짧隊The This is a podcast about the technology of the IIDA community. The support is provided by .dk, IIDA insurance and the Herning message center. My name is Henrik Fønns and I am the one who decides in... Techtopia I am the one who decides in... Techtopia I am the one who decides in... Techtopia. In the last episode of Techtopia we discussed the Telegram service. There are some hidden clues where you can find light-shade materials... and criminals who communicate with each other. But we also talked about how Telegram is an important channel for political dissidents... and others who do not have access to their own media. One of the media I follow on Telegram is Kyiv Independent, an English-language network media from Ukraine... that covers the war between Russia and Ukraine closely. The name suggests that the journalists on Kyiv Independent are honored to be independent. The media is also partly led by the employees. In November 2021 all journalists on the Ukrainian news Keeof Post were fired by the owners... who were unhappy with their critical coverage of the Ukrainian authorities. The journalists refused to let their news coverage be controlled by the owners... and fired them all. Instead of giving up, the owners founded a new media company called Keeof Independent. Jnomics, an international media consultant company with Ukrainian advice, helped to establish the company. Only three months after Keeof Independent was launched, Russia and Ukraine were involved. Suddenly Keeof Independent became a very important international media company. The news in English became an important news source for Ukraine for millions of people around the world... during the war against Russia. The daily leader of the Keeof Independent, I should avoid saying his name, he does it himself, visited Copenhagen this week... where he participated in the conference for Barbecue and he also had a place to talk to Tectopia. I am an officer at the Keeof Independent, which is a Ukrainian English language news publication. There I do all sorts of things. Mainly I oversee read revenue marketing, product and tech, as well as communications. Those are kind of the main verticals I oversee at the Keeof Independent. And that's what I do. So you're not really involved in the journalism? No, I'm a media manager. I do not work in a newsroom. So my main thing is the overall strategy of the Keeof Independent as an organization. Specifically also about how does the whole model work together. I think most Danish listeners are not familiar with the Keeof Independent, if they even know about it. I'm not sure they do that. Could you give us the story behind the Keeof Independent? Sure. It's actually a very fascinating and also very typical story of a media... kind of fight for the media freedom. So Keeof Independent was founded in November 2021, just a few months before Russia invaded Ukraine. And it was founded as a result of an owner of a previously quite big English language publication called Keeof Post firing the whole team because he didn't like what they were doing. He thought he's not controlling his kind of assets and so on. So he fired the whole team. And then the people from the Keeof Post, the newsroom from the Keeof Post, they partnered with a news consultancy called Genomics where I used to work back in the days. And we co-founded the Keeof Independent together. That was November 2021. And since then, kind of when Russia launched the full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, we suddenly became one of the biggest English language voices out of Ukraine. Suddenly the amount of attention to our work grew exponentially. Our followership on Twitter grew from 30,000 followers to over 2 million in two months. And the readership on the website grew dramatically. And that was an interesting collision of two important factors for us of being a startup and also being a source of information for one of the most, the biggest and one of the most important wars in Europe since the Second World War. And that's where we ended up ourselves being and where we still are. We are a bit over two years old now. We really changed a lot since that time. When I joined, we were a team of 20 people. Now we are even a bit less. Now we are a team of 65, approaching 70 people. We've been trying to rise to the challenge of being kind of the source of quality information about what's happening in Ukraine and also Eastern Europe in a wider context, launching new things, trying to change the business model, trying to survive in the middle because most of us are based in Kiev. I'm also based in Kiev, arrived this event from Kiev. And yeah, that's been the journey. Happy to share more. But that's kind of the high level overview. But it is a digital media. You have a website and then you also use Telegram as a channel for publishing. So we are digital only at the moment, but we are incredibly multimedia. So we have a website as our main platform of sharing our journalism. We are super active on social media, Twitter and now X, Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Blue Sky. We launched a bunch of them on YouTube. We also have been putting a lot of effort. We are getting our video journalism to a new level. That's also one of the things we've been doing a lot in the last year specifically. So we are very much across the board. We have a few podcasts, which are currently kind of in a moment of transition and transformation. But yes, that's where we are. We try to be whatever we can be, apart from print at the moment. We are not doing that. I've actually been following you on Telegram, but which channel is the biggest one for you? So the website would be the biggest. We have in August, we had 2.8 million unique users on the website and close to around close to 10 million page views. That was our website numbers. So I would say the website would be the main platform in terms of social media. The biggest one would be X or formerly Twitter. There we have a bit over 2 million followers and close to 100 million reach every month. Telegram is an interesting source for us. It was actually interesting. It was actually me who suggested to launch it on the day of the invasion while I was not yet working at the Kiv independent. But I was like, let's just throw them like 5 a.m. like guys, let's do Telegram. And we did it like we were just copy pasting some stuff we were publishing on from Twitter to Telegram. And that's how it kind of grew. So I think I take part of the blame for launching that channel specifically. The blame, but is it something to blame you for? It's a matter of my conversation. I wouldn't say it's a matter of blame, but it's also something that is actively discussed right now in Ukraine, whether Ukrainians should