nn.netfirms.com was the website of the newspaper "Narodny Nablyudatel" ("The People's Observer"), a publication of the Nizhny Novgorod branch of the National Bolshevik Party. The editorial office was located in Nizhny Novgorod: the home page carried a notice that "the Nizhny Novgorod branch of the NBP needs a lawyer," with the phone number 92-84-50 and a contact person's name, and the print edition of the paper was to be found "at the kiosks and stalls of Regionalnaya Pressa LLC (Nizhny Novgorod)"[1]. Web Archive snapshots of the site cover the period from October 2003 to June 2009[3].

The publication had no domain of its own: the site occupied a subdomain of the hosting provider Netfirms, and right under the newspaper's masthead stood the platform's standard service line — "Web Hosting by Netfirms | Free Domain Names by Netfirms"[1].

What the site looked like

The home page was arranged as a table of contents for a print issue. The header read "'NARODNY NABLYUDATEL' No. 35 (September 2004)," and below it came a site search, a voting form, and the recurring boxes "quote of the issue" and "fact of the issue"[1]. The substantive material was divided into named sections: "the party's word," "captive of the dead," "caught our eye!," "our rhythm," "creativity," as well as "comments on the issue" and a press-service feed labeled as messages from the NBP's Nizhny Novgorod branch[1]. Each teaser broke off after the first paragraph and continued with an arrow-link to the full text.

Besides the teasers, the home page carried three standing notices: a search for a lawyer for the branch; an invitation to buy the newspaper "Generalnaya Liniya" ("Limonka") with its Nizhny Novgorod insert "Narodny Nablyudatel"; and an open call for collaboration — as the home page put it, the editorial office was seeking "journalists writing analysis on Nizhny Novgorod topics, as well as firms engaged in distributing periodicals"[1]. A separate block carried a call to sign an open letter to the president in support of convicted party activists, dated 26 January 2005; according to the page text, the signature drive was run by the editorial office of the publishing house "Ultra.Kultura," headed by Ilya Kormiltsev[1].

Nizhny Novgorod content

Party publicism on the site was interspersed with local material. The "caught our eye!" section covered the story that the Nizhny Novgorod Pushkin Opera and Ballet Theatre was about to sign a contract with the singer Nikolai Baskov, who had shortly before been removed from the Bolshoi Theatre's staff[1]. The music section "our rhythm" carried a review of a Chorny Lukich concert in Nizhny Novgorod on 22 July 2004, which the author described as subjective impressions rather than a formal review[1]. The "creativity" section opened with a piece about a two-day online discussion around an article on the site sarov.ru devoted to an inscription that appeared on 3 August on the office of the Sarov branch of "United Russia"[1]. Thus the publication covered the whole region, not only the regional capital, and engaged in polemics with other local sites.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site was listed in the thematic directory of the nn.ru catalog — which is how it came to be included in this study of defunct Nizhny Novgorod sites. At the same time it held no notable place in the measurable part of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet: the domain does not appear in the surviving Counter.nn.ru samples on which the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating is based, and no votes for it are recorded in our data. The surviving results table of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day lists neither the domain nor the newspaper's name[2]. Judging by the home page itself, the publication drew its readers chiefly through the print insert and kiosk retail, rather than through city counters and contests[1].

How it closed

The site was not taken down at any single moment — it simply froze. In the snapshot made on 9 May 2008, the home page still displayed issue No. 35 from September 2004, and the latest dated entry on the page was from January 2005[1]. That is, for the last three and a half years of its existence the address served up an unchanging page four years out of date. The Web Archive index for the home page lists 34 snapshots; the last of them is dated 1 June 2009[3]. No further trace of the site survives; the second-level domain netfirms.com belonged to the hosting provider, and all that remains of the Nizhny Novgorod publication is archived copies of its home page.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2008 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet vote, 2004 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Index of nn.netfirms.com snapshots in the Web Archive (archive)