Languages

History of BarentsObserver.com

BarentsObserver.com was a news web site focusing on developments in the Barents Region. The web site was active between 2002 and 2015, and the archive contains more than 15 000 news stories. 

The site was founded by Atle Staalesen in October 2002, then under the name Barents News. In September 2003 the site changed name to BarentsObserver and was run by the Norwegian Barents Secretariat from 2005 to 2015.

The site presented news stories from the northern parts of all the four countries in the region: Russia, Norway, Sweden and Finland. All news stories were published in English and Russian. The Norwegian Barents Secretariat aims at supporting political, business and people-to-people contacts across the borders in the region.

All news material is categorized in: Energy, Security, Nature, Business, Arctic, Culture, Borders, Polictics and Society. An archive search function gives you full access to the news archive, which presently contains more than 15 000 news reports. BarentsObserver also provides background cross-border information about the Barents cooperation and bilateral contacts between the member regions.

In October 2015 the BarentsObserver news desk was closed and since then there has been no updates on BarentsObserver.com. The former staff of the secretariat startet the private run news web site The Independent Barents Observer.