23 Dec 2005 15:24

Interfax Awards Boris Grishchenko Scholarship 2006 to Olga Salabai

Interfax Information Services Group and the Journalism Department of the Lomonosov State University in Moscow have awarded the Boris Grishchenko Scholarship to Olga Salabai, a fourth-year student at the Department.

"We are very pleased that the standards of the copies that was submitted for competition is not going down and that their authors, who are at the very outset of their careers, already excellently know their way around in the subjects they have chosen and are in a position to be equal rivals to aces of business news journalism," said Mikhail Komissar, Chairman of the board of Interfax Group. "I am sure that the competition instituted by us will continue to arouse as much interest and will open up for the younger generation of journalists the road to the heights of the profession."
The main criteria were the quality of the copy submitted by the candidates - at least 20 articles published in the media - and successful performance during the semester that is coming to an end.
Salabai submitted for the competition a series of financial and economic news reports that had been published on the wires of Russian and foreign news agencies and two full-scale interviews - one with Sergei Kruglik, head of the Russian Federal Agency for Construction, Housing and Public Utilities (Rosstroi), and Viktor Kislov, deputy head of the Russian Federal Agency for the Real Estate Register (Rosnedvizhimost).
News reports by Salabai have been repeatedly reprinted in national federal newspapers and widely quoted in news programs on radio stations such as Ekho Moskvy and Mayak 24.

The Grishchenko Scholarship was instituted by Interfax last year to commemorate Boris Grishchenko, who worked in news journalism for nearly 40 years.
Grishchenko, who was born on June 1, 1937, and died on April 21, 2004, joined the Leningrad branch of the Soviet news agency TASS in 1966, and in 1970 became a political observer at the Moscow office of TASS.
He joined Interfax in 1991, a short while after the agency came into being, and was one of its top managers until his death.
For many years, Grishchenko worked as a "Kremlin pool" correspondent and had a good knowledge of life inside the Kremlin from the times of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev to the present day.
In 1999, the Russian leadership awarded him the Order of Honor.
Only one Grishchenko Scholarship may be awarded each semester. A candidate must be a student who is a trainee journalist and has his or her candidacy approved by a commission, three of whose members represent the university and, three Interfax.
***Interfax Information Services Group produces news and means of communication used in decision-making in politics and business.
Since the early 1990s, Interfax has been the main source of current news on Russia and the rest of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) for the international community, has invariably been the main source of reference for reports from this part of the world in the foreign press, and has been one of the world‘s most frequent sources of current information.
In recent years, Interfax has become the leading source of political and financial news from European emerging markets and from China.
Interfax Group brings together about 30 companies. Its network, which covers all of Russia and CIS countries and extends to China and some Central and Eastern European states, includes national, regional and specialist news agencies.

For more detailed information on the Group see the www.interfax.ru and www.interfax.com websites.