Russian journalists who have fled their home country over censorship and security issues are now rebuilding their lives and careers amid a diaspora community in Riga, Latvia.
Meduza, one of Russia’s last remaining independent news sites, lost 30,000 donors after the government cut off subscriber payments from the country due to unflinching coverage of the war. In less than a week, two German reporters organized a crowdfunding campaign to replace those funds to try to save Meduza.
This week’s Friday 5, where we round up our favorite reads from around the online world in English, includes Meduza’s report on Russian editor Roman Badanin’s Pulitzer-charged rant against The New York Times, ProPublica’s sober response to the “Plandemic” viral video, and Poynter’s point about an ethics policy that includes guidelines for pre-publication source review.
While exiled reporters may now be practicing journalism from a place of relative safety, repressive governments can still interfere with their ability to report stories, reach audiences, and make a living. Charlotte Alfred spoke to exiled reporters for GIJN.
The Bell illustrates a growing trend in which Russian journalists and media managers are finding ways of building news organizations that are not financially dependent on rich businessmen vulnerable to Kremlin pressure.
From a media outlet that pays citizens to report from remote areas of Kenya to a portal that uses humor as its main strategy to inform Russians, journalism faces different challenges in different cultural and social contexts. Creativity, however, seems to be a common skill that media entrepreneurs shared in addressing their problems at the International Symposium on Online Journalism (ISOJ) on Saturday, April 16.
From South Africa to Brazil; from Yangon to Kabul, I heard media editors sing varying versions of the same lyrics: I feel the earth move under my feet. The media business model has now cracked all over the world. Subscriptions to newspapers and magazines drop by the thousands; traditional advertising revenue vanishes into thin air; and digital advertising revenue is poor and only seems to work for web giants. Media have certainly learnt how to increase the value of Facebook or Twitter in their quest to fish readers for their stories, but have plenty of trouble in finding how to increase the value of their own outlets.
