Echoes of the Crossroads

Crossposted from Livejournal

It’s been a while since I posted anything in this platform – but given how much digital ink I spent on my journalism career, it didn’t feel right not to mark it here.

Back in mid-April 2022, I was hired as a part-time reporter at Growing Community media, which I freelanced for in my Chicago Journal days back in 2012 and then after the whole Pioneer Press debacle in the spring of 2015, when I ended up writing for Austin Weekly News. I got bumped up to full-time in late August 2022 (but because I wanted to surprise my family during what was supposed to be a joint birthday celebration with me and my siblings, I didn’t actually publicly announce it until September).

Since mid-August 2023, the work environment inside the company, at least on the editorial side, has been deteriorating. The fact that two employees left within less than a month of each other during the fall of 2023 should have been a sign of how bad things got – but the leadership was determined to ignore the implications. On December 22, 2023, I decided that I had no future in the company, that it was not going to get better. I set a deadline for myself – I was going to leave in May 2024, two years after I was brought on staff. If I found another job earlier, I would leave earlier, but if I don’t, that’s when I would leave.

I was fired on January 17, 2024. And, a week and two days later, another reporter, who also happened to be an immigrant from a former Soviet republic and a native Russian speaker, was fired. And while, with me, the writing was obviously on the wall for a while, she was fired without any apparent reason, and when she asked for an explanation, the company refused to provide one.

A lot happened in the past two years and a change, ladies and gentlefolks. And I may yet write something about it in a series of f-locked posts, because boy is there a lot to unpack and I have a lot more free time to unpack it. No promises, though. Like, I’ve been meaning to write about a lot of those things for just as long, but the sheer enormity of the task kept intimidating me.

For now... what happened with Niles Bugle taught me the importance of never putting all my eggs in one basket. I’m going to be regularly writing for Streetsblog Chicago (I never stopped writing for them, but I’ve been writing a lot less because it was harder to find time when you got a full-time staff job). I’m going to be doing regular freelance contributions for another publication I worked with before, and semi-regular work for a third publication I worked with before. I am still looking for staff jobs in journalism, or somewhere journalism-adjacent, but for now, I’m going to have money coming in, and I have quite a bit of money saved up (like I said, things have been deteriorating for a while), so I’ll be alright for the time being.

It’s been a hell of a ride, ladies and gentlefolks. I’m glad it’s over. I’ve done my best, produced some good journalism in the process. I worked with a lot of great people, and I hope that the ones who still work at GCM will be able to keep working there for as long as they want.

My mom recently wrote a post on her English-language blog that was mostly about the state of Russian society and Russian opposition to Putin’s rule, and… Those are some of the issues I’ve been thinking about, and this post just compelled me to finally put it to digital paper.

First of all, a bit of context that I’m not sure comes through in the original post to those who didn’t grow up in the former Soviet Union. There are two related pieces here. One, because Soviet Union was officially anti-imperialist and the Russian education system didn’t make an effort to reject many underlying Soviet-era assumption, there is a widespread belief that Russia and Soviet Union after it, wasn’t imperialist or colonialists. There is the idea that, unlike those evil Americans who killed Native Americans and forced them into reservations, we integrated native peoples of Siberia and parts of south and west peacefully. The whole thing doesn’t stand up to scrutiny – as I’ve often pointed out, the Soviet Union had its own version of reservation schools, there were policies that actively encouraged ethnic Russians to settle in territories that weren’t majority-Russian at the start of the 20th century, the way Soviet Union went back and forth of encourgaing multiculturalism and promoting Russian supremacy, that sort of thing. And, of course, it’s hard to see Russian imperial expansion into Caucasus mountain and Central Asian region as any different from what Western powers were doing outside Europe at the time. Even with Ukraine and Belarus, where things are more ambiguous due to their shared heritage, too many people accept the idea that Ukraine “returned” to Russia voluntarily, at face value, which just isn’t the case.

None of this is secret. Jut recently,the Kommersant newspaper, a major Russian daily newspaper, published an article doing a pretty thorough deconstruction of that version of history, and showed how much of what we learned as kids omitted some very important context. Like, the entire history of centuries of Ukrainian uprisings and push-and-pull between Ukrainian and Russian leaders. But thing is, the way history gets contextualized in school matters. If you have the idea of how the history is “supposed to be,” you’re not going to want to seek out things that don’t fit that. Not unless something compels you.

( More under the cut )

Say what one will about Myspace, Friendster, or even Xanga, but they never tried to become profitable by getting rid of and driving away the very people who kept them up and running.

Or, to put it in the way Russian-speakers would appreciate it, надо же умудриться так просрать.

( Seriously - это надо умудрится )