Guiding Lines: A Quiet Haven for Boisterous Work

Many are not ready to. The employees at the Parlant publishing house that issues the stylish L’Officiel edition seemed terribly embarrassed when they had to invite the author to their office in the rundown southern suburbs of Moscow, on Varshavskoye Shosse [motorway], two bus stops away from the Tulskaya metro station, to pick up his royalties.

At our Independent Media editorial office, before the house changed its name to Independent Media Sanoma Magazines, we, too, used to miss our freelancers terribly, for the same reason. The previous location of our office – on Vyborgskaya Street – seemed (and still seems to us, here at a new, no less remote, location) seemed to be in the middle of nowhere.

A place even slightly reminiscent, say, of Fleet Street in London, is something Russian journalists can only dream about.

The times when media companies, with the exception of a select few, “were sitting”, i.e. occupied offices in central Moscow, within the Garden Ring, it seems, are gone forever.

For the time being, Izvestia’s publishers have managed to hold on to their offices on Pushkin Square, where some of the reporters have up to 40sqm of precious office space to themselves; albeit bent on boosting profits, the new landlord has yet to evict Afisha Industries from a mansion in Bolshoi Gnezdnikovsky Lane; the Conde Nast publishing house continues to foot the bills for the upper stores of a fur fridge – a special facility where city residents store their fur coats to protect them from moths – on Bolshaya Dmitrovka street.

They are either rare survivors or rising stars, so to say, newly established media outlets. Curiously, editorial offices of such old-time literature magazines as Znamya, Novy Mir or Moskva retain their positions in the city center – on Malaya Bronnaya, in Malyi Putinkovsky Lane and in Stary Arbat respectively – despite “the ever diminishing interest in genuine literature on the part of the audience”.

Many perceived the relocation of the Moskovskiye Novosti weekly from Pushkin Square to – Oh, God, how cruel fate is! – Zagorodnoye Shosse (in southern Moscow). The building they occupied was the last one where both the letter and the spirit of Soviet journalism had been preserved. How could I ever forget MN observer Natalia Kraminova treating me to cup of coffee – a luxury in perestroika days – by boiling water with an immersion heater; or Alexander Kabakov, a wonderful man, and our jovial drinking parties, which it seemed would never come to an end.

But the end came, because, to the grave disappointment of the employees, publishing houses opted to cut costs instead of boosting revenues.

From my conversations with people seeking to work for me, I have learned that the location of the office is the most important issue for many. Choosing between the stylish restaurants such as Vogue, Gallery, Aist or Pavilion as a venue for business lunch is one thing. It’s quite another matter when the choice is limited to a fast-food joint Kroshka-Kartoshka and a shabby diner called Yeda (“Meal” in Russian). Unfortunately, few employers understand that well enough to speed up relocation to the Central Administrative District.

Moscow has seen a number of efforts to bring the editorial offices of print media under one roof. There was the House of Russian Press – an utter failure of a building – later taken over by the Federation Council (the upper house of the Russian parliament). Independent Media and Prof-Media for a while nurtured ambitious plans to join their offices under one roof on the premises of the Pravda publishing complex in Bumazhny Proyezd.

The idea of building a media tower within the Moscow City Business Center occurs to the city hall every now and then. I have mixed feelings about the project. On the one hand, it would be very convenient to order articles from colleagues from other editions, moonlighting during free time. Rumors, too, would spread much faster.

On the other hand, should a new GKChP (or State Emergency Situation Committee, that staged an abortive coup attempt in the early 1990s) attempt another coup and seek to do in the entire media fraternity with one blow, that task would be fairly easy. It seems that those in power these days, considering their distrust of the freedom of speech, should not be tempted unnecessarily.

Germany, for example, pays more attention to the problem of office accommodation for journalists, advertising agents and their support staff, rightly believing that the media market is experiencing a boom and that that boom is likely to continue for at least a decade. The market offers the opportunity to make good money. A group of private investors in the charming town of D?sseldorf, never in its history plagued by Communism, even developed a district called Media Port, or Media Hafen, a couple of years ago.

Old port docks destroyed in the bombing raids of Word War II were replaced with a town of glass and concrete where each property is an architectural masterpiece, and are now waiting for the arrival of tenants.

An example of some of the investment involved – the crowing of the project, so to say – is the recently commissioned SAS Media Harbour Hotel, worth 220 million euros. That money would have sufficed to build three similar hotels in other cities, beyond the media field. But the investor, an elderly gentleman wearing expensive clothes, is convinced that by being located in the media city the project will pay back much quicker. And others agree with him, because 60 percent of the offices, still filled with the aroma of fresh paint and laminated plastic, have already been filled by new tenants.

Of those tenants, 70 percent are directly linked to the press. They are the editorial offices of local papers, magazines, design studios, advertising agents, headquarters of radio stations and media distributors. The biggest disadvantage, in my humble opinion, is that there is no Japanese restaurant there. But residential quarters for press workers, to be developed during the second phase of the project, will feature catering facilities of all kinds. For those working there choosing the venue for a business lunch will not be a problem.