For those of us in print publishing, it may feel like the end is near. And it may be so. The internet is an unruly place for content sharing, and social media algorithms continue to replace human news editors. Consumers primarily want free information, creating special challenges for companies in the information business.
Despite all this, one Minnesota company has been able to largely avoid influence from Big Tech, Google and others. With extensive global connections and a deep history with publishers in the eastern part of the world dating back to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Minnetonka-based East View Companies has maintained small but steady growth over the years.
“When this big asteroid of Big Tech hit, if mainstream media was a tyrannosaurus or a brontosaurus, we turned out to be little rats in a crevasse or gophers in a hole.” Eastview co-founder Kent Lee said in an interview. TCB. “It's like one day we come back out of the hole and all the dinosaurs are dead and we're still here.”
With most of its content originating directly from the eastern part of the world, the company has secured a niche market in which it operates without the visibility of most Western countries. The company maintains a strong customer base of academic institutions, government agencies, corporations, public and federal libraries, and law firms. “Most of our information is captured and provided in raw form, which has driven us into obscurity,” Lee joked.
However, the company has been back in the spotlight in recent months. In December, Eastview received a trade award from Gov. Tim Walz. In February, the company's map division, Eastview Map Link, acquired Benchmark Maps, a map publisher known for its detailed reproductions of atlases and maps from the American West and beyond.
One of Eastview's mottos is “Providing extraordinary information from extraordinary sources.”
“The kind of oxygen that would kill or transform a Tyrannosaurus doesn't affect us all that much. To be honest, we also know that the rotting carcasses of Tyrannosaurus feed our largest database. Yes,” Lee said. “Our biggest product is dead newspapers.”
Bringing the scenery of the East to the West
Founded in 1989 by Lee and his partner Dima Frangulov, East View was launched after a series of kismet meetings between the two. Frangulov, a translator and Soviet military expert, was born in Georgia when the country was under Soviet rule. But when I first meet Lee, he's working in New York and spending his time researching “Evil Americans.” Born in Minnesota, Lee was researching the “evil Soviet Union.”
When the company first started, its product line was limited to what Mr. Lee and Mr. Franglof were already familiar with. “We knew about foreign policy, public policy and security research,” Lee said.
East View's first product was the complete collection and long-running military magazine Voennaia Mysl. The company's first customers were Columbia University and the U.S. Army Overseas Military Research Agency, both of which purchased copies of the entire Voenaya Mysr collection. From there, the company began selling magazines to more universities and soon decided to expand past military magazines. Meanwhile, new newspapers and press freedom were on the rise in the former Soviet-controlled countries. “Editors and journalists began to smell the sweet scent of freedom,” Franglov said in his in-house documentary titled “East Side Story.”
The company eventually expanded to include publications covering science, technology, agriculture, social sciences, humanities, and more. But East View's initial goal was to share information obtained directly from each country in its native language.
“Here is the view to the east. These are local authoritative newspapers, magazines, books, later databases, later maps, later scientific publications, which were published in their native languages by these very local communities.'' It's a thing,” Lee said. Kent pointed out that the biggest challenge for non-Russians and non-Chinese people seeking information from Russian and Chinese sources is that those sources simply aren't in their language. “You have a language block.”
Currently, East View has a wide range of languages available, including Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Ukrainian, and Yoruba. We have staff who can speak to you. East View was headquartered in Minnesota in 1990, but also operates offices in Moscow, Kiev, Nairobi, Beijing and Hong Kong. The company's services range from helping librarians select books for collection to building entire databases. The company works with publishers to digitize content. As technology advances, it has also become easier to add English translations to your database.
Franglof emphasized that Eastview is not primarily a content creator. We are in the business of providing access to a diverse range of content and audio by preserving existing content and making it available worldwide. As conflict escalates in these Eastern Bloc countries, Eastview remains steadfast in its mission to capture and preserve information. Franglov said the recent sanctions have had minimal impact on Eastview. For example, Canada announced some specific sanctions policies against certain newspapers. As a supplier, these sanctions require East View to notify its customers of these sanctions. It is up to each library to decide whether or not they wish to continue receiving articles.
“We're trying to bring diversity to our academics and researchers,” he says. “We try to present different aspects of newspapers and news in a country. We show Russian and Ukrainian government publications and those of their opponents so that readers themselves can see different views on the same subject. You can select and compare.
Looking to the future, Frangulov said he is dabbling in artificial intelligence to translate major Russian newspapers into English. For now, this is just a pilot project. “This allows us to widen the range of people who use our services.”
Franglof, who is a translator by trade, can evaluate the accuracy of AI translations. He noted that poetry and novels remain a challenge for AI translators. However, he said scientific journals can be translated accurately using this technology.
Meanwhile, the company's recent acquisition of Benchmark Maps signals further growth in another niche. When East View was launched 35 years ago, the map was not part of the East View product line. But through its connections with people in the former Soviet Union, Eastview had unique access to research in the former Soviet Union that was largely secret before it collapsed, Lee said. This included comprehensive mapping.
“Our work is very international, as we started with a product line based on large-scale products created by the Soviet military on a global scale,” said Lee. He said this during a panel discussion held last month by East West Connections, a Minnesota-based nonprofit organization. Citizens of the United States, Russia, and former Soviet Union countries. “During the Cold War, the Soviet Union not only produced more maps, but also produced perhaps the highest quality topographical maps on earth, including maps of the Twin Cities and Duluth. Both are historically fascinating and now… But in a nutshell, our global work on Soviet military maps has helped hundreds of local I have decided to contact the publisher of
Maps became part of East View's product line in the mid-1990s. “This became a very prominent product line, and we had a very different customer base than traditional academic libraries.” It was also used by organizations seeking to learn more about the ocean and the North and South Poles.
Moving forward in the publishing industry has proven to be a difficult task for many, but East View remains on solid footing. Lee and Franglov remain hopeful for the future and remain dedicated to preserving and archiving information from around the world.
There will always be an academic audience interested in history and a global perspective, Lee said.
“The World Wide Web can make you think you don't actually need any more information. You're fine here. But that's not the case. In fact, that's not the case,” he said. . “It's like being fed macaroni and cheese every day and thinking nothing's going to change. That's a tragedy. You're going to miss out on a lot of good food.”
