NYTimes Builds Bridge to Russia on LiveJournal

"The New York Times in Russian. Tell Americans and the entire world about Russia."

The New York Times has started an interesting project on LiveJournal (LJ), one of the first blogging platforms that was recently sold to a Russian company. The newspaper picks an article about Russia, translates it in Russian, posts it on a LJ, solicits comments, than translates the comments back to English and posts it under the original article. The newspaper's editors moderating the site promised, "You'll see that we are not afraid of critisism and willl post a large number of negative comments in our address."

The first and so far the only article about the upcoming elections has attracted 1780 comments from mostly angry Russians. About 140 of the most civil were translated back. Here's one of them: "I read the first paragraph [of the article] and it was enough. Sort out everything in your democracy first."