Last week, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky signed into law a bill on the media. Passed by the parliament earlier in December, the law aims to harmonise regulations of the media industry and introduces regulation of online media and web platforms.

The authorities say the law is part of the reforms roadmap Ukraine needs to implement to start negotiating the country’s accession to the European Union. Also, the law aims to help fight Russian propaganda more effectively amidst Ukraine’s struggle against Russian military invasion.

Critics, including international journalistic organisations, have previously criticised the bill for extending the powers of the state in regulating the media industry. For example, a previous version of the bill empowered the National Council on Broadcasting, a national media regulatory agency controlled by the authorities, to shut down news sites not officially registered as media without a court ruling.

The updated version of the bill, which was signed by Zelensky, relaxed some of the provisions criticised previously, particularly making official registration for online media voluntary rather than mandatory and limiting the regulator’s power to shut down news sites.

The key remaining concern, according to Ukrainian NGO Institute of Mass Information as cited by The New York Times, is the lack of the regulator’s independence (currently its members are appointed only by the president and the parliament, where the president has a majority). However, fixing it requires changes to the constitution, which is not possible under martial law.

The Guardian suffered a serious cyber attack in late December that forced the newspaper to shut down its office for a month. The attack happened on December 20th and forced the publisher to ask its reporters to work remotely. On Monday, January 2nd, the work-from-home policy was extended by further three weeks.

According to a note by chief executive Anna Bateson cited by PressGazette, the attack caused “[a] serious disruption” to the organisation’s network and IT systems, and “a number of key systems have been taken offline and remain unavailable” as a result of the measures taken to secure the network.

Semafor reports that “the print paper nearly did not come out on the first couple of days following the hack, and remains a heavy lift”. Not all of the systems have been affected by the attack – for example, the digital publishing system operates as usual.

As Semafor’s Max Tani notes, “The Guardian, which won a Pulitzer in 2014, for its reporting on Edward Snowden’s revelations about the U.S. National Security Agency, has long been considered a target for hackers, but reporting has suggested the motives for this attack may have merely been extortion via ransomware”. However, the publisher hasn’t yet officially announced any specific results of its investigation of the attack’s motives.

Vox Media, the US digital media company that owns outlets like Vox, The Verge and New York magazine, codified its ban on advertising from fossil-fuel companies, as well as any companies that mine nonrenewable resources.

As Morning Brew reports, Vox Media didn’t take fossil-fuel money since early 2021, but now is “kind of formalizing” the ban, in the words of senior vice president of media revenue AJ Frucci. The provision includes advertising from lobbying groups that exist to support fossil-fuel companies.

As Morning Brew notes, the question of selling ads to fossil-fuel companies remains heated among the news media. While The Guardian introduced a ban three years ago, US news organisations like Politico, Axios and Semafor have come under scrutiny for running fossil-fuel ads alongside their climate coverage.

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Weekly Digest: Ukraine’s media law, The Guardian cyber attack, Vox Media banning fossil-fuel ads