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Deputy Director of the Kyiv Municipal Security Department Mykhailo Shcherbin speaks to journalists during a military exercise for civilians on January 12, 2024 in Kyiv, Ukraine.
Until Feb. 24, 2022, The Village Ukraine was known as a city guide for Kyiv, the country’s capital. It published a mix of cultural reviews, lifestyle articles, fashion news, and updates about events around the city.
But after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, music, art, and dining stories had to give way to coverage about the war and its impact. Today, the website mixes guides of recently opened restaurants with documentation of alleged war crimes. Advice on cosmetics is juxtaposed with interviews of residents who, after the conflict began, decided to remove or change tattoos inked in Russian.
In an editorial published by The Fix, a magazine for media professionals, Yaroslav Druziuk, editor-in-chief of The Village Ukraine, cited the “fleeting balance between Ukraine-at-war coverage and the stories about Ukrainians carrying on with their lives.”
“It’s basically like running a Ukrainian TimeOut or Curbed, except your nation’s fighting a full-scale war,” he wrote.
Two and half years into the war, Ukraine’s journalism has been put to an existential test, but it has proved that quality journalism can survive even in deeply inhospitable conditions. Independent outlets have maintained operations amid missile strikes, dwindling revenue, and bot farms spreading disinformation. And despite unavoidable patriotic reflexes, journalists have kept asking tough questions, offering fair coverage of a deeply personal war. News outlets have warned about the need for Ukraine to respect international law once the country began its incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. They are also shedding light on Ukrainians’ growing war fatigue.
For the past fifteen months, NewsGuard and Reporters Without Borders (RSF) have been working on a project tracking how well 50 news organizations in Ukraine — ranging from the country’s public broadcaster to local and hyperlocal news sites, national radio stations, and nonprofit newsrooms — are adhering to journalistic standards of credibility and transparency. We looked at whether these outlets gather and present information ethically, have effective practices for correcting errors, and handle the difference between news and opinion responsibly. Our goal has been to provide trustworthy data about news sources in Ukraine with the same criteria we use for news publishers in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Italy, and Austria. If we could tell the rest of the world, with solid evidence, which Ukrainian publications were producing responsible journalism, then advertisers and other funders would have the confidence to support them, thereby aiding Ukrainian democracy.
As managing editor and vice president of partnerships for Europe at NewsGuard, I led this project and have spent much time reviewing the content of Ukrainian news outlets with a team of analysts across Europe led by a long-time journalist based in Kyiv.
The mission was twofold: First, we’d help the outlets fill out a public transparency questionnaire created by RSF about their practices and standards. The questions ranged from “Does your Media Outlet have an editorial mission statement?” to “Are there guidelines on the procedures to be followed for granting anonymity to sources?”
Second, we’d rate their credibility and transparency according to the same apolitical criteria of journalism practices that we apply elsewhere in the world. We’d look at whether the organization repeatedly publishes false or egregiously misleading content, gathers and presents information responsibly, handles the difference between news and opinion ethically, and efficiently corrects its errors, among other criteria.
As one might expect, transparency took a hit with the war, with many websites deciding to take down the names and contact information of their reporters for security reasons, but also withholding the names of their Western donors to avoid feeding the Russian propaganda narrative that Ukraine, its leaders, and its media are puppets of the West. But, more than half of the websites we rated (28 out of 50) have received a NewsGuard score of 80 or above out of 100, based on our criteria. And almost half of them (24 out of 50) improved one or more of their practices based on NewsGuard’s criteria during the course of our monitoring. Two sites reached a perfect score after working with us on disclosing ownership and transparently correcting errors.
At a time of war, this work involved scrutinizing how the media addressed some of the unsubstantiated pro-Ukraine narratives pushed by the Ukrainian government, as well as whether they’d question some key decisions and shed light on important military setbacks and scandals.
Websites that got high enough scores would go onto NewsGuard’s “inclusion” list used by advertisers, agencies, and ad-tech companies to direct advertising money toward quality journalism. For websites that did not score well, we’d walk them through how to improve their scores and offer support as they worked to improve their processes.
The task was daunting, though. In a country facing a full-scale invasion, did it really matter?
As of Aug. 13, 2024, 84 media workers have been killed in Ukraine, according to the Institute of Mass Information, a Kyiv-based non-governmental organization. At least 235 Ukrainian media outlets have had “to shut down, relocate, or suspend broadcasting as a result of Russia’s full-scale aggression,” according to the institute.
As we started reaching out to Ukrainian newsrooms, asking them to trust us and be among the first outlets we would assess, several editors asked: Why now? Was it really worth their time? After all, they were simply struggling to survive with dwindling resources and operational difficulties.
I also had doubts. In June 2023, one of the first interviews we conducted was cut short: The editor of a news website we were rating was hiding in a bomb shelter. The analyst interviewing her could hear a baby in the background, and the editor proved impatient when asked questions about ethics amid the surrounding chaos. The next month, the editor-in-chief of a website based in the southern Mykolaiv region apologized for the delay in responding to our questions. His city had just been shelled.
