A young press corps

Journalism in the Baltic nations Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania - is struggling hard to shuck off the horrors of a half-century of Soviet oppression, coercion, and censorship. So far - eight years after independence - the results are depressingly mixed. Scores of new publications are thrashing about to attract readers in the giddy new atmosphere of freedom - but only a handful of journalists know how a robust free press is supposed to operate. In Estonia's capital city of Tallinn, 29-year-old Marko Mihkelson, editor-in-chief of Postimees, the country's most successful daily, laments: "If we put all the journalists in this country together, we'd have enough for one excellent newspaper."

One hundred eighty miles to the south in Riga, capital of Latvia, 35-year-old, American-born, Harvard-educated Paul Rausteps, managing editor of Diena, Latvia's dominant daily, worries that the country's journalists "are still not professionals." They have "the objectivity of a parrot," retailing quotes "from whoever is giving a press conference" with no effort to provide context - because the reporters themselves don't understand the issues. Another nagging problem: some owners and editors have taken payoffs from companies for favorable stories.

At The Baltic Times, an English-language weekly with offices in all three capitals (including Vilnius, Lithuania), New Jersey-born (two years on The Bergen Record), 26-year-old Steven Johnson believes that since the "awakening" from Soviet dictatorship, most people "don't even know what the role of a newspaper is."

The Baltic press corps is probably the world's youngest. A recent round of visits to leading newspapers and magazines found newsrooms filled with twentysomethings, most of them eager but sadly miscast Few journalists who thrived during the Soviet period, when all publications were state-owned and controlled by the Communist party, have made the transition gracefully from those bad old days nor have they been asked to.

Readership is down sharply since independence, even as journals have proliferated wildly and competition grows ever more fierce. That's because newspapers and magazines were much cheaper under the Soviets, thanks to state subsidized paper and printing costs; and because many wage earners now average as little as $300 a month and can't afford to buy many publications.

Reporters and editors are simply "hired off the street," says Inta Brikse, head of the University of Latvia's journalism department Still, they're paid a premium wage because too many news organizations are chasing too few potential staffers. It's a sellers' market -- which helps explain why young Americans like Rausteps and Johnson are in top editorial jobs. "I was an actor with no news experience," Rausteps admits, "but I knew a little more than anybody here." Johnson was traveling in Europe looking for editorial work and was "hired on the spot" when he applied at The Baltic Times.

Tough investigative reporting, killed under the Soviets, is still virtually nonexistent. No Freedom of Information laws help reporters acquire official documents. Says Tarmu Tammerk, managing director of the Estonian Newspaper Association: "Bureaucrats simply tell journalists, `Where is it written that I must give you this information?"' The association is working to draft westernstyle FOI rules.

Peculiarly, news media in the Baltics rank among the institutions the public trusts most, despite the generally low level of talent In one recent mini-scandal, the Russian-language paper Respublica printed an "exclusive" interview with NATO secretary general Javier Solana, replete with extended quotations. Solana denied ever giving the interview. The reporter confessed he'd culled Solana's words from old press conferences. All three Baltic nations have large Russian populations - farm and factory workers, and Russian troops and their families who came there during the postWorld War II forced "Russification" programs. (Latvia's 2.4 million people, for example, include 720,000 Russians.) Most of those are unintegrated into their Baltic hosts' cultures and require their own Russian language publications, of which there are dozens.

In January, Latvia's Diena began producing a Russian-language spin-off with content drawn from its own pages. Its 33-year-old editor, Anna Stroja, says that papers owned by Russians are "primitive" by Baltic standards. "They propagandize. They don't separate fact from fiction. It's a very big problem."

In Estonia, many of the leading publications are foreign-owned. Schibsted, the Norwegian conglomerate, owns Postimees and a string of other papers and magazines, including Luup, a Time look-alike. Bonnier, the Swedish media corporation, is heavily invested in a competing chain, which includes the lively, large-format newsmagazine Eesti Ekspress and the second largest daily, Eesti Pevaleht. Do those foreign owners interfere in editorial affairs? "Absolutely not!" says Postimees's Mihkelson. "We are independent politically. The owners don't order us to write about Norwegian skiers or Norwegian salmon."