Meg Bortin cooks, writes and remembers Moscow times

Meg Bortin - Paris, London World Desk and Moscow during six years with Reuters in the 1980s - cooks fabulous French cuisine and now she writes about it every day on her new blog. She has also been remembering her crucial role in helping to setting up the English-language daily newspaper The Moscow Times 20 years ago this week when Russia was still very much the new frontier.

“I was hired by Bob Evans and worked for him in both Paris and Moscow, although Charles Bremner was bureau chief for my first three months in Moscow,” she told The Baron. “I have to say that not just Bob Evans but also John Morrison and his wife, Penny, were instrumental in my decision to consider going to Moscow. It was a very foreign place for an American raised during the Cold War - we saw it as the dark side of the moon - but John, who had just left his post as Moscow bureau chief when I met him in Paris, spoke with such warmth and humour about his life in the Soviet Union that I couldn’t resist the challenge.”

Upon leaving Reuters, Bortin joined the International Herald Tribune, where she worked for three years editing international news before returning to Moscow to participate as founding editor in the launch of the daily edition of The Moscow Times, Russia's first independent daily in English.

“Twenty years is a long time, and it is extremely gratifying to see that the paper has continued to exist and thrive over the years,” she wrote in a recollection of those days, published on Monday [How The Moscow Times was born 20 years ago]. She recalled what it was like to start an independent paper in the Russia of those days - a Russia that had just been reborn as an independent country - “and some thoughts about what it means to edit a newspaper in a place where the Kremlin continues to cast a long shadow, even if censorship has theoretically ceased to exist...

“When I took the helm as founding editor-in-chief of The Moscow Times, I viewed my job's main challenge as helping readers understand a complex world. And that is still the challenge. It means striving for accuracy but also for fairness. It means organizing the pages in a way that makes sense of the confusing issues swirling around us. It means taking a clear editorial stand on the opinion pages, the one place where the editor may say how he or she views the news.”

After a two-year stint there she returned to Paris and eventually to the IHT where she held many positions, notably serving as assignment editor for the paper’s reporters in Europe. Towards the end of her IHT career she created and launched the paper’s international edition of T, the New York Times style magazine.

Since leaving the IHT at the start of 2010 Bortin has been working independently on a couple of writing projects: a memoir and a cook book. Her most recent endeavour was the launch last month of her website The Everyday French Chef, described as the modern cook’s guide to producing fabulous French cuisine using simple and authentic recipes and without spending hours in the kitchen, for which she now writes every day. ■