Word: izvestia
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Precisely at 3 p.m. in a slate grey, glass-fronted, six-story building on Moscow's Pushkin Square, the subeditors and department heads of Izvestia (Information) trooped into the office of Editor in Chief Konstantin A. Gubin for the planyorka, or editorial conference. At the same time, 14 blocks north, Pavel A. Satyukov, editor in chief of Pravda (Truth), Moscow's other big morning paper, summoned the top members of his staff. There was no debate over policy. There was some debate about space allotments, e.g., between the Department of Propaganda and the Department of Soviet Constructions...
...just that way last week ran one editorial day after another for two of the most powerful editorial voices in the world-Izvestia (circ. 1,800,000), official organ of the 15 Soviet states, and Pravda (circ. 5,560,000), the mouthpiece of the Communist Party. While Pravda and Izvestia are two of the most widely known of all press names, their behind-the-walls operation is perhaps the least understood...
Making a Profit. Physically, both papers resemble U.S. newspaper establishments, down to the electric-lighted news streamer, flowing endlessly in the Cyrillic alphabet, along the top of Izvestia's façade. Their newsmen earn surprisingly good salaries: a junior reporter on Pravda 's local 120-man staff gets 1,500 rubles ($375) a month base pay, plus an average of $250 more in space rates. Besides this
Though smaller (60 Moscow newsmen, 65 correspondents in Russia and ten abroad), Izvestia is every bit as profitable as big brother: on a recent visit to this country, Assistant Editor A. G. Baulin confided to a U.S. publisher that the paper reaps an annual profit of $10 million, clears 2? on every copy it sells...
...true Western parallel exists for Pravda or Izvestia, or indeed, for the Soviet press as a whole. Each day, it spews 57 million copies of 7,686 papers across the land. Identical in size-18½ in. by 23½ in., four to six pages-all are of such a numbing editorial sameness that E. A. Lazebnik, deputy director of propaganda for the party Central Committee in the Ukraine, was moved in 1956 to complain with singular bluntness: "If one were to conceal the names of newspapers, it would be almost impossible to tell which is which...