Главная страница «Первого сентября»Главная страница журнала «Английский язык»Содержание №24/2002

YOUTH ENGLISH SECTION

The YES Page Editor’s Career

When we started this page, it was designed as a page prepared by students and for students. And never during its existence have we broken this rule. I hope this tradition won’t change. And therefore, now, when I have graduated from MSU and am no longer a student, I have also to cease being the editor of this page. In the following article I will tell about the years of my honest hard work.
I also want to say “thank you” to Alyona Gromushkina, Chief Editor of English, and all the staff of English, who have to work with our articles – which obviously contain many mistakes, and therefore require more correcting, than the articles for the other fifteen pages.
The new editor of YES page is Nika Osadtchaia. If for some reason you want to contact me personally, you’re always welcome to send e-mail to: yusup@fmradio.ru.

We can say that this story began when we – Svetlana Anurova, who was the editor of this page, Natalya Khmelik, our advisor, and I, deputy editor – decided to change the format of the YES page. Our idea was to limit the size of our articles, so that each page was to contain at least four articles devoted to different subjects. It was obvious that this format would make the page more interesting…though it’s much harder to find four small interesting articles, than to find one which is large, if not necessarily interesting. And I was very glad that I was only deputy editor, and therefore wasn’t responsible for anything.

So you can imagine my terror when about two months later Svetlana told us that she was going to France to prepare her diploma. I tried to find someone who would be able to replace her; but it proved to be impossible. Nobody wanted this responsibility…that’s how I became the editor of the YES page.

My career started from the action necessary for any chief – with forming a team. The first person I needed was an art-director, as I never was a good designer and wanted to have recommendations on how our page should look. Probably this task was the first which I didn’t fulfil – those persons who tried to be our art-directors, after several issues decided that it would be better to disappear than to continue their work.

One of the main obstacles on my way was the lack of articles. Everyone told me: don’t wait for authors to invent something interesting, invent a topic by yourself, and ask them to write an article on this topic. But it’s also not an easy task – to invent three or four topics every week. And when Natalya Khmelik founded a journalist seminar for students, it was a great help for me. The topics invented by them can be found almost everywhere in our page – starting from most articles, and finishing with the subjects of discussions. And the participants of this seminar – Agatha, Olga Doctorova, Pavel Stroilov, Kassy M. and others – are among our best and most interesting authors.

The person I found – and I was very glad to find – was Lena Kuzminykh, who worked with me for more than a year, helping to choose good articles and to correct them. Her work almost allowed me to again become a deputy editor…with one difference – now I was the person who was responsible for this page. But with Lena it was rather easy, and the year she worked with us was probably the best time for our page. You probably guess what happened then – Lena left for Germany, to prepare her diploma. It’s luck that I prepared my diploma in Moscow.

Fortunately, I didn’t work alone for long – Nika Osadtchaia appeared, who (at last!) replaces me in this position. And I am able to take a rest from the main problem of all editors –authors who never hand in their articles by the deadline.