Content area
Full Text
How are local Russian-language newspaper publishers meeting the needs of Soviet immigrants? According to reporter Susan Poizner, there's plenty of room for improvement.
A GLANCE through Israel's Russian-language newspapers makes it clear: Russian immigrants are big business. Half-page ads inform readers that Shekem loves new Soviet repatriates, that Bank Discount wants to help them turn over a new leaf, that even Gorbachev would be a new immigrant if he could buy Rataphone appliances.
The Russian-language newspapers themselves are big business. At least, so believe the owners of the six newspapers and numerous journals that have sprung up, many of them only in the past year.
"New immigrants from the Soviet Union are used to reading a lot, because in the Soviet Union newspapers are cheap," says George Mordel, editor of Krug ("Society"), a newsweekly established in 1977. "And the freedom of publication here makes them more excited about what they read."
The pioneer of the group is a small paper called Nasha Strana ("Our Country"), which was first published in 1975 as a weekly. In 1980, in anticipation of a great wave of aliya, Nasha Strana became a daily. When the expected numbers failed to arrive it reverted to its weekly form - until a month ago.
But now it has to compete with a slew of new weeklies, and the competition is fierce. The first of the competitors was Sputnik ("The Traveller"), established in 1986, and it is said to be one of the most successful.
"Sputnik was the first paper in Russian that presented news," says Carol Kainnan,...