Mediazona’s editor Dmitry Treshchanin and editor-in-chief Sergey Smirnov. Photo: Mediazona / X
Russian independent media outlet Mediazona has been forced to lay off some staff members and to cut salaries for others due to lack of funding, its editor-in-chief Sergey Smirnov and editor Dmitry Treshchanin announced in a joint statement on Monday.
A funding campaign launched by the publication in September to mark its 10th anniversary had failed to reach its goal of attracting 5,000 subscribers, Smirnov said, leaving Mediazona “no other choice” but to make staff cuts and slash salaries in order to continue its work, adding that he and Treshchanin had agreed to work on a voluntary basis for the time being.
In a separate editorial statement, Mediazona said that it would be forced to continue the layoffs and salary cuts unless it was able to attract 5,000 subscribers. The outlet, whose subscriber count now stands at over 3,100, stressed that there was “basically no alternative” to Mediazona’s reader-funded finance model, upon which it has almost exclusively relied since its launch. “Without your help, the Mediazona you know today will be gone,” the editorial team said, calling on readers to donate to save the outlet.
Founded in 2014 by Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, members of the Russian punk group Pussy Riot, much of Mediazona’s work involves reporting on the often secretive workings of the Russian judicial and penitentiary system, as well as human rights abuses and the repressive measures taken against opponents of Vladimir Putin’s regime.
One of Mediazona’s most notable projects since then has been its verified death toll of Russian soldiers in Ukraine, an open source data investigation carried out jointly with BBC News Russian, which last week announced that it had verified the deaths of over 100,000 Russian soldiers.
Mediazona has also remained one of the most reliable sources on Russian court cases since the start of the war in Ukraine, and is estimated to be the most cited independent Russian outlet in 2024 according to media monitoring service The True Story.
