�鶹Լ�� Media Action Feed

Meet Suspilne: a rebranded, modern broadcaster in Ukraine

Julie Boutros — Wed, 29 Sep 2021 10:03:33 +0000

The excitement was palpable when UA:PBC’s executives and board members gathered with ambassadors, dignitaries and representatives of �鶹Լ�� Media Action and our partner Deutsche Welle Akademie earlier this month, to present a dynamic modern newsroom that will form the central hub for the re-branded public broadcaster, Suspilne (Public).

‘(The) revolution on Maidan in 2014, just a few metres from where we are standing now, in many ways, this was the birth of free media in Ukraine. It became clear that a strong independent public broadcaster was needed. Soon Suspilne was born,” said Tetiana Kyselchuk at the opening.

�鶹Լ�� Media Action joined the project with UA:PBC in 2017 with one objective: to help it revolutionise its news operation and design a newsroom that would cater to a wider audience, with multimedia and multiplatform content that is trusted, impartial, informing and engaging.

With funding from the European Commission, working with Deutsche Welle Akademie, �鶹Լ�� Media Action has supported the design and implementation of new workflows, based on the newsgathering approach used by the �鶹Լ��, where the story is at the heart of a multimedia news operation. This approach shares stories internally, so they can reach audiences more efficiently and effectively across different platforms.

This required a complete overhaul of the current system. It took more than 300 days of training and mentoring to deliver a successful transition, while working closely with UA:PBC’s management on workflows, staff recruitment and re-assessment of training needs - including expanding journalists’ skills to work across multiple platforms.

By no means was it a seamless journey. But there is a noticeable difference between where the newsroom started and where it is today. Much credit goes to the UA:PBC team, who allowed us space to make suggestions and support its staff, who trusted in our consultants’ expertise from the �鶹Լ��, and who remain committed to serving the public and becoming a trusted and reliable source of information for all Ukrainians.

UA:PBC staff stand in the studio building project before completion

Changes from the bottom up

We began the project – Newshouse 1.0 – by bringing all the news teams together to work out of one, central multimedia newsroom.

Alongside new roles and job descriptions, new workflows improved communication among the digital, television and radio teams, all working around a story-centric approach. Journalists were encouraged to pitch new themes and formats, and to think about multi-platform distribution, to help embed a culture of thinking across platforms.

The reforms have also included adapting editorial guidelines, and defining and supporting a core mission for the main news bulletin, along with its target audience, unique selling point and its editorial remit and style.

Assessment and evaluation

An independent evaluator assessed the project against its intended outcomes, by looking at the content and news agenda for evidence of the values and principles of public service broadcasting.

The evaluation found:

News stories were covered with care, accuracy and a high degree of transparency, so audiences always knew the sources
A clear focus on issues that were of direct concern to the audience because they were expected to impact their lives
A substantial number of stories were fully multimedia: with text, still images and video with an audio track. Text and video tended to be alternative versions rather than accompaniments
Multimedia forms of story treatment showed greater story-telling craft and diversity of voices and sources, helping the public broadcaster establish itself as a source of news among audiences it did not reach before
Voices of some affected and minority groups were clearly represented in daily news items and in features, which were expected to remain on the website for some time.

“This is news that in general one trusts, both to be correct in what it says and not to miss developments of interest and importance,” wrote the evaluator.

Shaping and challenging the agenda

Examples of standout coverage included a background feature on Afghanistan, which demonstrated a ‘mission to explain’ through a well-crafted and engaging history of foreign interventions and the rise of Islamic militancy in the country. UA:PBC also demonstrated exclusive access at the Tokyo Olympics, with a team of reporters interviewing Ukrainian athletes.

The network has covered such major stories as the shooting down of the MH17 flight over Ukraine, unrest in Belarus, the Ukrainian Airlines flight that went down over Iran, conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, and of course, the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing conflict in the country’s east and in Crimea.

But it has also taken on less traditional stories for the country, including government measures against the LGBTQI+ community in neighbouring Hungary, a video feature on Ukraine’s Jewish Karaite community, extensive coverage of a sexual harassment case at a Ukraine university in which the accounts of the women affected were prominent, and a science story about DNA evidence suggesting non-binary persons held high office 1,000 years ago.

In project evaluation interviews, UA:PBC’s senior staff and editors noted improvements in the speed and quality of news production, coordination across central and regional bureaux, and streamlined planning and multi-platform distribution of news content.

Still more progress to come

The work is not yet done: the evaluator also found that audience engagement could be greater, if more creativity and storytelling were used in reporting. But, operating in a media environment in which news is often driven by opinion, Suspilne’s emphasis on well-sourced facts stands out.

This second phase of the project, Newshouse 2.0, has brought the opening of the new newsroom, designed, constructed, furnished and equipped by our partner Deutsche Welle Akademie. Overall, the project reflects the joint expertise and effort of media development organisations linked to leading European public service broadcasters in Europe.

“The Newshouse is the latest stage of our journey…We have already achieved so much and for that we have a lot to thank the people in this room - our partners,” Dima Khilchenko coordinator of NewsHouse project, said at the opening.

The project has demonstrated the importance of partnership, and of support and commitment to public interest media in Ukraine.

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�鶹Լ�� Media Action has worked with Deutsche Welle Akademie with funding from the European Union on the UA:PBC Newshouse project. To read more about the project, please see Deutsche Welle Akademie's .

