inequality looks like.
> We rely on journalists to sift through information and give us a balanced story based on their perception of the truth.
We rely on journalists to sift through information and give us the truth, period. I don't want a balanced story, and such 'balance' tends to be struck between reality and what appears to be lunacy.
Actually, I think anyone who reads a single article and takes it for truth is a fool. If something peaks your interest then you need to research more, there are different truths based on your perspective (exactly as you have pointed out).
Newspapers are too much of a propaganda machine, with the ease of the internet research is only a click away and you can make up your own mind.
I don't want a balanced story, and such 'balance' tends to be struck between reality and what appears to be lunacy.
Apologies, I shouldn't have used the word 'balanced' as apparently it has been debased so much by its use in a Fox News slogan that the original meaning has been lost.
I didn't mean a sort of false balance which parrots two opposing sides of a political debate, no matter how insane both sides are, I meant the sort of balanced reporting which tries to verify facts, reports not just what was said but what was done, reports and verifies the claims of all parties involved in a dispute, and most importantly tries to see past and acknowledge the very real bias and blind spots of journalists themselves.
Truth is not objective when you tell a story. Are drug users destroying themself, or are they live there live to the fullest. This is a question of values, not truth.
> given the treatment of stories like the NSA surveillance in the NYT (severely lacking, and often just parroting the government line without question), Iraq wars (again, severely lacking)
We must be reading different versions of the NYT, as they've been severely critical of the US government in both situations.
author took only dirty facts, that's the propaganda.
I'm russian and I admit it's a wild country. But Gypsy.. calm down, they never were even called russians.
This article is barely about Russia at all. It's mainly about wealth! privilege! inequality!, which is a perennial favorite topic of the NYT.
You aren't expected to read this and thing "omfg, Russia is so bad". No one in the US is thinking this - all they are thinking is "omfg, if inequality keeps growing, the US will be like this". This is of course nonsense for various reasons (we don't have gypsies and therefore the bottom 50% will not adopt gypsy cultural indicators, and our inequality seems to be merely differing rates of positive growth).
Note that many of the Americans on this thread are posting about Detroit, Appalachia and even Oakland (!?!?).
You aren't expected to read this and thing "omfg, Russia is so bad".
I think that's exactly what you're supposed to think, and you'd be quite justified in coming away with that impression when the strapline is 'A journey through a heartland on the slow road to ruin.' It's a beautifully executed and written article with a slanted premise. Reminds me of Newsweek or Time with better graphics/writers to be frank.
Imagine this as an NYT article about the US (which has examples of much of the same poverty, inequality and disillusion) - there's no way it would be published in this paper, without sympathetic asides/articles about other areas of the US which are developing well. The slant here is that the entire Russian nation is decaying and on a road to ruin.
I admire the quality of the writing in the NYT (it beats any other english language paper I'm aware of), but often the editorial slant is far too parochial for a truly global newspaper, and far too close to the official US government line on important topics (like surveillance or budgets for example) where the NYT should be standing up to government, not relaying its pronouncements without question.
Imagine this as an NYT article about the US...there's no way it would be published in this paper, without sympathetic asides/articles about other areas of the US which are developing well
A quick ddg search for "site:nytimes.com detroit" shows this to be incorrect:
Nor was this presented about the entirety of Russia. The NYT has featured the infrastructure and inequality problems in America dozens of times. If you actually read the paper it's a theme that appears almost daily (healthcare is a big part of this). Here's a very recent example that I remember reading titled "Inequality in America: The Data Is Sobering":
Nor was this presented about the entirety of Russia.
I disagree there, the strapline talks of a heartland in decline, and the article talks of the rest of Russia as separate from the two major cities. Not sure I would have called this propaganda myself but it does read to me as a portrait of the entire country and system in decline, not a single journey, partly because of the framing and strap.
If you actually read the paper
I've read it extensively for years thanks as I used to be a subscriber; the snark is not helpful.
