To mark World Press Freedom Day (3 May 2025), WLD is honoured to join other independent publications worldwide in publishing this piece from Olga Rudenko, the editor-in-chief of the Kyiv Independent, a Ukrainian English-language online newspaper.
For over three years, the Kyiv Independent has been the voice of Ukraine in the world, and it serves as a shining example of why local, independent journalism is vital to the ecosystem of a healthy community, whatever the challenges may be.
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 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.
This was followed by the initial Russian invasion and occupation of Crimea. Later, a full-scale invasion followed, which is still ongoing.
Every sharp turn and 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.
New media outlets appeared after every crisis, and more young people were motivated to carry out journalism’s mission of keeping the people informed while holding the power accountable.
The newspaper I lead today, the Kyiv Independent, has 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, the 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 starting your own publication? We were lucky to be naive enough to do it without 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 minuscule 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 to 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 local outlets, with their smaller resources, are hit the hardest.
And yet maybe our story can give them some much-needed hope.
For three years, the Kyiv Independent has been surviving and growing. One key reason for our success is the same as what some would identify as our key weakness — we are local.
Our readers recognise the value of local journalism, which has 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. Our readers fund the Kyiv Independent, which allows us to stay independent. 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 remain 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.
The publication is reader-funded, and you can support its work here.
With thanks to the Public Interest News Foundation (PINF).
More details on how to support West Leeds Dispatch here.