In what seems now like a different era but was actually less than a year ago, the fledgling independent Soviet news agency Interfax come under intensified political and financial pressure from state (Gostelradio) authorities and was subsequently assisted by Boris Yeltsin and the Moscow City Soviet ("A New Soviet Source," CJR, March/April 1991). It has continued to supply Moscow-based foreign journalists with its economic, political, and cultural news bulletins, distributed mostly by facsimile in English and Russian.

Its good luck continued when it hooked up with a U.S. distributor just in time for the failed coup in the U.S.S.R. in August. A small Denver publishing firm, DGL International Publishing, which specializes in publishing technical information about mining, petroleum, and agriculture, had agreed to distribute Interfax bulletins. Distribution was set to start in September. However when DGL president Pamela Lush went to her office after learning of the coup, she found Interfax bulletins already flowing through the new computer linkup. She and her staff of fourteen immediately began to distribute the bulletins to news organizations, Fortune 500 companies, and, Lush says, the White House.

Interfax, meanwhile, is anticipating vigorous competition from Tass, the once-lumbering official news agency that is expected to reshape itself under Vitaly Ignatenko, Gorbachev's energetic former press secretary.

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