Here's a very recent example that I remember reading titled "Inequality in America: The Data Is Sobering"
I agree the NYT features some great writing and some great journalism (including the article you cite). I'm not trying to say they never criticise the US, but that they haven't produced splashy front-page spreads about the decline of the once great nation of America which compare to this article - given the recent hostilities between Russia and the US (Georgia, Syria, Snowden), they should be doubly careful about cheering on the side of a very partial US administration or denigrating Russia as a country. To my mind, they haven't challenged that administration sufficiently on drones, surveillance, budget, wars, Guantanamo bay, etc. They have published critical articles but have also published many apologias for the gov. position, and on Snowden for example their coverage has been more notable by its absence from the front page than by its presence. I remember when the story broke the largest story on their home page for the day was a story about high prices in Disney theme parks.
Still, they compare well to almost every other newspaper, most of them have their blind spots, and there are some real high points in their coverage IMHO, like The drone that killed my grandson, though that was an op-ed rather than one of their writers.
But then again most of the US is not like Detroit. There are many pockets of disenfranchisement throughout the country, but by and large the infrastructure and social institutions are in decent shape considering their scale. In contrast, much of Russia is dilapidated.
> (we don't have gypsies and therefore the bottom 50% will not adopt gypsy cultural indicators,
Am I misreading this or are you throwing the "gypsies are like this because of culture making them lazy" argument?
> and our inequality seems to be merely differing rates of positive growth)
Then why has median purchasing power gone down for the past fifteen years? It doesn't matter if the dollar value goes up when prices go up faster.
Am I misreading this or are you throwing the "gypsies are like this because of culture making them lazy" argument?
I'm more referring to child marriage than anything else.
Then why has median purchasing power gone down for the past fifteen years?
This begs the question - if purchasing power went down over the past 15 years, people should be purchasing fewer goods and services than in 1998. What goods/services do you believe people have less of now than they did in 1998?
Upper education, health care, healthy food? It is easy to ignore if you are not at the bottom, but all of these things are less available to a growing number of people.
Higher education is incorrect. I'd love to cite the census, but the servers are shut down as part of the Washington Monument strategy. So here are news reports instead:
Food is a harder thing to pin down. There is no doubt that americans of most any income level have access to sufficient calories, but trying to purchase healthy fresh fruits and vegetables takes up a significant portion of my monthly income (family of 5, a long distance from the bottom income levels), but I could buy huge quantities of bread and rice for much less :-)
You derive such a different lesson than I do from the same facts.
You're mentioning areas in the economy that have had drastic price increases that far outpace inflation. Coincidentally, these are all areas that have seen heavy state and federal government involvement over the last 40 years.
Even the food disaster is easily attributed to the government's horrible misunderstanding of diet in the 70's and drive to create cheap low-fat (but high fcs) products.
While you see lessons of inequality, I see lessons of the danger of government interference in the economy and our daily lives.
I'm amazed you believe that's what Americans will be reading into this article - it's not what I read. FWIW, I grew up in Appalachia and it ain't nothing like the Russia the article discussed - plenty of food for the most part, water, decent roads.
drive by comment: I don't know what you mean to imply by Oakland (!?!?), but... I took the amtrak south from Oakland, and I was shocked by the level of poverty thats visible from the train.
the problem is that living near the rail line* has been traditionally one of the least desirable places to live. I'm not hand-waving away the poverty or even it's ratios but you will see lots of poverty around a rail line.
*there's a long, long history here going way, way back in the US. Living near a light rail or a commuter station is completely different than living near a freight rail/mixed use rail
> What they did not tell you is that gypsy settlements look the same in France, Germany and other industrialized countries
Exactly. I'm Romanian and when I saw the photo with the young gypsy couple I said to myself: "Hey! These people look exactly like the gipsies I used to grow up with". At least I learned that there are gipsies in Russia, also.
