Why local journalism matters: Lessons learned in Ukraine

This article is to mark World Press Freedom Day and has been commissioned by PINF

KYIV, Ukraine — When I started in journalism some 15 years ago, I soon learned one thing: apparently, I jumped on a ship that was going down.

At least, that’s what so many people around me seemed to believe. The writing was on the wall: journalism was dying. Social media was taking over, bloggers were taking over, YouTube was taking over and politicians, talking directly to the public on Twitter, were taking over. New platforms were lining up to tear down that obsolete concept — journalists. And among those, local journalists were going down first.

Well, I thought, that’s unfortunate — especially since I just started working in a newspaper, and I quite liked it.

Here’s what happened next. My country, Ukraine, faced a number of turbulent events in close succession. It started with a revolution – the EuroMaidan protests of 2013-2014, that ousted a corrupt pro-Russian government – followed by the initial Russian invasion and occupation of Crimea. Later came a full-scale invasion, which is still ongoing.

Every sharp turn and every crisis — be it a revolution, a pandemic, or a war — made the public turn to the press for answers. In those situations, when information was a matter of life or death, people chose reliable, independent media to tell them the truth about the developments around them.

Every crisis saw the appearance of new media outlets, with more young people motivated to carry out the mission of journalism: keeping the people informed, while keeping the power accountable.

The newspaper I lead today, the Kyiv Independent, had a similar origin story, it was born out of a unique crisis. At the end of 2021, tensions were building at the newspaper I worked at, Kyiv Post. The owner wanted tighter control over the editorial output and the editorial team wouldn’t have it. His response was to fire the entire team and re-launch the newspaper with a more obedient staff.

Fortunately for us, the fired journalists, we quite liked doing independent journalism and didn’t want to go down without a good fight — and what is a better way to fight than start your own publication? We were lucky to be naive enough to do it with almost no funding.

We launched the Kyiv Independent just three months before Russia invaded Ukraine. 

Three years later, we are an award-winning newsroom, staffed with a mix of Ukrainians and foreigners. We have established ourselves as the reliable source of on-the-ground news from Ukraine. We never planned to be a war newsroom, but we were forced to become one and had to learn on the go.

To put it mildly, we weren’t always destined for success. Early into the war, someone asked me: why do you need a local English-language newspaper like that, when Ukraine is already covered by some of the world’s best journalists?

That was true — correspondents from every country were flocking to Ukraine to report on Europe’s largest war in nearly a century. And they indeed were the best of the best. We were a motley crew of 20- and 30-year-olds, often with English as our second language and with miniscule resources compared to our global competitors. What were our chances?

That’s far from a unique question. This challenge — facing a competitor who’s dwarfing your resources — is familiar for thousands of local newsrooms globally. In the world of rapidly shrinking revenues and changing audience habits, local media are endangered everywhere. Media face the pressure to “reinvent or die” — and it’s local outlets, with their smaller resources, that are hit the hardest.

And yet maybe our story can give them some much-needed hope.

For three years, the Kyiv Independent has been not just surviving — but growing. One key reason for our success is the same as what some would identify as our key weakness — we are local.

Our readers recognize the value in local journalism with its boots on the ground and authors who know the place they are writing about by heart. We can bring them closer to the real story in the ways that a beautiful interactive feature produced by a big expensive team in a media giant won’t. And our readers really, truly feel that. They tell us so.

Moreover, they back their words with real support. The Kyiv Independent is funded by our readers — that’s what allows us to stay independent. As of now, over 17,000 members have joined us and pledged monthly donations, most of them just $5.

If the readers who follow Ukraine see so much value in local reporting that they show up for it like that, then the importance of local journalism is far from being forgotten.

It gives me hope that despite the unfavourable trends and ever-changing challenges, local reporting — the basis of all journalism — will be standing strong for many years to come.

But ultimately it depends on you — the reader.

Olga Rudenko is the editor-in-chief of the Kyiv Independent, a Ukrainian English-language online newspaper. It is a reader-funded publication — their work can be supported here. 

Pic: Olga Rudenko By Kostyantyn Chernichkin