The challenges of reporting in Ukraine

Tony Howson — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 13:58:17 +0000

Tracking the latest news on Ukraine from my kitchen in Scarborough has been a nerve-racking experience.

My son was in Kyiv working as a volunteer for the International Red Cross. Under sniper fire he was ferrying out casualties from the city’s Independence Square last month as the clashes between protestors and police intensified.

He had told me his Red Cross arm-band would protect him. Then we heard that he and a colleague were targeted as they were lifting out a casualty. His friend was shot in the back.

News was a vital link for my wife and me. She is Ukrainian, desperate to know what was happening and how family were coping.

Through the internet we were able to access Ukrainian TV channels and news services. It gave me a chance to see how some of the journalists I had worked with over the years were coping.

�鶹Լ�� Media Action is currently working on a journalism mentoring project in Ukraine, the latest in a number of large-scale activities carried out since 1996.

One of our trainers, Valentina Samar caught my attention as she delivered a live report from Crimea. I watched as she described the tense events on the Peninsula, now controlled by pro-Russian troops.

I was impressed by her careful language and use of local knowledge to create a picture of what was happening. I first met Valentina in the late 90s when we worked on a �鶹Լ�� World Service Training Overseas project designed to counter hate speech against Crimean Tatars.

Our paths crossed again when she became one of our local trainers as we worked on transforming the university journalism curriculum, in particular with the main university in Kyiv, but also in Uzhhorod and Crimea’s Simferopol.

The tensions around that time, fuelled by coming elections and rows over land, in many ways feed into the current crisis.

There have long been challenges and surprises working in the region, with the underlying political tensions sporadically bubbling to the surface. ��In 2003 �鶹Լ�� Media Action set up Top Media in Odessa, a media support project offering legal advice and training. When the EU-funded project closed two and half years later, a journalism student burst into tears in my office, apologising for spying on us for the SBU – the former KGB.

It was a sensitive time; we were being monitored as a result of the scandal following the kidnap and murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze. There were concerns that, as a �鶹Լ�� entity, we might encourage coverage of the story in ways the then authorities would not like.

Back in the current crisis, Andriy Kulykov, another trainer we worked with, a former �鶹Լ�� journalist and now one of Ukraine’s leading talk-show presenters, has also been at the heart of events.

He took a brave step of broadcasting his programme Svoboda Slova (Freedom of Speech) not in Ukrainian, but in Russian – an attempt to reach out to all sides.

He has also used his �鶹Լ�� journalism training and experience as a trainer with Media Action, to maintain balance during his on air interviewing..

And for me, as a listener eager to know the latest, I am grateful to those who worked on projects with me over the years, who maintain the editorial standards we have promoted and kept me in touch with how my family’s life is being affected – now and in the uncertain future Ukraine is facing.

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The circle of self-censorship

Alice Morrison — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 09:32:29 +0000

It was quite an intimidating thought. Training 11 senior journalists from Armenia and Ukraine in the delicate art of mentorship. I was dreading communication problems: I don’t speak any Armenian, nor Russian, nor Ukrainian. But human understanding is pretty universal and working through an interpreter was slow but not as painful as I thought.��

I am the team leader on a project called , funded by the EU and run by a �鶹Լ�� Media Action-led consortium. It’s all about supporting and training journalists: 1200 of them across 17 countries in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, in the wake of the Arab Spring and 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union and the emergence of democracy.��

In involves two regions at two different stages of development and what I wanted to find out was what kind of constraints the journalists in Ukraine and Armenia are working under.

I witnessed a very concrete example. I was taken to a pro free speech rally by eminent Ukrainian journalist and talk show host Andriy Koulikov. The rally was calling for a Russian-owned independent TV station TBi to be reinstated on the social cable package. The channel has been increasingly squeezed out by operators, widely thought to be at the behest of the government.��

At the rally, the protestors were also calling for people to vote for the opposition. Organisers also wanted to test out how much support they would get from other TV networks – who would cover it? Well, there were very few cameras there.

This gets to the heart of the matter: ownership and lack of financial independence. Because the vast majority of media outlets in both Armenia and Ukraine are owned by hugely rich businessmen – ‘corruptionaires’ as some call them here – or the government, most outlets are serving highly vested interests. Who wants to jeopardise a lucrative government contract? The net outcome of this is that the opposition get next to no coverage, becoming “the political living dead” as one of the journalists I worked with put it.
A happy little vicious circle is drawn with self-censorship at its core. The structure of influence is Government – Owner – Channel Director – Editor – Journalist. The journalist is five rungs down and makes assumptions about what the upper rungs will and will not want to hear. Do this wrong, and you can lose your status, your livelihood, and perhaps even your freedom. How many of us would not be cautious in the same circumstances? And if you know your boss is not going to broadcast or publish it, why do it?

This only highlights the importance of the internet in such circumstances, which everyone here agreed is free. But it does not get the audience. Television is the medium which wields the biggest clout.

“In Ukraine, journalism is not the fourth estate,” says Andriy Koulikov. Journalists are typically badly paid, and often have to work a second job. Their positions are insecure and don’t have the kudos of other professions.��
In Armenia, the media is dominated by women, not because we have struck a grand blow for emancipation but because salaries mean a man can’t support his family and there is a general gender imbalance in the country due to wars and the diaspora.

So my colleagues face a daunting array of problems as they go about their daily work. It hasn’t dampened their enthusiasm and professionalism. These are no jaded hacks, but clever, hardworking people trying to make a difference.
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