I'm Russian too but I see there only dirty facts. I live in Saint Petersburg now, but I lived 27 years in 2 another cities, small towns. One if them is rich, without gipsies, full of green woods and with clean streets. So yes, Russia is not a best country, but this article is a pure propaganda. I like story "Vasily" on Vimeo - there less propaganda and more true.
Yes, this article is a disgrace. Putin has built a relatively successful and stable economy, which worst of all for the NYT is both pursuing an independent path and is rich in natural resources. If they weren't able to defend themselves Russia would fulfil all 3 of Chomskys criteria for Western Intervention, however they have a capable defence and cannot be "Iraq'd" or "Libya'd", so instead of missiles they have to settle for black propaganda instead.
LOL @ 'relatively successful and stable economy'. Their economy is entirely based on selling off natural resources (sell 5%, steal 95% for yourself). When those resources run out, entire country will be bankrupt.
Source: I'm from Russia and know what I'm talking about.
No. You can not compare a period after privatesation and other social, political and economic changes directly with now. The fact is that there was less political elitism and state power in russia but it increased a lot.
If you have small political elite you will never have stable growth. You might not get stable growth under a more broader politcal system (socialist india was relativly democratic) but much more likly.
See these two books, one from a economist perspective, on from a politcal sienctist perspecitve (both considered top people in the field):
- Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
- Dictator's Handbook
The both tell the same story with diffrent words, or maybe one would better say diffrent but overlapping parts of the same story.
This is fine but kind of getting away from my main point, which is that the NYT is denigrating Russia, not because of it's economic and social problems which are real, but because it is an independent country that is rich in natural resources, therefore a target for the West. But it is too powerful to be threatened militarily, hence articles like this about its problems instead.
Oh my god, conspiracy theories abound on HN now. :-(
Living in Western Europe, life is busy. I spend all my time implementing conspiracies against Russia, Pakistan, etc, etc...
In fact against all countries which are controlled by authoritarian b-ds that use West as an external enemy to keep people from complaining about how much they steal. Weird coincidence.
It doesn't make it more successful or stable. Putin simply continued Yeltsin changes: more power to the government, suppress the opposition, consolidate the power in few hands. He haven't done anything new, except creating a new image of an iron man that Russia loves (Like Stalin, translated from Russian - steel).
I am a citizen of a country near Russia and have a rather good knowledge about Russia internal politics and economics.
Black propaganda, you say? That's adorable.
Not so stable now given the lack of economy growth and perspective of cuts amidst growing oil prices and diving into recession. Russian economy outlook is less than bright for a few years now.
I agree this is propaganda, and it is dangerous. Despite the fact that bad roads and decaying villages are very real in Russia, Russia has tremendous oil and gas wealth, and the medium and long-term economic trends for Russia are upward.
Russia has many symptoms of an industrial nation turning into a resource-extraction oligopoly, but it would be a very risky mistake to think Russia headed toward collapse. Russia may have many problems, but it will be a strong and rich nation. Allowing that fact to surprise us will lead to bad policy decisions.
As a Russian i know this is all true and much more than that.
They never 'picked' gypsy settlement, it was one of the many places they visited. It was you DominikR who 'picked' the gypsy part out of the long article.
Yes of course Roma are special. And they are nearly like that everywhere (possibly in places where they are living more permanently, like Romania, they are better off than in others, but more or less the same). This is part of Russian and European life. Native Americans are living about like that in the USA and nobody is trying to conceal that fact, or present things in a way that all of the USA is like that, neither does this article try to present all Russian to be gypsies and marry at 13.
But looking at the article overally yes, this is how Russia actually lives. And, further away from large railways (railways, not highways, are the bloodlines of the economy in Russia, like in XIX century America) - and the places visited are closest to most important railway - things are much, much worse. In many places you will need AWD vehicle to move around, and even that possible only in dry summer, and find little more than rotten huts and peasants who look like zombies, and illiterate children who drink at the age of 10. These places were too scary to travel too (you can be killed just for wearing suit and tie and not looking like zombie), but THAT is also how about 20-30% of Russian live.
