By Vladimir Kovalev
Staff Writer, The St. Petersburg Times
St. Petersburg, Russia

At the moment, there is a story on my desk that I wrote in August about a K-9 dog. It is one of three stories in total I wrote about the same dog injured in police action to capture criminals.

The other day, three weeks before the fellowship ended, my editor asked me to do the follow-up. “You must be joking…” I said, having a feeling already, that he wasn’t.

“Find out how the dog is doing. People call asking us about it,” he said laughing. He was laughing because a lot of my colleagues in the newsroom, including him, are quite familiar with my reaction to assignments of this kind, this one in particular. A helpless gesture was a frequent thing for me to do in situations like this because stories of this kind are not interesting to me.

This is quite different compared to things I did back in St. Petersburg, Russia. There I am accustomed to digging into things, writing about tricky political games, trying to open up conflicts between government officials.

Instead I was writing about a “mysterious” boat that sank in a reservoir seventeen years ago and was unexpectedly found because of a drought in the area. I still don’t understand what was mysterious about that boat. This looked like a joke to me—this is not a story, I thought, this is not even a brief.

The boat just sank and the Rocky Mountain News writes about it. The K-9 dog is injured and the media goes mad writing about equalizing patrol dogs’ and policemen’s rights if they are shot on duty.

At the same time nobody cares about the situation when you can buy any kind of drug in downtown Denver, nobody pays attention to young people seriously beaten up in a police station in one of the Colorado counties—this story was printed in a local club guide and appeared there only as a result of an election campaign when one of those policemen was running for the local parliament.

I had a feeling that police reports and press conferences were the main sources for journalists in Colorado.

There was quite a telling case recently, when a child died in a car accident. A colleague of mine and I were sent to a hospital “because TV cameras are there and if we don’t have something they have, this would be bad” (an editor’s quote). In other words we had to stand there for 20 minutes and wait until the cameras left to be sure we would get the same thing the TV had. I was sitting by the hospital, thinking “What kind of news are we looking for here? That the child is still dead?”

The TV crews rolled up their wires, put their cameras into vans and left. “This is just stupid we had to come here. Let’s go back,” the colleague of mine said.

In October I gave a lecture at Colorado University about my experience here and in Russia. Before that I told the Rocky Mountain News' chief editor about my concerns, trying to point out one main thing—that there isn’t enough research of local topics at the paper. It would be better if editors listened to reporters’ ideas more carefully, because the reporters know the environment by working within it. “If a person covers City Hall issues, that person would have to know better what’s going on there then the editor, right?” I asked. The editor didn’t get the point.

“You Soviet journalists get used to a situation, when authorities tell you what to write about,” he said. And he added that I didn’t have enough experience working in the newsroom to say what I did.

Yes, I was insulted when I heard the “you Soviet journalists” remark because I never was a Soviet journalist, but I did not want to concentrate on this because some of the things I said sounded insulting too.

Basically what I said was that the way the paper is managed looks wrong to me and I understand it was not a pleasant thing to hear from some journalist who came from a country where journalism is in quite an undeveloped condition.

Well I thought I had a right to say it—there were numerous articles I wrote in St. Petersburg which were followed by major European newspapers and TV companies, including American ones. I worked with American journalists for quite a while, years before I came to the United States. I consider myself a professional journalist, so that’s why I think I have a bit of a clue about how things work.

And if I was wrong, why did people in the newsroom agree with me? Maybe it’s because they, too, understand the fact that if there is no real competition between two papers in one area, there won’t be a quality product. I am referring to the single advertisement department that the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post have. I think this is the main reason why I didn’t see a fight for news here. Why should there be any if the paper feels financially secure?

I just have this strange part of my character, to try to make things better wherever I am. Maybe sometimes it looks silly, but what can I do about it?

It’s just better for me because I met so many truly talented people working in the Rocky Mountain News newsroom, who can do brilliant things. Sometimes they do, like in the election night issue, which looked just great.

They made me learn how the government, police and court systems work in America, which sometimes was a surprise for me. I was not afraid of asking questions—“there are no stupid questions, there can only be stupid answers”—this phrase is stuck in my head now.

The people I met in Denver made me happy here, some of them did a great job “pushing” me into the local life. They did it so successfully that in some places people call me the “local Russian.” There was even a guy who attempted to mug me once in downtown Denver, which resulted quite badly him. It’s funny to remember.

I took a trip from Denver to Los Angeles and back by car after having just four weeks driving experience in my life. This trip was one of the greatest things I’ve ever done. It’s only after I came back I thought that if some American drove 2,600 miles to the south of Russia and back in five days, I would have thought that person was crazy.

I took a train trip from Denver to Chicago and back, which made me laugh at the American railway system, compared to which some Russian analogues look advanced and sophisticated.

I think I took most of it.

There’s only one truly bad thing about the Alfred Friendly Program: it’s that you have to say “Goodbye” to some of the nicest people you’ve ever met. I hate it.