Matt Kasper (Meydan TV, Azerbaijan) and Ivan Kolpakov (Meduza, Russia) discuss how journalists in exile can continue to produce quality content, despite not being physically present in the country of their audiences.
Transcript
Ep 2: Reporting from abroad
Matthew Kasper:
Welcome to the Exiled Media Podcast. The first season of the Exiled Media Podcast is a collaboration between CONFIDENCIAL, Zamaneh Media, and Meydan TV. I’m Matt Kasper, publisher at Meydan TV, and I’m here today with Ivan Kolpakov, editor-in-chief at Meduza.
Ivan Kolpakov:
Hi, Matt.
Matt:
Ivan, it’s nice to have you here.
Ivan:
And I’m happy to be here.
Matt:
Before we jump into the main topic of today’s episode, Reporting from Abroad, I’m going to introduce Meydan TV, and also have you, Ivan, talk about Meduza and give our listeners more insight into why we are here and what is going on.
Meydan TV is an Azerbaijani media outlet that was founded in 2013 in exile, in Berlin, Germany. It has grown to become the largest independent and the largest digital —independent or not— media outlet in Azerbaijan. We’ve got millions of followers on our YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and other social media profiles, and we are followed directly by about 25% of Azerbaijani social media users.
Ivan, can you tell us a little bit about Meduza?
Ivan:
I think Meduza and Meydan TV represent the same generation of media in exile. Meydan is a little bit older, one year older than Meduza. Meduza was launched in 2014. It was launched not in Germany, but also in exile, in the post-soviet country Latvia, in Riga, the capital of Latvia. Fortunately or unfortunately, at the moment, Meduza is the biggest Russian-speaking media organization.
We are blocked in Russia. We are completely outlawed in Russia, but we still broadcast in Russia and we still have millions of readers in Russia. So I think this is the most important piece of information you need to know about Meduza.
Matt:
Thanks for that, Ivan.
So, today we’re talking about Reporting from Abroad. In some ways, we have similar positions in our organizations. I’m the publisher and co-director of the organization that runs Meydan TV. But unlike you, I am not a journalist, I’m not an editor, so I don’t directly work on content-related topics. So I’m gonna be relying a little bit more on your expertise on how Meduza works from abroad, reporting from abroad.
The goal of today’s episode is to give some insights and ideas for exiled media outlets out there on how to deal with some of the tricky situations and complications that come with reporting from outside of the country they are reporting on.
Before we jump into the first topic that we want to focus on, I would like to repeat something that I say in every episode and at every opportunity: it’s good to keep in mind that exiled media outlets can be diverse. This means that you can be completely outside of the country with no one inside at all, but your organization can also be hybrid, meaning that part of the team is inside, and part of the team is outside, or even an entire editorial team is in a country and just the administration is outside. So there’s a lot of diversity, which means there’s a lot of different kinds of varied problems that can come about.
Some outlets were founded like we did, in exile, and others moved into exile after already being in the country they were in. And so there’s a lot of different problems and a lot of different tricky situations, but we are going to try and speak broadly and come up with some ideas. You have some solutions for how you guys have worked around some of those problems.
So, the first topic that we want to highlight is the ethical side of things. How do you work with people who are at risk? You have been labeled as an undesirable organization very recently. Can you work with people in Russia?
Ivan:
Well, I would say that it would have been really hard for us to establish the network of people who work for Meduza if we had started in our current circumstances, because now we are labeled as a foreign agent in Russia, and we are also labeled as an undesirable organization. It means that it is legally forbidden to do anything with Meduza except for probably reading Meduza.
It is forbidden to donate to Meduza. It is forbidden to post links on your Twitter or Facebook to Meduza. It is forbidden to provide comments and give interviews to Meduza. So basically, everything is forbidden. And if you work for Meduza, you can be fined and then you can be prosecuted for up to five or six years in prison. The (Russian) authorities are not using this legislation yet, but it is an opportunity. They will probably use it against us or other Russian media.