'The _____ left behind' is a phrase with a well established meaning.
The poor parts of Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, as are well as parts of the Ozarks are 'The America Left Behind'. Recently they have been seized upon by the artistic elite and made hip by music like Mumford and Sons and movies like The Hunger Games.
The phrase means a subgroup that is not enjoying the prosperity that the rest of the group enjoys. To use the phrase, the author must believe the opposite of what you read.
Makes things sound desolate and hopeless. But the residents of provincial cities like Kazan would tell a different story pointing to new subway lines, a new airport terminal, new rapid transit from the airport to the city center, new highways, new apartment buildings, etc.
A foreigner will say, but St. Petersburg is an important port city. How could the main road link between the port and the capital be in such a sorry state? The answer lies in the Russian way of doing things. Russia has an excellent train network, and goods mainly travel from the port to the capital by train. Roads serve those areas which are not important enough to have trains, so when you take a road trip in Russia, you are choosing to travel off the beaten track in the back of beyond. Charming and full of natural beauty, but also full of poverty just the same as you would see on an indian reserve in the USA. Only the natives live in such places in Russia, clinging to the traditional way of life of their ancestors. You look at these people and see white faces like those of you and your neighbors and you are confused because you are used to seeing brown faces on the aboriginals. But in Russia, the white faces ARE the aboriginals, living in this land since before the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago when all of Europe was under a thick sheet of ice.
Russia is a very big place, and the government cannot afford to spend its money everywhere and anywhere. In order to make Kazan and Sochi into modern cities that are productive and desirable places to live, they have to neglect some other places. In a vast territory that means that most of the villages are neglected. But there are lots of people who like it that way because they want to live in the forest, breathe fresh air, collect mushrooms and berries, etc. It is their traditional way of life since time immemorial.
In some ways the Greece culture and politics can be compared to Russia's. In most cases they cannot however.
What's interesting about the Olympics example is that the amount is 3 times more than the previous Olympics. And I can assure you that that is not because everything is 3 times more expensive. The majority of this funding ended up in the pockets of corrupt politicians and their business friends, not reinvested in things like infrastructure, providing jobs and uplifting the economy as a whole. This is exactly where the article is spot on and why one of the most important roads in Russia is still an embarrassment of civil engineering.
I don't know about the costs involved and if three times the previous costs is justified, but that the corrupt politicians and their business friends are feasting on government projects is not a rarity either. Just to leave you an example:
How much time does it take for NYT to make these interactive stories? (pure technology not data collection or field journalism)
If it's not significant then this is certainly future of journalism.
[EDIT]: Looking at couple of interactive stories in recent past (Snow Fall and New Silk Road) looks like this is something they want to repeat again and again. Do you think they've developed some sort of framework (like Django/Rails) ?
I do not work for the NYT. I did, once upon a time, work for a news organization that was considered to be innovative with respect to using technology to further the presentation of journalism.
One of the things I worked on was a generic framework for "composite" stories -- that is, a collection of not just text and photos, but integrated presentations of text, audio/video, photos and data visualizations, with customizable templating to lay it all out and organize for the web.
Time and link rot have not been kind to the things that were done with that. For example, the data bits of this:
no longer function, and it certainly shows its age, design-wise. But that was where we were in early 2007, technology-wise, and it was built with a hacked-together-in-a-week proof of concept of the underlying framework.
What we had at the time shipped with some standard out-of-the-box templates for presenting a story, and for one-off stories we could also task someone to work on creating new ones which could be slotted in for use. When new templating work wasn't required, they could put together a composite story presentation in a matter of hours, once they had all the materials they wanted.
The next evolution of that, which I was pushing for toward the end of my tenure there but never got to complete, would have been integrated data processing and visualization tools, allowing journalists to toss various sources (my rough draft worked with spreadsheets, since those were a pretty common source) into a denormalized data store, scrub a bit, and generate useful presentations from them.
