Type Weekly newspaper Owner(s) MoscowTimes LLC Founded 1992 | Format Broadsheet Publisher MoscowTimes LLC | |
Editor-in-chief Mikhail Vladimirovich Fishman | ||
The Moscow Times is an English-language weekly newspaper published in Moscow, with a circulation of 55,000 copies. It is distributed free of charge at places frequented by English-speaking tourists and expatriates such as hotels, cafés, embassies, and airlines and is also available by subscription. The newspaper is popular among foreign citizens residing in Moscow and English-speaking Russians. In November 2015 the newspaper changed its design and type from daily to weekly (released every Thursday) and increased the number of pages to 24.
Contents
The newspaper regularly publishes articles by prominent Russian journalists such as Yulia Latynina and Ivan Nechepurenko. It has served as a 'training ground' for foreign correspondents, including Ellen Barry, who later became New York Times Moscow bureau chief and won a Pulitzer Prize.
Founding
Derk Sauer, a Dutch publisher who came to Moscow in 1989, made plans to turn his small, twice-weekly paper called the Moscow Guardian into a world-class daily newspaper. Sauer brought in Meg Bortin as its first editor in May 1992, and the team used a Radisson Slavyanskaya Hotel as its headquarters.
The first edition of The Moscow Times was published in March 1992. It was the first Western daily to be published in Russia, and quickly became "a primary source of news and opinion" quoted in both Russia and the West.
It "played an important role by giving space to Russian commentators". For example, in the fall of 1993, it was able to play a role in defeating the censors: "when anti-Yeltsin forces occupied the Russian Parliament and censorship was revived. Russian newspapers came out with large blank spaces on their front pages where articles critical of the authorities had been suppressed. The writers of those articles came to see us. Published the next day in English in The Moscow Times, their articles were quickly picked up and beamed back in Russian by the BBC and other foreign radios, defeating the censors."
From the mid 1990s until 2000, it was based in the old headquarters of Pravda. In 1997, the website moscowtimes.ru was registered.
Expansion
In 2003–04, the newspaper added Jobs & Careers and Real Estate appendices, and in 2005 the Moscow Guide appendix, featuring high culture. The annual Moscow Dining Guide was also launched in 2005.
Until 2005, the paper was owned by Independent Media, a Moscow-registered publishing house that also prints a Russian-language daily newspaper, Vedomosti, The St. Petersburg Times (The Moscow Times' counterpart in Saint Petersburg) and Russian-language versions of popular glossy magazines such as FHM, Men's Health and Cosmopolitan Russia. That year, Independent Media was acquired by the Finnish publishing group Sanoma.
In 2006, the paper began its alliance with the International Herald Tribune, while 2009 saw the launch of the themoscowtimes.com website. The first color issue was published in 2010.
In 2009, it published Russia for Beginners: A Foreigner's Guide to Russia, written by foreign authors who offer advice based on their own experiences of living in Russia. The paper celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2012 with a gala dinner at the Hotel Baltschug Kempinski in Moscow.
Recent history
In 2014, sister publication The St. Petersburg Times ceased publication.
In 2015, Sanoma sold MoscowTimes LLC to Demyan Kudryavtsev, a former director of Kommersant.
Controversy
In April 2014 longtime editor-in-chief Andrew McChesney stepped down and was replaced by Nabi Abdullaev, a former Moscow Times reporter, news editor, managing editor, and deputy editor-in-chief who had left in 2011 to head RIA Novosti's foreign-language news service. Shortly after his appointment, Abdullaev argued in The Guardian that the west's "biased journalism ...robs the west of its moral authority".
In the aftermath of the Ukrainian crisis, The Moscow Times was criticized by a number of journalists including Izvestia columnist Israel Shamir, who in December 2014 called it a "militant anti-Putin paper, a digest of the Western press with extreme bias in covering events in Russia". In October 2014 The Moscow Times made the decision to suspend online comments after an increase in offensive comments. The paper said it disabled comments for two reasons—it was an inconvenience for its readers as well as being a legal liability, because under Russian law websites are liable for all content, including user-generated content like comments.
In January 2014, malicious ads on the newspaper's website redirected visitors to an exploit kit landing page. In December 2014, The Moscow Times was forced offline for two days by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. It was forced offline a second time in February 2015 for unknown reasons.