Russia is isolated and persecutes journalists, but hasn’t succeeded in terminating independent journalism. How does an independent Russian news outlet — banned in Russia — operate in exile and maintain connections with Russians from Europe?
Ivan Kolpakov, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the independent Russian media outlet Meduza, will discuss the challenges of independent journalism in exile at the Media Museum and Archives Merkki (Ludviginkatu 2–4, Helsinki) on Tuesday, March 10 at 5 pm. He will be interviewed by Erkka Mikkonen, former Moscow correspondent for Yle.
The event will be held in English. The audience will have the opportunity to ask questions. The event will be livestreamed, and a recording will be available for one week on the HS Foundation’s YouTube channel.
Free admission. Welcome!
About Meduza:
Meduza is the world’s largest independent Russian media outlet. Outlawed and blocked in Russia, it has operated in exile for more than a decade and continues to report from the ground, reaching millions of readers worldwide, including more than 8 million people inside Russia every month.
The newsroom has developed and maintains a complex infrastructure to bypass censorship and deliver news inside Russia. This includes a mobile app that works without a VPN, regularly updated mirror sites, redirect and “magic” links, downloadable PDFs for offline sharing and audio formats such as Radio Meduza. In 2023, Meduza also launched a publishing house that releases fiction and non-fiction books banned and forbidden in Russia; to date, 24 titles have been published in print, with more than 50,000 copies sold worldwide.
Selected Meduza stories are available to read in Helsingin Sanomat.
About Ivan Kolpakov:
Ivan Kolpakov is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Meduza — the largest remaining independent Russian news outlet published in both Russian and English. It continues to reach millions of people inside Russia despite the project’s newsroom having to operate from exile for the last nine years.
In April 2021, Russian authorities designated Meduza as a “foreign agent” in an attempt to knock out its advertising income, and weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the government began blocking Meduza’s website outright. Finally, in January 2023, the Kremlin banned Meduza completely, declaring the outlet an illegal “undesirable organization”. These actions were made to destroy the newsroom, but Meduza keeps resisting. Meduza also managed to retain the majority of the publication’s audience due to the diverse and technologically advanced infrastructure.