While I can't be sure, I strongly suspect that the NYT has done something similar, developing the underlying framework for tying together a bunch of content in an attractive way, and probably building some tools to simplify and speed up the generation of the data presentations. What they're doing here, and have done a couple other times, seems well within reach for someone who knows what they're doing and has access to six years' worth of advances in technology.
(anecdotally, I've heard that the NYT special projects are done in Rails; ours were done in Django since it was originally our in-house web framework, but in either case it's a strong argument for the productivity gains of those web frameworks)
Edit: FWIW, here are slides from a lightning talk I gave at PyCon in 2008, about a data-driven project and the timeline involved in it:
I'm particularly curious what they're using these interactive stories for. Refining design or technique? Gauging user interest? Putting processes into place to speed up their development?
It's most likely all of that. They seem to be testing the waters on what written journalism means in the 21st century, and I think it's great.
The Rolling Stone recently did an article[1] that I otherwise would have ignored(due to my distaste for their material), but ended up reading because of the fantastic presentation. I don't know if this trend will stick, or how it will evolve, but it is certainly an interesting spin at modernizing these features.
There is nothing really that novel about this story to anybody who knows anything about Russian history. Rural Russians have been saying "God is too high and the Tsar is too far away" for centuries now. A strong central government that cares little for the provinces is the status quo that has been maintained despite a variety of different political systems. Unlike the US, which has had powerful agrarian political parties that were fiercely suspicious of a strong central government since at least Jefferson, Russian serfs and the overall "agricultural class" have never had any significant political power (factory workers and other lower-class city dwellers were the prime force behind communism while the serfs were mostly an afterthought).
I don't know if anyone can make any sort of objective claims as to whether the highly centralized Russian power structure is any better or worse than a more evenly distributed one. Yes people in small towns live without infrastructure, but they also choose to live there, often for the "clean air" as the article notes. I'm sure there are many American individualists out there that would love to be able to disappear into an unregulated wilderness, mostly free of government scrutiny and yet be like 4 hours away from the capitol.
>(factory workers and other lower-class city dwellers were the prime force behind communism while the serfs were mostly an afterthought)
I heard that that was not because the communists did not like or did not trust the serfs, but rather because factory workers knew how to show up at a particular time and place, e.g., the location of a demonstration.
I spent two years living in a variety of cities eastern Ukraine (Donetsk, Kharkov, Makyevka, Gorlovka), and what I saw there wasn't too far removed from what is described in the article. As I read the article, with the exception of the 14-year-old Gypsy wedding, I found myself saying "Oh yeah, I remember that." I would argue that what was described wasn't so much a story of a dying and decaying Russia, as it is some aspects of Russian/former-Soviet culture, especially in small cities or villages.
Long Bet #5: "By 2012, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times will have referred to Russia as "the world leader in software development" or words to that effect.”
Predictor (who lost) was Esther Dyson, an investor in several Ruassian start-ups. Challenger was Bill Campbell, chair of Intuit.
JetBrains is actually from Czech Republic, not Russia. Yes, they have offices in Moscow and SPB, but also in Munich and Boston - that does not make them German or US company either.
I think the owner decided to register the firm in Czech Republic because it is more western and also a country with Slavic language. As far as I know both the owner and majority of developers are from Russia.
But Visual Studio wouldn't be the same without the great ReSharper :) By the way, Google's recent Android Studio - the best Android IDE, which pushed Eclipse aside - is a customized IntelliJ Idea as well (they made a deal).
