vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #146 / Special reports / Reading article...

The Vladivostok News is taking a new leap into cyberspace with this edition.

Within the next few days, we plan to have a redesigned paper online – there is a cleaner look to the web pages, and it will be easier to navigate our web site (http://vn.vladnews.ru). But we hope our readers will find substance and not merely style.

The Vladivostok News has long been a leader in Far Eastern online publication; we were the first newspaper in the Russian Far East with a web site. But in the past, our articles on each page were stacked on top of each other, so that you had to scroll down through the stories one by one to see what we were reporting on.

Our new format should help readers surf the site more easily. This is hardly a new concept in Internet newspapers, but it should come as a relief to our cyber readers.

Other changes will allow us to get further information to readers that we can’t fit in the limited space of our print edition. In our current editions (both print and online), we are publishing a story on President Yeltsin’s decree expanding the powers of Victor Kondratov, his representative to Primorye and head of the local Federal Security Bureau. Online, we are providing a bonus for policy buffs: a link to an English translation of key passages of Yeltsin’s decree. The clash between the krai and federal government is a constitutional issue of national significance, and we want readers to see the federal government’s justification of its actions.

We hope to periodically provide such background information for our readers. It won’t happen with every story – government records are hard to get and our translators are busy – but we will try to expand the scope of discussion.

We also plan to publish stories online that don’t fit in our print edition. In this edition, we’ll include a translation from Russian media: a follow-up to the story about Russian sailors trapped in ports because their debt-laden shipping companies abandon them.

Over time, we plan to update our web site more regularly. In the past, our bimonthly publishing schedule forced us to downplay or skip stories that occurred right after we went to press. After all, the news starts seeming stale after two weeks. Now, however, we will try to get a few new stories online in each off week. And we might add an occasional story that breaks right after we go to press.