When Russia launched its all-out invasion of Ukraine in February last year, Babel’s founder and CEO Kateryna Kobernyk spent a few weeks posting news updates on the publisher’s Telegram channel. With Russian tanks rolling into the country, the demand for information skyrocketed – and so did Babel’s audience.

The company quickly doubled in size to 30 people, and over the next months Babel joined other major news publishers in being an essential source of information for many thousands of Ukrainians fleeing the war or trying to weather its impact.

Last fall, when The Fix spoke with Ukrainian media expert Otar Dovzhenko about the Ukrainian media industry during the war, he cited Babel as one of the most interesting media projects in the country today, both as a source of news and as a place for on-the-ground reporting.

Babel has a relatively limited audience for a major nationwide outlet – typically around 1 million unique readers monthly – but it has positioned itself as an upscale publisher catering to a well-educated audience with an interest in thoroughly edited longreads. Babel is on the “white list” of most reliable online news media outlets regularly compiled by the Institute of Mass Information.

When Russia’s open invasion started, Babel made a principled decision to ditch its Russian-language version, which accounted for 40% of traffic, and had to completely change its business model.

Editor’s note: disclosure – Babel has been among the multiple Ukrainian news publishers supported via the campaign to keep Ukraine’s media going led by The Fix and partner organisations since early 2022.

The idea and the team behind Babel

Babel launched in 2018, having secured an investment from Ihor Kolomoyskyi, Ukrainian oligarch and media tycoon. It shut down next year after the financing had been cut off, but relaunched in 2020 with new investors – Dmytro Melnyk and Serhii Mostenets, who own an auto business in Western Ukraine.

Today Melnyk and Mostenets hold 75% of the company, while Kobernyk, the CEO, owns another 25%. Kobernyk says in an interview for The Fix that the owners give the publisher complete editorial independence and view their investment as a social mission (high-quality news business isn’t particularly lucrative, and Babel had not been profitable even before Russia’s war upended the Ukrainian economy).

Before Babel, Kobernyk led tsn.ua, one of the biggest Ukrainian online news websites, that belongs to Kolomoyskyi-owned 1+1 Media Group. She says she aimed for tsn.ua to be a “noble tabloid” (by the time Kobernyk left, the website reached its record of over 7 million unique visitors a month).

*Kateryna Kobernyk, *Babel*’s founder and CEO (photo: Babel)*

The idea behind Babel was different – create a “website for smart people”, as the team internally code-named it before launch. The publisher would feature in-depth analysis, produce painstakingly edited articles and pay a lot of attention to design.

Kobernyk serves as Babel’s CEO, overseeing both the editorial and the business divisions of the company. The outlet’s editor-in-chief Yevhen Spirin, who leads the newsroom, reports to Kobernyk.

Today the team includes around 30 people, twice as many as before the full-scale war. Three main units within the newsroom are the news department, the team of reporters and correspondents, and the English-language newsroom.

First moments of the war – influx of readers and ditching Russian-language edition

In the wee hours into February 24th of the last year, when it had become increasingly clear that Russian troops would invade Ukraine after months of tension, Kateryna Kobernyk woke up during the night and was monitoring news. Right around that time, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin infamously announced his “special military operation”, and Kobernyk was the one who posted Babel’s first news update that the war started.

What followed was a long period of frenzied work, when Babel’s audience grew by several times as demand for information skyrocketed (for example, the Telegram channel grew from 12,000 subscribers to over 50,000 subscribers in a week, adding almost 15,000 new readers just on the day of the invasion). Overall number of unique website visitors reached over 2 million monthly at the beginning of the war.

One of the decisions taken at the beginning of the invasion was to ditch the Russian-language version. Although Ukrainisation has been a widespread response to Russia’s military aggression, many national media outlets, which had traditionally been bilingual, have continued to support Russian-language editions, not least because they account for a huge chunk of traffic. (For comparison, Ukraine’s biggest news website Ukrayinska Pravda sees 48% of its audience reading news in Russian, its executive director Andrey Boborykin told The Fix last fall).

The decision was a principled one – suggested by editor-in-chief Spirin and approved by Kobernyk. In an interview for The Fix last fall, Spirin argued that the media should promote national language and be an example.

Spirin said that the core audience stayed with Babel, having switched to reading it in Ukrainian. In addition, the publisher launched an English-language edition, which Kobernyk says primarily targets English speakers from Europe. Babel’s English edition focuses on covering the war; recent stories include interviews with leaders of liberated Bucha and Izium, a report on the work of an artillery unit that helped liberate Kherson, as well as daily live coverage of the war.

*Babel’s report from the newly liberated Bucha district of the Kyiv region showing the scale of killings*
*and disruption left by Russian invaders, early April 2022* *(photo: Stas Kozliuk, CC BY-SA 3.0)*

“During the war journalists are primarily citizens, only then journalists”

Basic journalistic principles – reporting truthful, verified information – are always relevant; however, the all-out war has caused Babel to reconsider some of the language standards that were important in peacetime. When the war started, Kobernyk notes, it became clear that they couldn’t just stand aside and calmly, dispassionately cover the situation. “During the war journalists are primarily citizens, only then journalists”, Kobernyk told The Fix.

Babel doesn’t hide its disdain for Russian invaders; one of the style rules of the wartime is to use lowercase while describing the aggressor country and its leaders (e.g. “russia” rather than “Russia”, “vladimir putin” rather than “Vladimir Putin”). The words “enemy” and “defenders”, previously considered taboo, entered the lexicon, Kobernyk told The Fix. As Spirin said in a comment to Detector Media, “the rule to include a comment from the second side is really funny now when we’re talking about an occupier who tortured people”.

Perhaps more impactfully, Babel has used its platform to help fundraise for the Ukrainian army, efforts mostly spearheaded by Spirin. Before the new year, for example, a campaign to purchase two air defence complexes gathered over 900,000 hryvnias (around 23,000 euros). Funders who donated over 10,000 hryvnias could enter a chance to win a Ukrainian flag signed by Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces.

Another attribute of wartime coverage is self-censorship. Kobernyk says that while Babel isn’t singing praise to the authorities and is casting a critical eye on the situation in the country, they also sometimes choose not to publish negative information that could demotivate soldiers and people in general, such as petty conflicts between high-profile politicians.

*Christmas tree decorations created by Babel as part of its fundraising drive for air defence systems*
*(photo: Babel)*

Monetisation during the war

Despite Babel’s successes in fundraising for the army, sustaining the newsroom in wartime conditions is difficult. Before the invasion, the publisher built its commercial department, relying on native advertising to make money. However, during the economic crisis caused by Russia’s war, that is no longer possible.

Babel’s sales team had to become fundraising specialists, Kobernyk recounts, as the publisher is now relying predominantly on grants from international organisations to sustain its work. Funders include Reporters Without Borders, Internews, and multiple other organisations. Donations from readers and advertising do bring money, but they account for a fraction of the publisher’s budget.

Kobernyk says it’s clear that relying on grants isn’t healthy in the long run, but with the current situation in Ukraine it’s hard to make concrete plans a week in advance, let alone lay long-term plans for financial sustainability.

How Babel is building an upscale national news publisher in Ukraine during the war

Anton Protsiuk

Sales managers had to become fundraising specialists, and Russian-language version made way for the English one

Author

Anton Protsiuk

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