I, too, probably need to say something memorial about the Narvskaya Gazeta. Moreover, today, it seems, colleagues have finally nailed down the lid of the coffin.
I write “it seems” because formally, of course, everything is not so. Formally, we have a production suspension. There are financial difficulties. There is a message from ERR that the latest issue will not be published this week, the editors are left without employees, and the publisher is looking for additional investments.
This is speaking in the normal language of people who still believe in press releases.
Apparently, I don’t really believe it anymore.
I left on May 17th. If I remember correctly, already from the article. And I, in general, understood quite well how it would all end. But let's not talk about that. Let's talk about fun stuff.
That's what's fun here.
For the first time, as far as I remember, I got to work at Narvskaya Gazeta in 2007. I was then leaving Ireland, where I was working for a Russian newspaper in Ireland. It was called, characteristically, “Our Newspaper.” Dublin, 1.3 million people, almost the entire population of Estonia, Guinness, big city, bustle, civilization.
And now I’m going to Narva. I have already reached an agreement with the then editor Seryoga Stepanov. I’m driving and thinking: that’s it, I’m going to a country where nothing happens. Where it's quiet. Where it's calm. Where you can write about culture, pipes, meetings and people who know how to distinguish protocol from reality.
It was the day before the Bronze Night.
That is, I arrived in Narva not quite the same place I was going to. While I was flying, driving from Riga, getting further and building a quiet Estonian life in my head, the country managed to become different. And Narva along with her.
For me, and for Sasha Khobotov, for example, “Narvskaya” was an alma mater. Well, in Estonia. Before that, I already worked at the Ryvan newspaper, but it was completely different. And here everything was immediately adult: the city, politics, people, layout, calls, deadlines, grievances, edits, smoking room.
And if we speak as confusingly as I say now, then my mother, Olga Olegovna, worked there as an editor. Over the years, a huge number of our mutual acquaintances, friends and colleagues have passed through Narvskaya.
Therefore, the resentment is, of course, incredibly strong. Honestly.
But I don’t want to talk about the reasons and culprits now. They will be found. They will definitely find it. In Narva, they are generally quite good at finding the guilty, especially when it is too late to save something.
I want to say something else.
I am very grateful to all the colleagues with whom we have worked over the years. And especially to those who were close now, because we all saw it end together. This is a special pleasure, of course: watching the end of a newspaper from the inside, pretending that you are still working in the editorial office, and not standing in a room where the furniture has already been mentally removed.
I am grateful to the subscribers. All deliveries. To the guys at Printall who kept us printing until the last moment. Even the guys from Omniva who delivered us, although there was always a lot of drama in the relationship between the newspaper and the post office.
A newspaper generally does not consist of texts alone. This is a rather naive idea of a newspaper. The newspaper consists of a route. Of the people who write it, print it, transport it, lay it out, wait, scold, read it in the kitchen, send the cutting to relatives and say: “Did you see what they wrote there again?”
A newspaper ends on paper before it ends in people.
There will be no new issue this week. Perhaps someone else will find the money. Perhaps something else will be restarted. Perhaps in a month they will explain to us that all this was not a closure, but a difficult organizational stage.
There are no former journalists. And it seems there are no former newspapers.
They simply stop going out on Wednesdays and start coming out somewhere inside: in memory, in habit, in resentment, in gratitude, in the ridiculous desire to check in the morning to see if a new number has appeared.
I think so.
We are eternal.
Well, or at least very poorly removable.