Type of site News site Commercial Yes | Available in Russian Alexa rank 3,571 (April 2014) Registration Free/Subscription | |
inoSMI (Russian: иноСМИ, a derivation from "foreign mass media") is an internet media project that monitors and translates articles published in foreign and Western media into Russian. Translations are published online on a daily basis. The range of topics varies, but most of the translated articles are analytical essays written by Western journalists and dedicated to Russia. Regular news articles are rarely published.
Contents
The service is affiliated with the RIA Novosti news agency and is sponsored by the Federal Agency on Press and Mass Communications of Russia (FAPMC).
The project was masterminded and directed by Yaroslav Ognev who has been serving as its editor-in-chief since its foundation. In March 2009 Marina Pustilnik was assigned the editor-in-chief of InoSmi.
While RIA Novosti states that the project web-site was launched in February 2004, a whois service query indicates that the domain name had been reserved since 2001.
Activity
While the service has several professional translators on its payroll, a noticeable fraction of translations is performed by its eager readers on a voluntary basis. Readers also participate in media monitoring, as they may suggest an article for translation.
The site has a forum where new publications are discussed. The moderation policy is rather loose and allows for a variety of views. Material that can be regarded by editors as promoting competing reader projects will be censored though.
An unusual phenomenon that took off recently on InoSMI forum can be described as a massive voluntary effort in translating into Russian other readers' forums hosted by foreign media.
InoSMI also invites leading foreign journalists and editors to discuss the publications with Russian readers. For instance, Stanislaw Lem's conference with the inosmi.ru readers (on 17 Jan. 2006) was the last press conference before his death.
Achievements
InoSMI claims a daily audience of 70000-90000 visitors, most of them from Russia.
In 2007 it won the "Culture and mass media" category of the Runet Prize Award, supervised by FAPMC.
Viewpoint of Ognev
The first editor-in-chief of the resource explained his viewpoint in numerous interviews. In February 2009 interview to the Regnum agency he said:
Assignment of Pustilnik
On March 11, 2009 RIA Novosti announced assigning a new editor-in-chief of the resource, Marina Pustilnik. The explanation included:
The new politics which included closing the free forum and establishing premoderation caused the "nucleus" of the reader audience of Inosmi to migrate to a new resource InoForum.
Speaking against the new editorial policy, the readers united and wrote the open letter to the RIA Novosti heads, that included among other stuff the quotes of the new editor-in-chief that as readers believed reflected her views and intentions:
"...today media resources get more and more interested in what's called user generated content — what's emphasized by the success of such project as nytimesinmoscow.livejournal.com that causes the delight of the New York Times bosses. I would like the InoSmi readers to be those opinion makers that I would manage to trade in exchange for the content legalization." "...but I lived for six years in the U.S. and I can guess that my [information] selection is greater than yours any way." "...I am not going to make excuses before you. If you and your colleagues at the forum want to exchange the nationalistic chatter and make yourselves and others sure that all is well — welcome. I work in the news now for 10 years and I know for sure there's no truth in the news. And everything depends only on who shouted more loud."While prior to the depicted events the resource enjoyed about 700,000 visits and 150,000 visitors a day, those numbers got decreased approximately 1.5 times in few days.