Russian Journalists Meet a Crackdown With Dark Humor, and Subscribers

I visited Mr. Kolpakov in Meduza’s new office — a crowded walk-up apartment overlooking a courtyard on a side street near the center of the Latvian capital. The site’s co-founder and chief executive, Galina Timchenko, is paying the rent personally. I was there because, while many of the crackdown’s targets are drawn from a new wave of small, grant-funded online investigative outlets, Meduza is something different.

Founded in 2014 in Riga by journalists who had left another popular site after it lost its independence, Meduza began as a resolutely commercial, advertising-based business, a not-so-distant cousin to the American news sites that got their start at roughly the same time.

The nationalist activist who campaigned to label it a foreign agent, Aleksandr Ionov, had relied on thin evidence — a podcast that had been sponsored by Latvia’s tourism agency, for instance — to claim it was backed by outsiders. With 1.3 million followers on Twitter, almost a million followers on Instagram, and nearly 450,000 followers on Telegram, Meduza had annual revenue of more than $2.5 million before its designation, on April 23, as a foreign agent, Mr. Kolpakov said.

In a week, Meduza lost more than 95 percent of its advertisers. Mr. Kolpakov and Ms. Timchenko told the staff during a glum Zoom meeting that they saw no real way forward. Reporters and editors were furious — and demanded that they “fight to the end,” said Tatiana Ershova, Meduza’s editorial director. So they launched a last-ditch appeal, asking readers for money to “save Meduza.” To protect skittish donors, they even accepted cryptocurrency and didn’t require that supporters leave email addresses, though many did.

The campaign also sought to flip the “foreign agent” label from a designation with sinister undertones into something readers could laugh about. “Become a summer agent,” one ad said. An Instagram post suggested you tag your “foreign-agent crush.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/22/business/media/russian-journalists-independent.html