By Dominic Swire

For the Post

Evgeniy Kouzminz, who runs Internet projects at a television station in Blagoveshchensk, Russia, recalls a distinct impression from his training period in February as one of the first interns at Transitions Online.

"Although we have cheap Internet in Moscow, in the Far East we pay $1,000 per month — about 10 to 30 times more than over here — and have many restrictions. The high cost means that our readers are only bureaucrats or the very rich, but we want more local people to read our site."

His observation underscores the obstacles to free speech still remaining for journalists throughout Central Europe and the East. Others are a lack of the skills, experience and funds to fully develop online reporting.

Enter Transitions Online (TOL), the small but stalwart media development organization based on a Žižkov side street. To address issues like these, the organization is offering 12 three-week intensive training internships for Russian-speaking Internet journalists over the next few months.

During Kouzminz's studies, the group learned how to launch and run an Internet publication and made several visits to local media including Radio Free Europe and the offices of Czech daily Mladá fronta Dnes. The course proved so popular that over 70 applicants competed for just 12 places.

Other educational projects run by TOL include an internship and training program for Romany journalists from Central and East European countries; online journalism training for Russians in cooperation with the BBC's World Trust; and a conference addressing the quality of education coverage in post-communist countries.

TOL is best known, of course, for its online magazine covering the changes in the post-communist world with most of the content written by local journalists from the region. This dual role of publishing and training can make the organization difficult to grasp for some.

"I always have a problem explaining," says Executive Director Jeremy Drucker, "because we're both a media organization and a training institute, and in many ways the projects we run overlap and build on each other. Actually, we're both these things with the overall mission of trying to improve the coverage of Central and Eastern Europe and use local journalists from the region."

TOL's history dates back to the early '90s when it existed as Transitions, a print magazine covering the post-communist countries of Europe and Central Asia. It was solely funded by the Soros Foundation but as this money dried up, the magazine were forced to close in 1999.

According to Drucker, who has been at TOL from the start, "The magazine always had a good reputation but had problems developing a business plan and getting diversity funders. A group of us decided it was a real waste for the magazine to shrivel up and die, so we moved to the Internet and we've been going since then."

Over time, TOL has built up a formidable archive of tens of thousands of stories with about 80 percent written by journalists from the region, a point Drucker says is key.

"We're trying to encourage local journalists to get out their opinions and analyses on events to an international audience. ... It's a different perspective that we're constantly trying to nurture, allowing voices that would not normally be heard on an international level to be heard and give them a platform for opinions and topics that might be hard to cover in local media."

The projects are now chiefly funded by about a dozen donors, mainly private U.S. foundations and European governments, plus some agencies like SIDA, the Swedish development agency. But grants don't cover all TOL costs, so the organization also generates revenue through subscriptions and advertising.

"What we're doing," explains Drucker, "is trying to come up with a model of self sustainability for an Internet publication, which is very challenging and very few people around the world have had any success with it. The income we generate has been going up every year and we hope we're on the way to developing a model that other Internet publications can emulate."

Future plans also involve a large blogging project in both English and local languages. Drucker hopes this will add a nice alternative to TOL's content, providing a greater insight along with more opinionated views than in traditional reporting.

But perhaps the greatest challenge is promoting this new kind of journalism in places that lack the infrastructure for free online media.