Euromaidan Press is a media partner of Lviv Media Forum 2026. Over the coming days we will bring you selected thoughts and dispatches from speakers across journalism, security, and democratic resilience.
Larysa Hnatchenko has run Slobidskyi Kray, the oldest newspaper in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, for more than 14 years. By June 2025, she told Euronews she was dipping into her personal savings to cover staff salaries, office rent, and fuel. US grants had made up half the paper’s budget.
By the end of 2024, USAID had paid for more than 300 local outlets in Ukraine.
After the Trump administration slashed 90% of USAID contracts in January 2025, Slobidskyi Kray could no longer afford to deliver to front-line villages without electricity or Ukrainian-language access—the places where, Hnatchenko said, Russian signals fill the gap.
USAID supported an estimated 80% of Ukraine’s independent outlets. Slidstvo.info lost 80% of its funding in a single day. OCCRP, the international investigative network, lost 38% and laid off 40 staff. By the end of 2024, USAID had paid for more than 300 local outlets in Ukraine—nearly three-quarters of the country’s local independent papers.
At today’s Lviv Media Forum session, a German newsroom offered an answer.
The newsroom that survived
CORRECTIV is an investigative outfit based in Berlin and Essen. Annual budget: about 23 million euros ($27 million). Up to two-thirds of it comes from individual readers, most giving less than 20 euros ($23) at a time. The outlet spent ten years building that donor list—long before USAID collapsed.
The number of people sending CORRECTIV money nearly doubled.
That funding base made the next investigation possible. In January 2024, CORRECTIV sent an undercover reporter into a meeting at a Potsdam villa where Alternative for Germany (AfD) politicians, Christian Democratic Union (CDU) members, and the Austrian far-right activist Martin Sellner had gathered to discuss a “remigration” plan that, by CORRECTIV’s reporting, contemplated deporting German citizens of immigrant background.
Within weeks of CORRECTIV publishing the story, four million Germans turned out across more than 1,800 protests—the biggest civil society mobilization in postwar German history. The number of people sending CORRECTIV money nearly doubled to 16,000 in three months.
For an investigation into Germany’s energy transition, the team knocked on 200 doors.
CORRECTIV owns a café in one of its newsrooms where reporters work in public, alongside any reader who walks in. For an investigation into Germany’s energy transition, the team knocked on 200 doors, returned two weeks later to help residents fill out a survey, and, after publication, invited the same residents to face down policymakers and grid operators about their electricity bills.
Most newsrooms still measure themselves by clicks, shares, and subscriber numbers.
“Publication is just the beginning, not the end” of journalism’s task, CORRECTIV.Europe Managing Director Joanna Krawczyk told today’s panel, “Beyond Clicks and Cash: Measuring Journalism With a Different Ruler.”
She shared the stage with Ukrainian media strategist Katya Gorchinskaya. Most newsrooms still measure themselves by clicks, shares, and subscriber numbers, she argued. Those tell you about the media business, not whether anything moved because of the reporting.
That changes who CORRECTIV hires. It pays people to chase stories after publication—find who could act on the reporting, sit them down with the people the story is about, and watch whether anything actually moves. “It cannot rely on the assumption that this will be everyone’s side task—somehow it will happen,” Krawczyk said. “It will not.”
Russia banned them. The AfD sued them.
In October 2025, Russia declared CORRECTIV an “undesirable foreign organization,” citing its work on Russian disinformation and Kremlin networks in Europe. Russian citizens who cooperate with CORRECTIV—sharing an article, translating a text, commenting on a post—now face up to six years in prison. CORRECTIV said the move placed its work under threat “while simultaneously demonstrating that our reporting is effective.”
A Hamburg court had earlier ruled that the same passages were protected opinion.
Five months later, the Berlin II Regional Court ruled in favor of AfD lawmaker Gerrit Huy, who had attended the Potsdam meeting, and ordered CORRECTIV to stop describing what was said there as a “master plan” to expel German citizens. A Hamburg court had earlier ruled that the same passages were protected opinion. CORRECTIV has appealed.
Ukrainian newsrooms already do versions of this
Gorchinskaya pointed to several. The Kyiv Independent is funded by its subscribers, writes in English, and covers Ukrainian politics. Texty.org.ua won a Sigma award for data journalism mapping Kremlin disinformation.
In the first weeks of the full-scale invasion, Gwara Media in Kharkiv built PEREVIRKA, a Telegram bot that lets any Ukrainian send in a suspicious link and get a fact-check back from the newsroom’s analysts. Nobody told them to. Nobody paid them up front. They just did it.
The same investigation has now led to former Presidential Office head Andrii Yermak being formally suspected of laundering 460 million hryvnia.
Trending Now
The same kind of journalism is driving the biggest corruption case of Zelenskyy’s presidency. National Anti-Corruption Bureau tapes named businessman Tymur Mindich—a former business associate of the president—in a $100 million kickback scheme involving the state energy company Energoatom.
The same investigation has now led to former Presidential Office head Andrii Yermak being formally suspected of laundering 460 million hryvnia ($10 million) through luxury construction.
Ukraine just placed one of its highest-ranking corruption suspects under court-ordered custody
The cabinet reshuffle that followed the first Mindich tapes happened because the reporting made it impossible not to.
Outlets able to survive on their readers take years to grow.
But these are a handful of outlets, not 300. Outlets able to survive on their readers take years to grow, and the one-year grants most Ukrainian local papers live on do not pay for the people who would do that growing.
What Belarus already learned
The Belarusian press in exile—around 700 journalists across more than 40 organizations, almost all facing criminal charges at home—spent the past several years building things they all use together. A shared pool of data.
They built it because they had been jailed at home, exiled abroad, and were losing donor attention to more visible crises.
Surveys no single newsroom could afford alone: one tracking whether readers of independent Belarusian media are more likely to oppose Russia’s war against Ukraine; another measuring how exiled outlets preserve a language and culture the Lukashenka regime has worked to erase from schools inside Belarus.
They did not build this in calm conditions. They built it because they had been jailed at home, exiled abroad, and were losing donor attention to more visible crises. The shared tools exist because survival required them.
What donors do not pay for
Both speakers reserved their sharpest criticism for funders. Krawczyk, who sits on the boards of two of the bigger European ones—the European Media and Information Fund and Journalismfund Europe—called the standard donor expectation of policy-change impact elite-driven, because only outlets with insiders in legislatures can deliver it.
One-year-long grants do not pay the people whose job is to chase a story after publication.
One-year-long grants do not pay the people whose job is to chase a story after publication. The slow work of building a relationship with readers does not fit on most application forms.
What changes now
Ola Myrovych, the Lviv Media Forum’s CEO, told the Christian Science Monitor last summer that in Ukraine, “we are living in a constant crisis from the war. That has forced us to learn to adapt.”
LMF 2026, themed “Reality Under Attack: Flight, Freeze, or Fight?”, runs through 16 May.