Nothing new and does not really show how bad things are. Places like he visited are among relatively polished ones. And well, using a wood stove an not having indoor plumbing is simply the traditional way of life, most of those people are subsistence farmers and that obviously doesn't give good quality of life. Problem is that in many regions, there is nothing reasonable people could except subsistence farming + receiving relative's pensions and drinking them away, because there are no jobs and no economy per se. That in turn, happens because the regions are populated sparsely enough due to cities sucking out population, and smart and initiative people who could start a business find that they have so few customers that they are better off just getting a full time job in Moscow, so they leave. And this filtration goes on and on, and we get the population that is rotten itself.
That is a natural process, and will result in rural Russia being completely abandoned (probably with no permanent population at all) in couple generations. In the region where i am from, rural population (settelements under 100,000 population) declined by a factor of 5 in 80 years (while total population declined by just 25%). There is not much left and what's left cannot sustain itself, too few people to even maintain infrastructure, which in turn pushes remaining people out.
Soviets somewhat contained this trend with restrictions on movement (propiska), which were a gross violation of human rights and Soviet constitution itself, and these limitations were lifted immediately after Soviet Union collapse. That only accelerated in the process.
Probably in countries where there are no real reasons for people to live (except resource-rich regions), some kind of non-democratic control is needed to simply make them survive.
When leaving becomes very easy, it is true even in not-so-bad countries. Why so many people left Baltic states and they turned from most prosperous Soviet republic to the holes they are now? Answer is simple: because they CAN leave. Nobody is going to live in Vilnius if we can just catch a train, find a job and stay in Berlin with no paperwork at all. And it doesn't even require Vilnius to be very terrible. You just can't make it like Berlin, no way.
I know i will be downvoted for this, and of course i'd hate to be in the shoes of those poor chaps locked up in their countries/regions, but it's extremely sad to see places decline, depopulate, and turn into forests for no real reason at all except that the people who lived there initially did so because they've been forced to, and now they are no longer.
In 2012 Estonia's population was 1 294 236 (census), which is 5,5% smaller than in 2000, which is still smaller than before the collapse of Soviet Union.
And that number is predicted to be exaggerated because census was carried over the internet, promises of penalties for those skipping it - the real number of residents might be even smaller.
This coverage reminds me Soviet articles from my childhood about hard life of common people in the USA. Funny to see same propaganda being produced for domestic consumption in the USA now.
exactly, it's a journalism as it is: concentrating on the worst distorting the reader's view and the truth.
PS I live here, moreover between Moscow and Spb. In the nice and largest city on this path (Tver'), but they skipped it accidentally. Why you should know something good about Russia? Look, they're savages.
You may argue that it's biased and cherry-picked - presumably as opposed to all these counter-arguments like "I've seen worse around Brooklyn" or "I happen to have a lower crime rate than NY in my 100 thousand Russian town" :))) That's solid stuff fortunately, no cherry-picking going on.
However oops, overall statistics also tend to show that Russia isn't doing all that great
Eg. Human Development Index, which measures the standard of living based on a wide variety of data, doesn't even place Russia in the world's top 50.
It only does slightly better than Cuba or Mexico. Or is this evil, imperialist dollar-paid propaganda too (this one never gets old) :)
As a Brazilian national I wholehearted agree with this. It is very easy for a develop world country reporter to inform the world on our seemingly barbarous-like ways.
As in the case of Brazil, this has been a problem for generations, like our authorities do not live in Brazil or only come for the world cup and carnaval.
The picture is much dire, its part of the culture, we are raised to think this way. Someone applies for a job in the police not because they seek order but because they know the corruption behind it can put their family in a better spot.
You can find examples of this in any 'developing' country.
The America Left Behind
A journey through a heartland on the slow road to ruin.
Could we not use this title? Take the examples of Detroit, New Orleans, Cleveland, Galveston or Atlantic City and many other cities in America and the same could be said.
The headline is catchy and I'm not sure if I agree with it.
It would be really nice if NYT did a real piece about how American cities are declining and the causes of this and also how we could change it. I guess its easier to study Russia, instead of looking inward.
This reminds me of this NY Times article about the Amtrak line between NYC and Washington, DC. Similar story of two booming cities and hundreds of miles of urban blight and poverty in between: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/magazine/amtrak-industrial...
