The visit to the Media Development Foundation’s office was part of the last day in Kyiv for participants of Media Dialogue 2025. The centre for the development of independent media has worked for 11 years and runs a community of 75 local media outlets from all regions of Ukraine.
They work with television, print, but mostly with online media. The key spheres of their services are: helping newsrooms to achieve sustainability, professional training programs at Kyiv Media School, journalism experience programs that provide internships and offline meet-ups, community building, and research about media processes of European media.
“For example, we have a media forum that is focused on advocacy and communication of Ukraine abroad. We have a Bucha journalism conference. It’s a big event that brings together around 400 media professionals. It is usually organized in May. Also, we launched a national investigative contest. It was held for more than 10 years, and after that, we chose the best investigation of the year,” said operations director Tetiana Kulkova.
She added that for financial stability, media outlets apply for grants and take fundraising courses. That happened after some media outlets were shut down because of the lack of budget, leading them to start working more on their subscription and membership models.
As she said, if people don’t have any source of independent information, they must analyze lots of news themselves, which is extremely hard in wartime. They mentioned the case of the Dnipro region where there was no independent media.
“We found an activist group, a small media outlet, and launched an initiative to build an organization with structure, with a new brand book, and with a site. We shared our expertise and supported specialists by hand and made the connection between media and audience easy. This media has operated for two years already, and it’s totally independent,” explained Tetiana Kulkova.
She admitted that during the war, censorship in the country still exists; however, independent media are trying their best to provide verified information for the audience, but are following some rules and standards, which are necessary to observe during current events.
Guests from Germany, Armenia, Belarus, and Georgia were able to learn how independent media is supported in Ukraine and whether this support is sufficient
