huvaara and Iltalehti v. Finland, No. 53678/00, § 49, ECHR 2004-X). Accordingly, this issue will also be examined in the analysis of the proportionality of the interference.
40. Turning to the issue whether the interference was "necessary in a democratic society", the Court must determine whether the interference corresponded to a "pressing social need", whether it was proportionate to the legitimate aim pursued and whether the reasons given by the national authorities to justify it were relevant and sufficient. In assessing whether such a "need" exists and what measures should be adopted to deal with it, the national authorities are left a certain margin of appreciation. This power of appreciation is not however unlimited, but goes hand in hand with a European supervision by the Court, whose task it is to give a final ruling on whether a restriction is reconcilable with freedom of expression as protected by Article 10. The Court's task in exercising its supervisory function is not to take the place of the national authorities, but rather to review under Article 10, in the light of the case as a whole, the decisions they have taken pursuant to their margin of appreciation. In so doing, the Court has to satisfy itself that the national authorities applied standards which were in conformity with the principles embodied in Article 10 and, moreover, that they based their decisions on an acceptable assessment of the relevant facts (see Grinberg v. Russia, No. 23472/03, § 27, 21 July 2005).
41. In examining the necessity of the interference in the particular circumstances of the case, the Court will take the following elements into account: the subject matter of the publication, the position of the applicants, the position of the person against whom the criticism was directed, characterisation of the contested statements by the domestic courts, the wording used by the applicants, and the penalty imposed on them (see Krasulya v. Russia, No. 12365/03, § 35, 22 February 2007).
42. Both publications in the applicants' newspaper concerned the unlawful felling of trees and undocumented sale of timber to Chinese companies, a matter of intense public interest for residents of the Primorskiy region, where the timber industry was one of the main employers. It was stated that the inclusion of the regional police department and the courts' management department in the number of timber purchasers had resulted in an increase in irregularities in the sale of timber. As the Court has held on many occasions, reporting on matters relating to management of public resources lies at the core of the media's responsibility and the right of the public to receive information (see Busuioc v. Moldova, No. 61513/00, §§ 63 - 64 and 84, 21 December 2004; and {Cumpana} and {Mazare} v. Romania [GC], No. 33348/96, §§ 94 - 95, ECHR 2004-XI). However, there is no evidence in the domestic judgments that the courts performed a balancing exercise between the need to protect the plaintiffs' reputation and the right of the members of the press to impart information on issues of general interest. They confined their analysis to the discussion of the damage to the plaintiffs' reputation without giving any consideration to the Convention standard which requires very strong reasons for justifying restrictions on debates on questions of public interest (see Godlevskiy v. Russia, No. 14888/03, § 41, 23 October 2008, and Krasulya, cited above, § 38). The Court therefore finds that the Russian courts failed to recognise that the present case involved a conflict between the right to freedom of expression and the protection of a reputation (see Dyundin v. Russia, No. 37406/03, § 33, 14 October 2008).
43. Further, it is undisputed that the applicants were not the source of the allegation about the increasing irregularities in the timber business. The first publication reproduced an extract from an open letter by s
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