Authored by: Olha Chorna
The Ridne Misto is the only print media outlet in the Donetsk region that continued to be published after the start of the full-scale invasion. The editorial staff of the city weekly, which has been published in Myrnohrad for nearly a quarter of a century (until 2016, the city was called Dymytrov), is not going to stop working even today, when Russian troops have come very close to the city and are continuously shelling it.
By early 2022, Myrnohrad had about 50 thousand residents. Almost every third family had a subscription to the Ridne Misto weekly, with its circulation equal to six thousand copies. The editorial staff, whose members remained the same for many years, had seven employees.
“We were one big family. Since the outlet was denationalised in 2018, all team members have also become founders of the newspaper, in which everyone receives an ownership interest. So, each of us had a vested interest in making the media successful. The newspaper was not profitable, and we have never got around to receiving dividends, as the authors of the idea of denationalisation of the media once promised to the editors. Everyone, however, received their salaries on time and in full, and most importantly, felt the importance of the joint work they were doing, professional satisfaction from it,” says the newspaper’s editor-in-chief, Maksym Zabielia.
Maksym Zabielia tells how he had started working in the newspaper, which he later headed.
He joined the Ridne Misto in the seventh year of the media outlet’s existence in 2005. He first worked as a photojournalist, then started writing, and later became deputy editor-in-chief, ultimately heading the editorial office in 2013. It was under the leadership of Zabielia that, on the eve of 2014, the publication was updated: the newspaper switched to full-colour printing, “grew” to sixteen pages, increased its editorial staff, and diversified its content. The circulation also increased accordingly. Revenues from subscriptions and advertising allowed the newspaper to remain financially viable in the media market.
If you look at the ATO maps of 2014, Myrnohrad, which was then still called Dymytrov, is marked as the territory that was then occupied. However, no hostilities were taking place in and around the city at that time, although the militants tried to conduct a simulation of a referendum in Myrnohrad.
“After the events of that time, it seems to me that a large part of the city’s population decided on their position. At least back then, we noted an increase in the share of people among our audience who had a conscious pro-Ukrainian position. Many NGOs emerged in the city, focusing on patriotic youth education, etc. We started the newspaper’s transition to the Ukrainian language since materials were published in Russian only before then. It was a gradual process, with a mixed version published initially 50/50 in the Ukrainian and Russian languages. Later on, all newspapers started to be published in Ukrainian only. Thanks to such a smooth transition, we managed to retain the audience, which, in its majority, has always been Russian-speaking,” recalls the editor-in-chief.
The Ridne Misto has never had a website or a social media presence, and this, according to Maksym, was a conscious position of its editors: “Our thoughts were as follows. If we go online, we will need additional resources — both financial and human — because simply duplicating the content created for the newspaper on digital platforms won’t work. A website needs a news feed, and it is necessary to constantly generate timely messages to be competitive on social media. Of course, the printed version would constantly lag behind since we focused, in the newspaper, not on news content but on people’s stories, analytics, and explaining how certain government programs were implemented. Thus, we would only scatter our efforts and would not reach a decent level in the online format but would most likely lose in the paper format.”
On Wednesday, February 23, 2022, the editorial office submitted another issue of the Ridne Misto for printing, and the next day, the Kharkiv-based Faktor-Druk printing house, with which the Ridne Misto had collaborated for the past ten years, stopped answering calls. Later on, a message was received from them that they discontinued the printing of the newspaper.
Maksym Zabielia tells how the newspaper run by him survived the beginning of the full-scale invasion
“Overwhelmed by panic, we started looking for an alternative, and the Kramatorsk Printing House came to our rescue. They told us that, after everything they had experienced since early 2014, they wouldn’t be scared even by the full-scale invasion, and they invited us to use their printing services. Since then, the Ridne Misto has been printed by the Kramatorsk Printing House,” says Maksym Zabielia.
After the printing problem had been solved, the editorial team faced another issue – how to deliver the publication to readers. Ukrposhta, through which the newspaper was distributed, also made the editorial staff nervous during the great war’s first months. However, in April-May 2022, the situation levelled out. It became clear to everyone that the Ukrainian forces succeeded in holding the enemy in the positions they had occupied before, and life continued in a more or less stable rhythm.
The editorial office has not even discussed stopping the newspaper’s publication, says the editor-in-chief: “Our readers paid for the subscription in advance, and we couldn’t afford to let them down. I know there were editorial offices, not only in the east and south of the country, for which the beginning of the full-scale invasion became an excuse to stop printing their publications and not refund people’s subscription money. We deem this unacceptable. Because if you do this even once, no one will trust you anymore and no longer help you with content or subscriptions. To put it otherwise, it is very easy to lose your reputation, but whether you will succeed in restoring it later is a big question.”
