Eesti Ekspress

File:Eesti Ekspress logo.svg

Eesti Ekspress logo

Eesti Ekspress (Estonian Express) was the first politically independent newspaper in the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic during the Soviet control of Estonia. The first issue was published on 22 September 1989. Making use of Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and glasnost, it was established as a weekly newspaper in 1989 by Hans H. Luik and others. In essentially the same format, although with a number of appendices, it is still every week. The day of the issue changed from Thursday to Wednesday on 30 April 2014.

Success of Eesti Ekspress led to Hans H. Luik's becoming an established media mogul.

The newspaper has broken a number of important stories and been known for its innovation-mindedness. Considerably thicker than other newspapers of the late Soviet era, it was one of the first to make use of digital publishing technologies and photographic typesetting. Consequently, it has been notorious for popularising the incorrect usage of 'sh' and 'zh' in substitution of the characters 'š' and 'ž', which in late 1980s were rather inconvenient for computer processing but appear in a number of Estonian loanwords (e.g. garaaž, borrowed from English garage and tšau from Italian ciao) and names transliterated from Slavic languages, most importantly, Russian.

Today the newspaper remains one of the most popular newspapers in Estonia, with a circulation of 28,000 in 2015.

External links

• Official website (Estonian)