About the Herald

The Talas Herald (Talas Jarchysy) is an English-language daily newspaper published in Talas six days a week, Monday to Saturday, by the privately owned Herald Publishing Company. It is the most widely read newspaper in the Irad Special Economic Zone.

Our history

The Herald was founded in March 1993 by Medet Orozaliev, a former correspondent of Iradyn Chyny, and Margaret Hendricks, an American reporter who had covered Operation Starlight and the siege of Talas for a Chicago newspaper. The first issue came off the press on Monday 15 March 1993. Start-up grants came from US-funded media-development programmes, which also trained the paper's first Iradi reporters. We chose English because it had become an official language of the territory, and because it was the language of the territorial administration, of the foreign companies arriving in the valley and of the air base.

Margaret Hendricks was managing editor until 2001 and Medet Orozaliev editor until 2009. The online edition began in 1999. The paper kept publishing through the events of 2007, and its senior staff stayed in Talas. Elmira Beishenova, for many years our courts reporter, has been editor since 2009. Medet Orozaliev told the paper's story in Twenty Years of Deadlines (Talas State University Press, 2013).

What we cover

We report on the courts, the city councils of Talas, Nurzhan and Iyık Janyl, the Mejlis, the economy, the districts and, where permits allow, the tribal regions; and on culture, faith, food and sport. We build our reporting on public records: court judgments, council minutes, tenders, budgets and official statistics. We ask officials to respond to what we report, and we say when they decline.

Our standards

• We name our sources wherever we can and explain why when we cannot.
• We report claims made by anonymous websites only when officials have responded to them, and we describe such claims as unverified.
• We correct our mistakes promptly and publicly. See Corrections and clarifications.
• Our editorial, The Herald's View, appears on Saturdays. It is written by the editorial board and is separate from our news reporting.

Jarchy

Since 2017 we have also published Jarchy, an Iradi-language weekly for younger readers.

Registration

The Herald Publishing Company is registered with the Department of Public Information as a publisher and printer. Herald House, 8 Printers' Lane, Old City, Talas 724003.