use Telegram so much as they use it right now. And for the context for readers, the role of Telegram for Ukrainians as a news source is crazy. Like, it's hard to describe it for someone who is not who is not kind of based there. But it's recently the recent study showed that it's used more as a news source than TV, which is not very easy to believe and more than websites overall in general. So people do get their news on Telegram. On Telegram, there is this thing which is called like channels. And it's a mix of private messaging and public kind of messaging. WhatsApp recently launched something like that. But Telegram had it for years. And it became really it was already quite big. Even before Russia launched the full scale invasion and it got skyrocketed after. So everyone used it. It's my parents now use it. They check rocket attacks on Telegram, like who when whenever there is like an air siren, they go in like different telegram channels, see what is exactly flying on us. That's like one of the typical use cases people use Telegram for. They really rely on it a lot. But at the same time, Telegram has been launched by a Russian born entrepreneur, Pavel Dudov, which is right now under arrest or under custody. Right. Like he's now I think he had a bail. Right. So he's in France, cannot leave the country right now. So that is an interesting development, that story. But there has always been concerns whether Telegram is a safe place, safe place to to have your private messaging gone. My I know I don't know if you want to dive into it straight away. I'm happy to. I would say my personally I was kind of evolving from having a lot of my main conversations on Telegram now to having most of my private conversations on signal. That's where kind of where I am right now personally. But I still do use Telegram as a source of news. But do Ukrainians worry about the Russian access to information on Telegram? Do they think that Russia has a back door, so to speak? I would say they were not worried about it too much, but that worry is growing. And and people are like they I know they don't really think about it that much. Right. Like the overall like they just see it as a convenient source and they use it. But there is a shift also in how the government is thinking about Telegram. In the last year, they've been trying as far as I know to reach out to Telegram to get them to block some of the Russian channels in Ukraine, which Russia is very actively using as a source of propaganda and disinformation on Ukrainians. For them, it's like probably the main platform to do that, because in Telegram, not you don't even have to have a back door to do that. Right. The ability to launch big anonymous news channels and reach Ukrainians, which are, as we just discussed, use it as a primary news source. Like a lot of Ukrainians use it is such a golden opportunity because Telegram does not do any any moderation whatsoever. Almost right. They you can both access, you know, give independent and some sort of an Russia military with military bloggers at the same time on the platform. You can there are huge channels with one million plus followers that you have no idea who is behind them. You don't know who is the founder, who is who controls it. There is no regulation in terms of disclosing the kind of the owner slash the administrator of the platform. Telegram does not collect that data. So for Russians, it's an incredible golden opportunity to launch this big information campaigns. And they do it a lot. And maybe that's why it's important for Kiev independent to be there as well, to sort of counter that kind of disinformation taking place from Russia. That's right. So for us, our main kind of target audience are people outside of Ukraine because we are English language. So I would say our main mission would be for people like you, right, like who is trying to get the sense of what's happening. And if you're on Telegram to be there, kind of to have to be to have a platform there. But also I would say Telegram is not the main thing in this in this equation. But for people inside Ukraine, for sure. And there are a lot of good independent media present on the platform. It's just they are not as big very often as those anonymous, anonymous channels. Like they don't refer to the same techniques very often as they verify information more and makes them slower. So I can give you one example of a very specific user kind of information need that Ukrainians have that they go to Telegram for. And then classic independent media just cannot provide them to this. Right. So this is the information of what is happening if there is an aerial attack. So whenever Russia is launching a rocket or something, there is air siren that starts in Ukraine. But just the information about the air siren is often not enough to understand what is happening because sometimes a fighter jet can take off, let's say, in Russia. And the protocols would say that air siren has to be triggered because that can be they can have launching missile. And, you know, it kind of the air siren starts across the whole country, but it doesn't necessarily lead to an attack. Right. So for Ukrainians, what they develop, the habit they develop in this two and a half years is they don't just use the air siren itself to make any actions like going to a shelter. They go to Telegram and check what is actually happened. Is it a rocket? Is it just a fighter jet? Like the like the second layer of information. Often this information is not like this is like the leaked information from like military systems and so on. So some of those anonymous Telegram channels, like they do use this. And sure, let's say there are rockets flying from like Black Sea about to be in Kiev Oblast in like 15 minutes. Right. And people do need this information a lot. And so independent media kind of the likes of keeping them. We don't share that kind of things. Right. Because we cannot verify it straight away. The source like the source of it and so on and so forth. But they do. Right. So in the battle between independent media and like those anonymous channels, they win for this specific information need. And that I can just tell you that this thing itself is what makes those channels so much more popular. Even I'm looking at my parents who like they say, oh, yes, I read it on like some channel called like something like Ukraine. Now, whatever. Like no one knows about it. Like there is this thing going on. They somehow found it like and so on. No one knows about this brand. Like no one knows who is behind it. But and yet they use this information for their almost like life and death decisions. Right. Are you going to a shelter during an attack or not? Right. And that's what many Ukrainians do use