Thanks, Internet

The Internet makes this magazine possible.

Yet, as we were reminded by two closely-spaced incidents in January, the Internet is very much a double-edged sword (the indicents came, of course, while as were preparing a story on the Russian Internet).

The first incident came on a Thursday. An attentive blogger notified us that our Calendar Editor had, for her biography of Alexander Men [Jan/Feb 2005], copied several lengthy passages from two online articles. The Internet (particularly its Russian incarnation) is not a stickler for laws of copyright and she mistakenly concluded this information was in the public domain. Nonetheless, she should have credited the source, but she did not. We editors should have questioned her sources, but we did not. For these breaches, we apologize to our readers and to the authors Yakov Krotov and Vladimir Zelinsky, who should have been properly credited for their work.

The next incident came three days later, on Sunday. The full text of our Jan/Feb 2005 lead article on skating was posted on the web – free to roam in the wild. A syndicated news site, Red Nova, posted it and, despite repeated requests from us, refused to pull the article down. It turns out they had gotten the text from an archiving service to whom we license our magazine’s content for a very different purpose. Acting on the basis of an agreement we signed back in 1995 (before Al Gore invented the Internet), this archiver had decided that they had the right to push our magazine’s content into free news sites like Red Nova. They did not.

The Internet is powerful for the very reasons that it is dangerous – it does not follow rules of anything that has come before it.

That said, I return to the fact that this magazine would not be possible without the Internet. We are in constant (sometimes instantaneous) communication with writers all over the world via e-mail. Photographers upload digital photos to our servers from every known corner of Russia (and Europe and the US). We do endless hours of fact-checking, research and cross-checking through search engines, online encyclopedias and libraries. We exchange digital, virtual proofs of the magazine between editors. In fact, the magazine is even delivered electronically to the printer (which is in Ohio, and which we have never visited with our physical, analog persons).

And yet, in the end, the product of so much online, digital collaboration is the decidedly analog publication you hold in your hands.

So what is the danger that this voracious online world, on which we have so come to rely, will one day gobble us up (not all of us, just the magazine)? That danger is insignificant, I have to say. Personally (and, of course, I hope you agree), I am one who feels that books and magazines will never disappear, even when their full texts are online (legally or otherwise). Why? Because humans crave a very tactile, organic experience when we are reading something of substance. Sometimes you need to smell the ink, feel the smooth gloss of the pages... or roll the magazine up and swat a fly...

Well, not with your copy of Russian Life, of course.

Enjoy the issue.  :^)