CJR SCENE
The Power of a Press
T atyana Goryachova, editor of the independent weekly Berdyansk Delovoy in Ukraine, routinely confronts obstacles to her journalism that would confound editors in the U.S. Since the Delovoy began publishing in 1996, Goryachova has survived a criminal libel suit brought by the mayor of Berdyansk for her reporting on the firing of a hospital administrator who had backed one of the mayor’s political rivals. She was forced to reregister the newspaper under a different name to dodge the city’s attempt to revoke the Delovoy’s publishing license. And in January 2002, in the midst of a contentious mayoral campaign, an unknown attacker threw hydrochloric acid in Goryachova’s face, leaving her with second- and third-degree burns and blinding her for months.
Yet the Delovoy never missed an issue. But it wasn’t easy. Goryachova, long ago squeezed out of the city-run print shop by erratic monthly price increases, says, “We prepare each issue as if it were our last.” Last New Year’s Eve, for instance, Goryachova had to spend the night at a print shop ninety miles from Berdyansk after someone sabotaged the first issue of 2004.
More than five thousand miles away, the Omaha World-Herald had a solution for Goryachova. In July 2003, the journalist Hal Foster, then working as a summer-intern coach at the World-Herald, told Goryachova’s story to John Gottschalk, the paper’s publisher and ceo. Foster had met Goryachova while working as a media consultant in Ukraine. Gottschalk decided to donate to the Delovoy a press — already slated for replacement — from a weekly the World-Herald owns in Papillion, Nebraska.
Last year, Goryachova flew to Omaha with her husband and publisher, Sergei, and their new press technician, to learn how to operate the 1971 News King printing press. Though thirty-three years old, the press is no jalopy. It has been overhauled to increase its capacity, and will turn out the Delovoy’s 14,000 weekly copies in about an hour.
The press, dismantled and packed into two tractor-trailer-sized shipping containers, arrived in Odessa on April 1. Although Berdyansk is a port city, the Delovoy hired brokers to get the press through customs in Odessa, beyond the reach of Berdyansk’s mayor.
“It is incomprehensible to most journalists in this country what Tatyana has to go through for what amounts to the most elementary form of journalism,” says Gottschalk. “The press is only an instrument; the soul of the paper is what this is all about.”
And the soul comes from Goryachova. “I am a journalist,” she says. “It doesn’t matter what country I live in; I do my professional duties. I report on current events.”
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