BBC Russia launches online history archives

The website of the BBC Russian service – bbcrussian.com – launched an archive of significant historical radio programs from the past 45 years today. Among the voices featured in the audio archive are Alexander Kerensky, Prime Minister during the 1917 Russian Revolution; Nobel Laureates for Literature Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky; one of Russia’s great poets Anna Akhmatova; and Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva.
It also features former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and former Beatle Paul McCartney – both of whom took part in live phone-ins with audiences in the USSR in the Eighties.
The archive – which can be accessed through the radio page on bbcrussian.com – brings together more than 50 hours of audio from nearly half a century. It is divided into sections on Culture, Society, Britain, History and Music.
The oldest recording in the archive is BBC Russian’s coverage of the funeral of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1965. First recorded in 1982, author Alexander Solzhenitsyn reads his seminal work One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich. More recently, there are archive recordings of Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist who was murdered in 2006 in Moscow. There are also many recordings of the BBC Russian commentator Anatoly Goldberg who, for many generations of listeners in the Soviet Union, was a household name.
Among the programmes, clips and speeches are old editions of iconic programmes like Sevaoborot – featuring legendary broadcaster Seva Novgorodsev – Citizen Of The World, and London A-Z.
Sarah Gibson, Head of BBC Russian, says: “The Russian service continues to take pride in the range of topical voices it puts on air. This archive will allow a new generation to hear some of the pivotal events and people which have appeared on the BBC in Russian, many of whom have had a profound impact on Russian life over the last century.”
Now that the vintage programmes have been digitised, BBC Russian plans to donate the original tapes of its historical archive to the Hoover Institution in the United States.
(Source: BBC World Service International Publicity/R Netherlands Media Network Weblog)

BBC's Russian service website relaunched

The website for the BBC's Russian service, BBCRussian.com, has become the latest of the 33 World Service language sites to relaunch.

The page is now over 20 percent wider, giving more space - a full 214 extra pixels, in fact - to showcase the very best of the BBC's Russian language output.

In particular, a new Rolling News index has been added - which allows users to see the latest news stories as they are published onto the site - a first for the BBC language services.

"We are publishing six to eight short stories an hour to reflect the news as it comes in," explains Dmitry Shishkin, editor of BBCRussian.com.

"This is another feature very popular in the Russian market where the audience clearly needs it. We tried to boost the video and interactive presence as well as keeping a very significant amount of news stories and analysis on the front page."

Perfect platform

As a result, there is now more video available than ever within a single click on the site. This will soon be followed by new indexes for all of the Russian radio programmes.

"We always distinguished ourselves as being the only news site in Russian which gives the user the ultimate multiplatform experience. When a big story breaks the user reading our text story is also able to watch an embedded video, a picture gallery, to read and/or contribute to a forum on the issue, to listen to the radio discussion, and to comment on a blog," says Dmitri.

"The new site is a perfect platform for this task."

It follows the BBC World Service sites for English, Vietnamese, Spanish, Persian, Urdu and Portuguese.

"It was always our great disadvantage that the old site looked really different in comparison to the competitors' sites," Dmitry adds.

"We simply looked unusual and rather dated, the site was too compact in Russian terms - the market there is used to very long front pages. So we wanted to address that when we discussed the redesign."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2009/04/090421_russian_site_launch_story.shtml (ADXC, Chennai, India)