Last November, Tribuna became the first Belarusian-language sports outlet in the country. It happened after more than two years of repressions in Belarus, which also targeted Tribuna’s journalists. The publisher openly supported the protests, eventually forcing the whole newsroom to leave the country. Now, the team works from five countries, looking for ways to connect with the people in Belarus and documenting pro-war athletes.

Tribuna Belarus started in 2010 under the name of goals.by and switched to a new name four years later. Nowadays, it is part of an eponymous network of football websites in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Arabic. Belarusian and Ukrainian outlets are wider in topics, not focused solely on football. Tribuna is one of the biggest sports outlets in Belarus and Eastern Europe, raking in some 20 million unique views across all the language editions, including about 1,5 million in Belarus — though being blocked in the country doesn’t help in attracting readers.

The Fix interviewed Tribuna’s CEO Maks Berazinski on how it operates nowadays and what problems it faces.

Tribuna didn’t become “politicised” only in 2020

Asked about the transformation that started in 2020, Berazinski explains that Tribuna was always more than just about scores and points. “We were asking the athletes what they thought of Muammar Gaddafi; we were trying to make sportsmen opinion leaders, to have some background and not to be just a medal stand,” says the CEO.

Tribuna was a rare example of a media in Belarus making a living solely through advertisement. Its main YouTube channel, ChestnOK, started in 2018 as a side hustle about Belarusian football from journalist Aliaksandr Ivulin. It grew to 35,000 subscribers before the protests of 2020, which was an impressive result for the country. Now, it has 80,000 and content on other sports as well.

Before the protests of 2020, Tribuna did a few interviews with potential presidential candidates, asking for their views on the sports sphere. When the protests in 2020 started, Tribuna publicly supported the vast number of people who stood against the rigged election and switched to covering the events. The website got immediately blocked in Belarus by the officials. In the next few days, the outlet changed the logo to white and red and the official red-green flag to white-red-white. Thus, when Sunday marches coincided with football matches, the timetable widget on the website’s main page was full of national flags next to club names – a gesture of solidarity by the newsroom.

*The main page of Tribuna on August 23, the day of one of the biggest Sunday marches in Belarus*

“Sport is an expression of life for us, and there can’t be an athlete who is unbothered when hundreds of thousands are on the streets. So, we just continued our job following the context. Overall, the nation was heated up, and, accordingly, our content heated up, too,” explains Berazinski.

Quickly, the team realised that the repressions were coming, and the leadership fled the country. However, almost the whole newsroom continued to work from Belarus until the trigger moment in June 2021, when the police detained Aliaksandr Ivulin (he was later sentenced to two years in prison and then released in March 2023).

A few more journalists were detained for two weeks around that time, and after that the newsroom left Belarus. So now, a team of about 20 people works from five countries. Berazinski says that Tribuna’s team worked from different cities in Belarus before, so having a remote newsroom is not new.

Two languages, anonymous sources: how Tribuna works now

When Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine started, Ukrainian and Belarusian Tribuna newsrooms cooperated to gather a list of athletes and sports officials who supported or justified the aggression. At the moment of publication, it contains 240 people.

“It is important that athletes who haven’t spoken out against the war aren’t allowed to any competition because sport in Belarus and Russia is an instrument of propaganda,” says Berazinski. He acknowledges that some Russian athletes fear falling under repression after speaking out. However, he explains, this is a situation with clear good and evil, and “we just don’t understand how one can remain silent”.

Someone finds the strength to call a spade a spade while others try to move between streams, which is unacceptable

In the second half of 2022, the team finally started the Belarusian-language website version. The Ukrainian Tribuna already had two languages, so the team didn’t need to search for a technical solution.

The CEO points out that they received numerous replies from people they hadn’t met before when they published the vacancy for a Belarusian-language editor. Some people even offered to volunteer simply because this project was important to them. Additionally, the newsroom hired three more people to update the news feed in Belarusian.

About 35-40% of the audience now uses the Belarusian-language version. Berazinski says that some new behavioural patterns emerge: for example, people on social media write comments under Belarusian-language news mostly in Belarusian.

Tribuna noticed the trend of people moving to social media before 2020 and now pays much attention to its pages. There is a separate department focused on social media which does different content for various accounts: short news videos for TikTok (13k followers), visual content for Instagram (43k followers), digests on Telegram (11k followers), and so on.

One of the main issues for Tribuna nowadays is receiving information from Belarus. “We can’t go to a football match, talk to a coach, pro-regime athletes don’t talk with us, and we can’t even speak to pro-democracy people there because it is dangerous for them,” says Berazinski. Thus, Tribuna publishes anonymous interviews and information from anonymous sources in the federations or clubs.

As for the business side of things, Berazinski says that it would be easier just to close the outlet than to keep it going if not for the outlet’s mission. “There is no question about profit; this is all about the mission to provide people with information through all these blocks, VPNs, etc.,” he explains. Tribuna lived on ads until the officials labelled it an “extremist” in August 2021, even though its website had been blocked since August 2020. Now, its life mostly depends on grant funding.

The website’s audience dropped from 4-5 million sessions monthly to about 1.5 million after the blocking. Due to VPNs, it’s impossible to know how many people access Tribuna from Belarus. Berazinski says that the outlet lost the audience which opened the website occasionally from the search during significant sporting events.

Being a part of the network helps by cutting costs on technical maintenance and website development. Additionally, the team translates international news from the Ukrainian Tribuna, which would otherwise need 4-5 more people in the newsroom.

“We are in a situation where, perhaps, no media manager from any country can give us advice. When Russian journalists started to flee the country, Belarusians were the ones to share the experience and give advice. We are on a way that nobody went through, and we just need to do what journalists have to do. But we need to keep in mind there is no option of supporting or not supporting the war. The war is an evil, it is black, and everybody has to understand that,” says Berazinski.

What it is like to be a Belarusian sports outlet banned in the country: the case of Tribuna

Hleb Liapeika

Being a sports outlet without reporters in the country is tough

Author

Hleb Liapeika

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