The newspapermen also realised that, due to shelling and changes in the front line, power outages and communications blackouts, including Internet outages, were inevitable in the city. Therefore, people will need an accessible information channel, which is what the newspaper has ultimately become.
Throughout 2022, with the financial cushion that the editorial office managed to establish in previous years, without any donor support, the newspaper was published as usual – without reducing the output, circulation, and frequency of publication. The media team worked well on a subscription campaign, got good results, and could work peacefully for the next 9 to 12 months. They also did not experience a paper shortage, as they remained the only print media in the region. Aside from the information important to the city’s residents, the newspaper published many stories of defenders, fallen heroes, volunteers, and entrepreneurs who, amid war, when many were closing their businesses, took the risk of starting a new business. They also wrote about the experiences of Myrnohrad residents who settled in other cities in Ukraine or abroad.
“In 2023, things started getting worse and worse, as part of our audience, after all, left the city. However, we conducted a subscription campaign for 2024, as a result of which we retained 50 per cent of our circulation in peacetime, with our circulation currently amounting to about 3,000 copies. The newspaper began to be published once every ten days, instead of every seven days as before, although we managed to preserve the number of columns. We started working in austerity and cost minimisation conditions. An expense priority is paying for printing services and paper,” says Maksym Zabielia.
As soon as the editorial office of the Ridne Misto noticed they were losing their audience because native Myrnohrad residents were leaving the city, they quickly realised how to compensate for these losses. Being a front-line city, Myrnohrad became a hub receiving displaced people from Bakhmut, Volnovakha, Mariupol, Avdiivka, Ocheretyne, Kurdiumivka, Chasiv Yar, and other towns. Then they went either to the Dnipro or further – to western cities of Ukraine or abroad. However, many refugees remained in the city. Thus, about two and a half thousand internally displaced persons settled in the Myrnohrad community. Journalists from the editorial office began to visit them regularly. The newspaper started to be filled with stories of these people as well, and, later, a column with useful information for them appeared in it: how to find housing, work, apply for state benefits, restore lost documents, and receive psychological help and support.
Afterwards, the editorial team came up with an idea to create a universal guide for displaced people, in which a person arriving in the community for the first time could find answers to the most common questions to more easily undergo social adaptation in the community. This is how the Interactive Map — Effective Assistance to IDPs appeared, which was implemented by the newspaper with the help of the Ukrainian Media Business Association and UNESCO, which provided a grant for this purpose.
“People felt our desire to help them and supported us by subscribing to the newspaper,” says Zabielia.
However, according to him, the media outlet failed to get regular donor support, although they managed to receive several small grants – from Internews Ukraine and the Ukrainian Media Business Association. The Institute of Mass Information and the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine also supported the publication. “This experience helped us understand that grants make it possible to implement some individual projects. Well, and to get our hand in writing grant applications – over the past two years, my accountant and I, in addition to our professions, have mastered another area of expertise, that of a grant manager,” Maksym smiles. However, since the beginning of this year, the editor-in-chief has faced even more problems, and publishing the newspaper has become even more difficult.
After the enemy entered the Avdiivka bridgehead, which the Armed Forces of Ukraine had held since 2014, the situation in Myrnohrad has become even worse. Since March 2024, the city has suffered from enemy ballistic missile attacks almost every night. The occupiers focused on destroying infrastructure and social facilities — transportation routes, dormitories, schools, kindergartens, and the sports palace. After 2014 and before the start of the full-scale invasion, the Myrnohrad community was a leader among other communities in the Donetsk region in terms of the number of investments attracted from international donors. Modern educational institutions, social institutions, outpatient clinics equipped with state-of-the-art equipment, and a park area have been built there, and many other projects have been implemented. It is very painful, says Maksym Zabielia, to watch how the enemy is purposefully destroying everything that Ukrainians have restored and reconstructed over the past ten years.
This summer, a breakthrough occurred on the front line near Ocheretynе, and the enemy started to advance quite quickly toward Myrnohrad. The editorial staff of the Ridne Misto then realised that it would no longer be possible to work as before when they stayed relatively safe in the rear. In August, the Donetsk Regional Military Administration decided to forcibly evacuate families with children from ten settlements, including Myrnohrad. In late August, the newspaper’s editorial office was destroyed as a result of another enemy shelling.
