Lloyd Donaldson moved to St. Petersburg in 1993 in a borrowed coat with a huge hole on its right side — and put nearly his last $300 into an English-language newspaper.
Called The St. Petersburg Press, the paper soon turned into a successful operation that was sold in 1996 at a profit to Independent Media, the parent company of The Moscow Times. Rebranded as The St. Petersburg Times, the newspaper is published to this day with a biweekly circulation of 16,000.
Donaldson, who died suddenly in Britain on June 26 at the age of 46, is remembered by friends and former colleagues as an adventurous foreigner who arrived in Russia during the heady days of the early 1990s with a desire to make a difference — and succeeded.
Donaldson, a New Zealander, was working as a freelancer in London as the August 1991 coup of Soviet hardliners unfolded in Moscow, and he sold Britain's Daily Telegraph a story in which a new Russian friend, Grigory Kunis, retold his experience in the Soviet army. When the newspaper asked for photos, Donaldson bought a Soviet uniform from London street sellers and convinced Kunis to pose in it.
"We made good money, which we later invested into the founding of the newspaper," said Kunis, who co-founded The St. Petersburg Press with Donaldson.
Donaldson then covered the war in the former Yugoslavia before resettling in St. Petersburg, where he and Kunis set up a small publishing house called Cornerstone.
Its founding documents were signed by the city official responsible for joint ventures with foreign capital. His name was Vladimir Putin.
A teetotaler vegan from New Zealand, Donaldson had a colorful career before he arrived in Russia, having worked as a forklift driver and burger flipper before turning to journalism in Western Australia.
Donaldson's willingness to take risks — a trait that brought him to Russia — was perhaps best illustrated in how he got the job as a forklift driver at a warehouse.
The foreman came to the waiting room where Donaldson was sitting with three other applicants and asked, “Who can drive a forklift?” said longtime friend Geoff Crowhurst.
When none of the others replied, Lloyd quickly said, “I can”. He got the job on the spot.
"When the foreman left him with one of the other workers, Lloyd had to confess and got a crash course in forklift operation," Crowhurst said. "By the end of the week, he was driving it around like a pro".
Donaldson's next job was as a burger flipper in Fast Eddie’s Family Restaurant, where he worked until he was practically running the place, Crowhurst said. When the owners opened a new restaurant on the other side of the country, Donaldson was sent over to help manage it.
After that, Donaldson worked for a retirement foundation helping recent retirees plan their finances, health and lifestyle. After the foundation folded, he went to work for an oil and exploration company, where he read international newspapers, the Internet and other publications in order to compile briefs for the company’s clients.
It was there that he decided he wanted to be a journalist.
Donaldson started by writing two stories about local people and visited several local newspapers, asking for a job. A weekly paper called the Stirling Times hired him.
He learned quickly about the sometimes fickle tastes of readers when he wrote a passionate piece about the sentencing of sex offenders and waited expectantly for a flood of feedback.
"He got nothing, not a single phone call or letter to the editor," Crowhurst said. "The next week he wrote a story on the state government trying to move a public holiday to another day. His phone rang off the hook for the entire week.
"He learned, what was to him, a painful lesson on the public’s priorities," Crowhurst said.
Later Donaldson went to work for Western Australia’s second-largest paper, The Sunday Times, where friends said he was happy until the desire to move to Russia became too strong.
In Russia, Donaldson had ample opportunities to use both his journalistic penchant for adrenalin as well as his business skills.
He spent his 30th birthday in Abkhazia, watching the bodies of 127 executed soldiers exhumed from a mass grave. "It took days for the stench of rotting human flesh to leach out of my clothes," he later recalled.
Yevgenia Borisovna, who was with him on assignment in Abkhazia and later became a reporter with The Moscow Times, said Donaldson taught her how to be invisible in conflict zones, telling her that “a dead journalist will never write a story”.
As editor, he left a lasting impression on his staff of young Russian journalists who were discovering a free profession that had re-emerged after years of Soviet censorship.
"He was the first and the last in the office, working everything to perfection and some people to tears," Borisovna recalled.
He also impressed the foreigners. "Lloyd was, ultimately, one of the great moralists and humanists, a man who saw journalism as a way of not only recording, but of fighting the injustices and moral failings all around us," said Alistair Crighton from Scotland, who was the first journalist taken on.
Donaldson was "an inveterate voyeur of the lower strata of St. Petersburg society: the mafiosi, the whores, the drunks, the punks and the crooks," Crighton added.
The early 1990s were the days when the mafia was part of anybody's business in Russia — including newspapers.
"[Donaldson] resisted paying off the hoods, who used to turn up at the early offices in the city's Komsomolets Hotel with monotonous regularity," Crighton said.
He even mocked death threats by posting them on a newsroom notice board.
Donaldson banned escort ads, refusing a potentially lucrative income stream because that crossed a line.
This policy did not outlast him.
Donaldson later described the move from journalism to newspaper management as one of the hardest things he did in his career, because it required not just learning new skills but changing his entire way of thinking.
"Journalists who cannot or will not change make the worst possible newspaper directors," he wrote in a guidebook for the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers.
"I see a tremendous amount of leadership by former journalists but very little balanced management," he said, adding that often newspaper professionals in Russia and Eastern Europe lack management experience — particularly in budgeting and advertising.
Yet even as business manager, Donaldson retained a soft spot for the sort of journalism that is not necessarily popular with advertisers.
He used to snicker in hearty guilt at the weekly crimewatch column on the back page, detailing the latest horror stories from St. Petersburg's underworld, former colleague Garfield Reynolds said.
"He knew most of his advertisers hated it and that the guy who wrote it despised him but Lloyd couldn't stop admiring it or taking a perverse pride in it," he said.
After leaving Russia, Donaldson worked as a media consultant for various organizations.
He felt a sense of achievement during a trip to Croatia in 2002 when the publisher of Montenegro's Vjesti newspaper shared an issue with him that contained a section reminiscent of the St. Petersburg Times.
"I found a page of small adverts for restaurants which is unusual in the Balkans and which looked incredibly similar to what I did in St. Petersburg … and in fact that's where the idea came from," Donaldson later wrote in an e-mail.
It turned out that he had taught another Vjesti manager at an earlier seminar.
But the success of the early 1990s could hardly be repeated today in Russia, said Kunis, his former business partner who today is the publisher of the Norwegian-owned Moi Rayon chain of free local newspapers.
"Both in terms of attitude toward investment into print media and the money required to bring such a project to life — our country has become too costly," he said.
If you want to start a good newspaper without thinking too much about money, risks and returns, less-developed countries like Laos or Cambodia would be the place to go, he said.
Donaldson spent his last years in relief work. Since 2005, he worked as a special projects coordinator for London-based aid agency Merlin. Yet his dream to one day run a refugee camp did not materialize.
He died June 26, one day after collapsing during a visit to the famed pop festival at Glastonbury in western England. A cause of death was not given.
Donaldson is survived by his wife, Lena, and their daughter, Masha.
