Russian “Ad-Hoc” Journalism

Abstract

Any civic project naturally seeks an effective means of spreading the word about its activities. Sometimes, such projects are able to create a system, in which a large nmber of people take part in collecting primary information, processing, enriching, verifying and interpreting it, and in distributing the finished product. The latter is particularly important and useful given external pressure from the state and its coercive apparatus. This ‘exit’ point for information is always the most vulnerable in any voluntary community that is forced to withstand aggressive pressure from the state’s oversight and law-enforcement structures. It is technically possible to create a distributed, decentralized working environment (a dispersed ‘office’ or ‘newsroom’), in which workers are not physically proximate to one another. It is also possible to store information, materials, work-in-progress and finished products on remote or distributed servers. Indeed, any organization can be spatially ‘dispersed’. All of these methods are well-known and widely used by those who have reason to fear external intrusion into their work processes. But the finished informational product is still a concrete website with a unique address, and that is what is most vulnerable: it can be easily blocked, most simply by the internet providers themselves. However, it turns out that ‘populous’ civic projects are best positioned to overcome this threat. Each participant in the community de facto becomes an element in a distributed system, through which the community can publish the results of its work. It thus becomes possible to organize not only a decentralized ‘entry point’ for information, but a decentralized ‘exit point’ as well.