Telegram a lot. It must be difficult to do journalism in an environment like this with all this disinformation and fake news and anonymous sources. I think it is. I think it's definitely difficult. Very hard. It's very hard for it from kind of media to compete in that environment because they lose on. And there is also another layer of complication. Right. People want visuals, but there is an official Ukrainian law that bans publishing photos from the site of an attack because the Russians can use it. Then they can alter the rocket, let's say, launch locations and so on. Right. Like so there is this ban. And yet people do make these photos and they share it, for example. And these Telegram channels do share it and an independent media with a disclosed source and owner and so on. If they would publish it, they might have a legal problem against them. Those Telegram channels, they do not. Right. They are just doing it. So for people, an average person who just heard there was an attack in a city, they go to those channels to see photos, to see photos of the destroyed buildings and so on, which might for regular media will be not possible to publish straight away. They wait for an official source to publish it, like a mayor of the city or an official. And they publish it. Right. Or they send a reporter. But sometimes very often they cannot. Right. So there are a number of examples where media lose on speed and lose on access to information because they are abiding by rules for each other. So I'm not right. The people who work for the Kiev Independent, the reporters and the staff, are they placed in one location or are they scattered around the country? And do you have people with the soldiers at the front? Yes. So we are based in Kiev. We are a team of 65 people right now. I would say close to 50 people are based in Kiev right now and then around 15 are based in different other countries. The majority, like all the team essentially is based in Kiev, apart from a few people who are based in Lviv, which is in western Ukraine. We do have frontline reporters who regularly go to the frontline and back, but they are not leaving there. They go on trips, for example, for a week. They are embedded with soldiers. They are doing the reporting and they are coming back to Kiev. That's usually how it works for us. And what about your business model? If you're growing from 20 people to 65 people in two years, you must make some money somewhere. That's right. So we do have a business model that works for now at least. And we are proud and I would say even lucky that we found a way that works for us. The main business model is our support from our readers. We have a membership and donations. Our membership is the backbone of our financing. So we have at the moment over 12,000 monthly paying members, which support us from $5 to $100 per month. So with an average check of from $8 to $9 a month. And that really is right now the main backbone of our business model. But we also have many other things. We, for example, recently launched a store where we sell merchandise and clothing. And only in August we sold over a thousand items. And it was a very good start. We are quite happy with it. We also have some advertisement, not much, but we are kind of trying to ramp it up in a sustainable way, not to harm our brand and not to harm the experience of our members. We have things like syndication where we sell our journalism to big platforms like Yahoo, MSN, and they share it on their platforms. So it's a kind of distribution of our journalism. And this allows us to grow so far and sustain ourselves. We are trying to be super careful with this and not overstretch ourselves. But at the same time, we do understand the uniqueness of this moment and the opportunity and responsibility that we have as the key of independent to be a primary source of news for many people around the world about what's happened. We understand that if we would shut down, many probably would not go for another place. They would just stop reading about Ukraine at all. So we try to live with that mindset and be very, very conscious that our work impacts a lot of people. And the name independent indicates that you're also independent from the Ukrainian government in what you're writing? That's right. We are independent from everyone apart from ourselves. And our main stakeholder is our reader. Key of Independence is owned by its staff. And that allows us for being truly independent in that form. We do treat ourselves as a news publication and with all the standards and limitations and maybe limitation is not the best word, but the standards and values that that brings. So while we have a stance and it's obviously our stance is that we support Ukraine and we are against Russian invasion, that is very clear stance that we show in our editorial and so on. When it comes to our journalism, we do it no matter if it's going to make someone unhappy, including the Ukrainian government. So for example, in 2022, we published one of the first investigations into some misconduct in the Ukrainian army. We published a story about Foreign Legion, which is a separate unit of foreigners fighting for Ukraine and about the issues there. There is about there was a essentially a Polish gangster wanted in Poland who was leading one of the units and all the efforts to solve this were not working. And it was clearly like harming harming that unit published that investigation. And, you know, it made many people in the government quite unhappy about it. But and yet we were really happy with the support we got from our readers. And I remember that many people were writing, that's why we support Ukrainians, because that's possible there during the war that they do preserve democracy, independent media, even the time in the times like this. So that's just one example. But since then, we had a lot of them. And but we do believe that that work is essentially long term is beneficial for Ukraine. And that was the media section on Kiev Independent, which has talked about their work. I have links from tektopia.dk. It's also there you can find our Q with earlier podcast. You can find the opportunity to subscribe to our newsletter. And then you can also subscribe to our podcast in the streaming app you now prefer to use. You can write to me at henriksnabla.tektopia.dk with suggestion rice and rose. And then you can participate in the techonokit discussion in our Facebook group. It's called TekTopia Backstage. You can follow us on X and Instagram. That's what we're called at snabla.tektopia.dk. And then you can also follow us on LinkedIn. We are coming every Monday. And TekTopia is me. My name is Henrik Fønns. And I get to help you in Denike. See you next week. TekTopia. TekTopia.