I spent some time in a different part of Russia, 10 days in Volgograd. The best and brightest do try to leave for the big city, not much different than many stories of people going to NYC or California in the 40s and 50s.
Besides the content, Is anyone going to mention the beautiful use of the line as a scrollbar with the SVG? Its nice to see more and more articles beginning to use more interactive web technologies as opposed to just a static text and pictures. There's more of a reason to read content online than just having the latest content.
My cosmopolite was sustaining the pride and reputation of the Earth when the waiters closed in on both combatants with their famous flying wedge formation and bore them outside, still resisting.
I called McCarthy, one of the French garcons, and asked him the cause of the conflict.
"The man with the red tie" (that was my cosmopolite), said he, "got hot on account of things said about the bum sidewalks and water supply of the place he come from by the other guy."
"Why," said I, bewildered, "that man is a citizen of the world--a cosmopolite. He--"
"Originally from Mattawamkeag, Maine, he said," continued McCarthy, "and he wouldn't stand for no knockin' the place."
I think that in the moment, it is very beneficial to have large chunks of rural, not overpopulated lands. And I don't think that it is in any way a problem.
Current approach of developing natural resources is an ecologist nightmare! Just consider growing fields of mono-cultured plants. And in developed/overpopulated countries, well, the land is 'developed' on the country-wide scale. Ecological nightmare on a country-wide scale!
So. Until we learn how to build better-than-natural ecologies, I'd never consider any under-populated regions as a problem. I wouldn't even think of such region as poor, considering the richness of local ecosystem and natural resources.
Just look at the photos of these people. Doesn't look like they are too unhappy. As to the "richness of local ecosystem", it does do a lot for people. Consider this another article from the same newspaper, took me only a few seconds to find it, on the frontpage:
У меня кореш живет в Десногорске (за сотню километров от Смоленска, маленький городок, градообразующее предприятие - атомная станция). Его невеста из Москвы, есть там квартира и возможность жить. Так вот, они почему-то предпочли жить там. Хотя ничто не мешает жить в Москве. Он, кстати, пилит там свои стартапы для US рынка в том числе.
Более того, наблюдается обратная тенденция -- люди бегут из Москвы в свои родные города и живут там. Почему? Все просто: ты зарабатываешь в Москве 50 тысяч рублей и снимаешь квартиру за 30. Так зачем там жить, когда в родном городе ты сможешь зарабатывать столько же, только жизнь будет спокойнее?
Моя мама, кстати, жила под Москвой (Солнечногорск). Переехала с мужем в поселок рядом с Ульяновском. Продали квартиру и купили там дом. Очень им там нравится, много ягод, грибов и т.д. Спокойная жизнь.
Так что это палка о двух концах, не все так однозначно ИМХО.
>Почему? Все просто: ты зарабатываешь в Москве 50 тысяч рублей и снимаешь квартиру за 30. Так зачем там жить, когда в родном городе ты сможешь зарабатывать столько же, только жизнь будет спокойнее?
Сразу видно москвича. Проблема с регионами не в том, что там доходы ниже (хотя они объективно ниже), а в том, что в регионах нету множества работ. Это важно, если ты не программер / дизайнер на удаленке и не водитель троллейбуса. Не в любом российском милионнике можно найти софтверную контору, которая занимается чем-то кроме аутсорса. В российских стотысячниках в этой области нет вообще ничего, кроме сопровождения одинесок и сборки визиток на джумле.
To me this is a good sign. Not every small town needs to exist. Historically there were reasons for them - agriculture I guess. But now they often serve no purpose except to house the old people who have trouble leaving. The fact is the world doesn't need as many farmers as it used to so these places are better off left to disappear. It might feel sad if your hometown is lost but it's only physical things whose usefulness has passed.