“By that time, we had already removed the main editorial equipment from the office, and the missile hit was a signal for us to finally be convinced that it was impossible to stay in the city any longer. Therefore, all the editorial staff left Myrnohrad — some to the Dnipropetrovsk region, some to Kyiv or Poltava. “In the last year, there have been four of us working together — me, my assistant, an accountant, and a layout designer,” Maksym Zabielia clarifies.
In late August, Ukrposhta also decided to close all its branches in Myrnohrad, although print media is still being delivered to some settlements in the neighbouring Pokrovsk district. The Ridne Misto once again faced the issue of delivering the newspaper to its subscribers.
“A significant part of our readers are elderly people who, after being evacuated, were placed in hubs for displaced persons that the Myrnohrad Military Administration established in three regions – Dnipropetrovsk, Kirovohrad, and Poltava. Several shelters accommodated three and a half to five thousand displaced people from Myrnohrad and the Pokrovsk district. We established contact with them and found several volunteers who agreed to receive newspaper issues at Nova Poshta branches and deliver them to all these shelters,” says Maksym.
He is not ready to predict how long the editorial team will be able to maintain this distribution format, but the team is determined to do so at least until the end of 2024.
As to delivering the newspaper to Myrnohrad, things are much more complicated in this respect. Today, the city has no electricity, gas, heating, water, or mobile communications. An evacuation train that went to Pokrovsk was cancelled. But about three to four thousand people still live in the city. This is despite the fact that the distance to the combat contact line is about seven kilometres on one side and one kilometre on the other. In other words, it can be seen through the sights, say, of a sniper rifle.
“The last time I was in Myrnohrad was in early November. And I can say that it’s better not to go there today without a bulletproof vest and a helmet. I found spots where people gathered to catch a mobile phone signal, and I left part of the latest newspaper issue there. I don’t know what will happen next. While we could previously approach film crews that travelled there on editorial assignments with a request to deliver the newspaper, now they have stopped making trips,” says Maksym Zabielia.
He keeps in touch with a few people who remain in Myrnohrad. When they travel to neighbouring settlements, they call to share the latest news — what the situation in the city is, how people are adapting to life in increasingly difficult conditions, where a missile strike hit, who has died, and so on. Several Myrnohrad residents seem to be counting on somehow surviving this winter in the city. Moreover, according to Zabielia, a thousand residents of Myrnohrad, among those who had left the city, returned home because they did not receive the necessary state support in their new place.
If the contact line remains in the same place as it is now, the media collective will try to continue publishing the newspaper. The editorial team is convinced that the newspaper is still important to the community despite the evacuation. If Myrnohrad is occupied, that would be a different story.
“The editorial team has experience with its employees working remotely, even from abroad, and will be able to produce content under any conditions. The question is how to convey it to the audience. In this respect, an issue may arise about creating an online version of the newspaper. Now we understand that, given all the risks, we should establish an online branch. However, this requires some start-up capital, and, accordingly, we are looking for grant programs that would focus on this component,” Maksym Zabielia shares his plans.
He adds: “Sometime before the full-scale invasion, I visited the Scandinavian countries where I got acquainted with the experience of the local press. The media situation there is a dream for the editor-in-chief of the print media outlet. In a small town, there may be two or three newspapers or magazines with a total circulation of 200,000-300,000. This is the 21st century when people have smartphones and the Internet. Getting back to our realities, I would like to note that if it were not for the great war, the Ridne Misto would continue to be an example of how it is possible to publish a newspaper with decent circulation and content without having an online version, but having a stable subscriber base and understanding the priorities and interests of our audience, which we specially researched. And there are enough such examples of successful local and regional publications in Ukraine.”
The editor-in-chief of the Ridne Misto is convinced that if a hyperlocal media outlet spends years studying its audience, maintaining close contact with the audience, and developing in them a habit of reading print media, it can be successful. Of course, this also requires a well-thought-out financial and editorial strategy and experienced editorial staff. Still, all this is real. Indeed, the number of printed publications is decreasing. However, according to various estimates, there are still three to four hundred newspapers and magazines on the market. And if they weren’t self-sustaining, no one would publish them on a volunteer basis, notes Zabielia, since paper and printing require money. Those newspapers that lose readers with a sense of local identity and patriotism cease to exist. On the other hand, Maksym is sure that it is print media whose employees understand that information is not only facts but also a way to support the identity of a community, to give people hope and an opportunity to feel part of something bigger, that can maintain and preserve this feeling.
The translation is supported by Science+, a network for disinformation-resistant journalism that is powered by Free Press for Eastern Europe
