Reform.by media is on the brink of closure

“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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