01 May 2020

FIDE Newsletters

I've already followed up last week's post Minutes of the 90th FIDE Congress with a post on my World Chess Championship Blog: 90th FIDE Congress : Whither the World Championship. In that more recent post I noted,

In the past I've been critical of FIDE communication under the Dvorkovich management, and I know I'm not alone. This is being addressed.

More specifically,

90th FIDE Congress; FIDE Extraordinary General Assembly; Abu Dhabi, UAE; 28th February 2020 • 1. FIDE President address [...; FIDE President Dvorkovich] added that FIDE needs to improve its communication practices. FIDE already counts on multiple channels of communication, but it is still not enough. One of the initiatives which will start today is the publication of the electronic FIDE Newsletter.

A few weeks after the minutes were published, FIDE in FIDE Newsletter #003 is out (April 2020) announced,

Welcome to the bi-weekly FIDE Newsletter. The coronavirus crisis conditions most of the content in our third issue: all official competitions have been halted, but the online chess activity never ceases, and in fact, it is thriving.

The first section of the newsletter was included in the announcement:-

Stay home, stay safe, stay sharp! • The UN considers the COVID-19 pandemic the most challenging crisis since the Second World War. Probably it is also the most global event ever experienced in human history, and many think that we will come through the crisis reinforced as a society. [...]

I followed the instructions under 'SUBSCRIBE YOURSELF HERE', then verified that my email address was correct by changing my subscription parameters. So far I haven't received the newsletter. After it shows up, I'll see if I can locate newsletters #001 and #002.

This isn't the first time that FIDE has communicated via a newsletter. A routine search picked up

Both are located in the subdomain that I documented in Fide.com Archive (November 2019). Are there other examples from the same time period? Going back even further in time, I have a couple of PDFs in my own archive of FIDE documents:-

  • Newsletter, Volume 2009 Number 15
  • Newsletter, Volume 2009 Number 16

I'm sure there were other numbers published in 2008/2009, but I don't have copies. Will the latest initiative to produce a FIDE newsletter last longer than the earlier initiatives? Let's hope so.

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