Actually, its 6% if you use simplified taxation. After that you can cash in your companys profits every quarter for a reduced 9% dividend tax (instead of 13% personal income tax).
It's definitely not a whole picture, but it's rather accurate view of the countryside and abandoned villages.
I live in Tyumen and it's not that bad, thanks to the gas and oil industry.
But I visited a couple of villages and _it seems to me_ that this article is rather accurate portray of the average out-of-the-city life in Russia.
I think that it's written as propaganda, but it doesn't change the facts.
I just want the author to go to a Moscow or St Petersburg subway and compare that to the one in New York City. He will be amazed how clean and beautiful is Moscow subway, and he will see how dirty and slow is NYC subway compared to it.
You can not judge the whole country just by driving on a highway which not many people use and filming a gypsy wedding which has nothing to do with Russia.
Beautiful presentation work - congratulations to Mike Bostock and company at the Times for making something engaging to read in the modern web environment. Great work and I enjoyed the experience of reading it - things like this will be critical to the future of journalism.
Putting the article aside, I love the functionality. Mapping a story to exactly where you were on the trip when it occurred, the way the NYTimes has, is an amazing way to present the story.
The subject matter aside, that is the coolest web page implementation I have seen in a long time. The rolling zoom with the mouse wheel and the map display on the side was just neat.
I have only skimmed this article and thus will not comment on its contents, BUT I wonder what is the software package that has been use to generate the article layout?
I'm old fashioned...the parallax motion and the embedded widgets and things don't do much for me, but what really sticks out to me is the great photography, and this format, whether you like the effects or not, at least showcases the great images.
That said, I don't think this story-telling format is the future of journalism. The reason why this story looks so attractive is because there are so few ads, if any. Yes, this format lends itself to being able to do full-page ads or special built-in ads...but those take work to both acquire and construct. Given that these type of feature stories are far and few between, I'd be surprised if the higher-CPM on special-feature-story-ads outweighs the bespoke-effort needed to acquire and implement them. In any case, I highly doubt that if it does, that it does so at a scale that is meaningful.
And another thing: the reporting and editing is obviously the bottleneck here. But let's let that be a given...the other main bottleneck is the non-web-dev reporters and editors trying to get their ideas into this innovative format. My guess is, that even at the New York Times, this is a very painful and slow process, even if your devs include Mike Bostock, creator of D3. Part of these features are done with generated templates. And part of them appear to be handcrafted.
But again, it's not the hand-crafting that is necessarily the most painful part of the tech workflow. It's the editing across systems that weren't designed for this collaboration. Have you ever built a fancy website in Flash only to have your client want to change a bunch of links that were hard-coded? Imagine that, except across several editorial departments. Another way to think of it: newspaper reporters and editors typically do not use Sublime Text.
----
Some technical observations:
The NYT interactive team has been doing analytics on these different story formats. Check out the source code for their previous feature on The Jockey:
If you view the source of the Russia story, you won't see any such analytics code. You'll see a lot of D3 code and even some special video-player helper code that I haven't seen on the other features. So again, these features are a pretty new thing, but I think it's a long way from being something that is scalable, and not because for lack of technology or skill at the NYT.
Why is that it's fine for major western media establishment to paint unsettling picture of east.
- Of course west is doing better
- But that does not mean they can point communities that are worse off
- I'am sick of BBC covering negative stories on China & India (i'am one)
- Why don't NY Times and the like, point to their own troubles where they left ordinary people troubles and spend all the recourses in covering the powerful { Politicians, Actors, Musicians, Sports Personale}
Frankly I'm a bit tired of all the negative coverage of Russia by the NYT, The Economist and other respected establishments. I can drive through the Appalachians or towns in the South or Detroit and describe an "America Left Behind"- but we all know that those places do not represent the USA as a whole.
Edit: Russia has problems everyone knows that, I would just like to see more balanced coverage- talk to the middle class that has grown in the cities, the startup people in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other cities, compare how things are today to how they were in the 90s.