But having dealt with 50 Ukrainian newsrooms over the past 15 months, it’s become clear that Ukraine’s media is proving that it is possible to uphold the highest standards of journalism, even in the most difficult times — and that it is crucial to do so.
Since the full-scale invasion started, news outlets have demonstrated admirable tenacity. New websites were created to meet new needs. Evacuation.city, for example, was launched a month after the war started to provide tips and tools for Ukrainians fleeing the war. Recent articles listed the best countries to relocate to and reported on a new checkpoint scheduled to appear at the border with Hungary. More than two years into the conflict, the site still covers stories about displaced people and refugees, and now also explores the stories of Ukrainians who’ve decided to return home.
Other websites adapted their coverage to stay relevant amid the chaos and tragedy, while maintaining their unique identities. That’s how Chytomo, a website dedicated to the publishing industry, started paying close attention to the suffering of writers and translators under Russian occupation while continuing to provide book recommendations. Or how 1kr.ua, a local website based in the central city of Kryvyi Rih, published a deep dive on how residents are protecting and restoring buildings damaged by the war while continuing to investigate the local government for possible corruption, proving that a newsroom could offer a critical lens to current events even when reporting reveals uncomfortable truths about fellow citizens.
Some newsrooms had to completely reinvent themselves. After many of its staffers fled to safer regions, Menshchyna, a website based in the Northern region of Chernihiv, which borders Belarus and Russia, had to hire and train individuals with no reporting experience. Its editorial staff now includes a primary school teacher, a social worker, a historian and a public activist, a librarian, an English teacher, a leader of a children’s creativity group, and a social worker, site editor Serhiy Bondarenko told us in March 2024. The new team publishes short articles about events in the rural town of Mena and its residents, including a piece about a local winning a gold medal at the 2024 Paralympic Games, a survey conducted among readers on how much parents spend on back-to-school shopping for their children, and job vacancies in the Chernihiv region.
With advertising revenue virtually disappearing — the advertising market in Ukraine lost two-thirds of its volume in 2022, according to the All-Ukrainian Advertising Coalition, an association of about 130 advertising and communications companies — many newsrooms had to learn how to seek grants, shifting the focus of their business sales teams. “Before the war, we were a self-sustaining publication,” Denys Shabanin, program and finance director at 1kr.ua told me in an email. At the time, almost 100% of the site’s expenses were covered by advertising contracts. Today, grants from European and American foundations constitute their main source of income. “Without them, our media outlet would have closed in the spring of 2022,” Shabanin said.
The war prompted even linguistic and grammatical changes within newsrooms. These were symbolic of the new publishing environment.
In January 2022, a new law came into force, requiring all media in the country to publish in Ukrainian. The text forced sites publishing only in Russian to create Ukrainian versions of their content. This triggered an ethical dilemma for some publications: Should they stop publishing in Russian to push back against the culture of the invading forces, and lose millions of views and corresponding advertising revenue? Some did. Others like 1kr.ua, thought that it was best to keep offering reliable reporting in Russian to those used to reading and speaking in that language. “We believe that it is advisable to allow the audience to read news … in the language they are comfortable with. Otherwise, readers will go to other publications that are politicized and biased,” Shabanin wrote.
While many websites have predictably embraced some form of patriotism in their news coverage and injected anti-Russian commentary into news stories, the most responsible ones have at least tweaked their editorial policies or their “About” pages to disclose and explain such changes. The editorial policy of Chytomo, for example, now states that since the war started: “We began to write the words ‘Russia’, ‘Putin’ and derivatives with a lowercase letter to express protest and contempt for the actions of this country.” The “About us” page of Slidstvo.info now says “Glory to Ukraine!”
Despite the conditions, a significant number of media outlets demonstrated their ability to cover the war with minimal bias, recording setbacks and advances of both armies, investigating arms procurement corruption, and putting significant effort into verifying Ukraine’s official statements and decisions. Seventy percent of the organizations we rated responsibly distinguish between news and opinion.
For example, Novynarnia, a Kyiv-based news site founded by a war veteran who served in Donbas in 2014 and 2015, investigated sensitive military topics, including suspicions that a regional army recruitment center in Kyiv was issuing false certificates of unfitness for military service. (Dmytro Lykhoviy, the founder, is now a spokesman for the Ukrainian army.) The Kyiv Independent, an English-language site based in Kyiv, has extensively covered the debate about mobilization and exhaustion within the ranks of Ukrainian soldiers. One story reported on women calling on the government to demobilize their loved ones. The outlet also directly questioned unsubstantiated claims by Ukrainian intelligence that Putin has cancer and reported on the “outgunned and outmanned” soldiers on the frontline in Chasiv Yar.
Having access to credible information can be a matter of life and death for Ukrainians. It is crucial for their future that strong, independent, and factual reporting can survive, and even thrive while fighting a war. And, it’s time for advertisers, funders, and other organizations to support the Ukrainian newsrooms that have proved that they are committed to the highest journalism standards, against all odds.