Reform.by media is on the brink of closure
Reform.by’s editor-in-chief, Fiodar Pauliuchenka, explains why the project may be forced to close down.
“The project faces unprecedented financial constraints. We only have enough funds to cover one and a half to two months of work.
The reason for this situation is the fact that our grant support application has been recently rejected by a crucial European institutional donor. While we respect this decision, we do not agree with it.
The media was created in August 2018 with the plan to establish ourselves in a highly competitive market. Our site received about 100,000 daily visits from Belarusian users by the summer of 2020, and we were able to fully finance ourselves through advertising. This is a great achievement for a media startup that has been operating for only two years.
Due to our preliminary preparations, Reform.by was the only website accessible to Belarusian users during the few days of external internet blocking in August. Daily, an average of 300 to 500 thousand Belarusians read our texts. On peak days, we have recorded up to 800 thousand visitors per day.
However, due to the persecution of journalists, criminal cases, and interrogations, we had to leave the country to avoid imprisonment. In August 2021, the Belarusian Ministry of Information blocked our domain for Belarusian users.
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Despite this, we have found ways to continue our work and still have over 100,000 daily readers from Belarus. The game’s rules changed significantly when the full-scale war began. We were removed from popular Russian news aggregators such as Yandex.Novosti, Zen, and Mail.ru News. The site itself was blocked in Russia and dropped to the bottom of Russian search engines. Russian social media also pessimized our content.
Despite these challenges, we did our best to continue our work while in exile. We utilized programs that support independent journalists and received some assistance from donors. However, the funding was insufficient for our development, so we had to work 18-hour days. Our newsroom is just three people who produce 50–70 unique news articles every day, seven days a week. The news pieces they make are often republished and referred to by other media.
Our work has been recognized widely, as the Reform.by editorial board won the Free Media Awards for 2023.
The donor denied our grant due to our inability to adapt to the new reality and our loss of audience. We have never had the opportunity to hire additional staff and dedicate more time to development. We agree with this assessment. We are blocked in every direction, working an average of 12 hours a day with no days off, in a foreign country, and with a salary lower than the industry standard. Our ability to create new and innovative products is limited. Our budget has always been limited to 3–4 months.”
Due to a lack of resources, the team cannot take full advantage of social media, but they recently launched a YouTube show.
Fiodar Pauliuchenka expressed gratitude to his team for their dedication and Reform.by’s partners who supported them all these years. He called on everyone to help save the project, including with donations.
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