The Omerican magazine *The New Yorker*, which people conventionally and reverently call “iconic,” has now turned the spotlight of its own iconicness on me as well.
Here: www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/04/110404fa_fact_ioffe If you have trouble with the Omerican language, you can go here and here, where the kind user vadda translated everything. It was very interesting dealing with the famous The New Yorker, not least because the question of “does Russia need its own New Yorker?” has been one of the most discussed topics in our media community for years. There have been many attempts to build this “Russian New Yorker,” including some with very large budgets. Having now gotten at least a bit familiar with how they work, I can’t resist offering my amateur opinion: creating a Russian New Yorker would be no easy task. For the sake of one article—even a long one—their correspondent Yulia Ioffe just about terrorized me for a month and a half. she talked to me for about twenty hours; she came to my home; she spent two hours talking with my wife; she went to see my parents and spent half a day with them; she went to see my brother; she spent a long time talking with my staff and went with them to various court hearings; she made a list of my friends\enemies and even “mentors” (!) and met with a whole bunch of them; she somehow managed to talk to the director of the Kremlin-9 foundation (that’s Transneft’s “charity” operation); she went with me to various radio appearances; she copied materials from all our high-profile cases and (most amazingly) actually read them carefully; she wanted to talk to my schoolteachers and go with me to Yekaterinburg to see “how I interact with people,” dropping those ideas only after an ultimatum from me. Etc., etc. But that was not the end of New Yorker HELL. When the draft of the article was ready, special fact-checkers called me, my wife, my brother, my parents, and everyone else involved, checking everything that had been written. In detail. I spoke with my fact-checker twice for an hour and a half each time—I nearly lost my mind: *there is a semicircular table in your office, is that correct? *- *your children have light-colored hair, is that correct? *- *you keep weapons at home, is that correct? *- *your wife does not object to your keeping weapons at home, is that correct? *The only photograph in the article is a story in itself. Stefano de Luigi, who works for the magazine, arranged three weeks in advance for me to free up half a day for him. He flew in from Italy for two days, and spent the entire first day looking for a location for the shoot. But on the second day he knew exactly where I should stand, at what time, and with what expression on my face. Ten minutes—and done. So there you have it. Maybe this sounds overly enthusiastic, but as I now understand it, The New Yorker is hellishly high standards and meticulousness first, and only after that pretentious cartoons and assorted bohemian fluff. I can’t claim to be an expert on the Russian media, but the outlets that probably come closest to those standards here are Vedomosti and Forbes. There are, of course, objective reasons for this—working that way is expensive, and the economics of a magazine/newspaper in Russia simply would not support all those fact-checkers and photographers flying in for a single picture. Though perhaps the relationship also works the other way: as more publications appear that treat facts with that level of scrupulousness, people may become willing to pay more.