So in our case, we started in 2013. We had 15 people abroad and we had three reporters on the ground. By 2022, a third of our team was based in Russia, and we evacuated everyone only after the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Nowadays, we don’t have staff writers on the ground, but we have a network of freelancers, people who despite the risks are willing to collaborate with Meduza, and they provide a very important part of our reporting. They can see stuff and this is very important for the reporting.
Matt:
So then I guess the question there is though, how do you deal with the security side of things? Because these people are putting themselves at risk in working with you. So what is the role of an exiled outlet? I mean, how much can you leave people to kind of fend for themselves, or how much responsibility do you need to take on?
Ivan:
I think the responsibility is huge, to be honest. There is a big discussion among NGOs and media organizations about whether it is possible to keep working with people on the ground because you are based in a safe space. You are in Europe and your people are working there on the ground. They can be detained. They can be arrested. They can be tortured. This is what happens in Russia, unfortunately, with political activists, journalists, and common people. With anyone, it may happen to anyone. It is a fundamental question. How can we work with these people? But on the other hand, there are a lot of people on the ground. And they are adult people and they understand it very clearly. They want to work.
You know that a lot of people escaped the country after the beginning of the war. Hundreds of thousands of people, probably more than a million people. But the majority of people stayed in the country, and the majority of journalists stayed in the country. Probably the most privileged people from Moscow, from Saint Petersburg, escaped. People from some regions escaped, but the majority of regional journalists are still there. They can’t do journalism in their own country anymore because there is military censorship. They’re going to be just put behind bars if they do normal journalism inside Russia and publish it on their social networks or whatever. They can’t participate in an anti-war movement because this is an authoritarian country.
It’s really dangerous. You can go to prison for up to 10 to 15 years for your anti-war activities. So for many of them, doing journalism is a way out of this nightmare. And they understand what they do. They understand the content. They understand the consequences.
We at Meduza have to create the most sophisticated security protocols. Of course, we have to provide technical solutions for them and we have to be ready to evacuate them if something bad happens. But to be honest, we can’t do a lot if a person is on the ground in this locked country. You can’t do a lot and you also have to explain it to your freelancers on the ground. You can’t do it with your eyes closed.
So, we are trying to maintain a certain discussion within the newsroom. First of all, we talked to our editors. We talked to different employees about the circumstances in which our freelancers work. We’re creating this agenda that these people are on the ground and they are in real danger. What can we do from our side not to protect them, but to you know, to support them? Support is probably the right word to say.
Matt:
I think in some ways it reminds me of a situation we had at Meydan, and a situation we are currently having. Different risks and previously worse than Russia, now in some ways less restrictive, relatively.
For example, there are some times when you cannot guarantee people’s security 100%. I think for a long time my personal goal was, let’s secure them 100%. It was kind of delusional on my part to think that that was possible. First, because they can get themselves out of problems better than I can on the ground, and sometimes, there are ways to kind of go around things that I wouldn’t think of from far away. But also, just simply because we are not the state, we are not as strong as the state and we don’t have a monopoly of violence and a monopoly of this force.
And when we found out that some of the people working with us had been surveilled with Pegasus spyware, that’s a moment where it became clear to me: “Okay, I don’t have any foolproof way to get out of this or to be sure that they are not going to be (surveilled) in the future.”
There was not a 100% way to prevent it. You can always say “Don’t go to a shooting location without already having a lawyer’s number ready”. These types of things you can prepare for, but there are certain things that it’s almost impossible to prevent.
And then it was important — as you said as well — to inform them. There is a certain toolkit and certain tools that everyone should be aware of on how to prepare themselves so that it becomes almost second nature. Just like it’s second nature for us to check: “Do we have our keys before we leave the house?” It’s the same thing if you’re working as a journalist in this environment. “Do you have this, this, and this done on the checklist before you go out into the field?”
Guaranteeing that you are better prepared and to react, but also to make sure that everyone’s informed and everyone’s aware and you discuss it and you openly kind of question, do you want to keep doing this even, you know? And just being adamant and knowing, okay, making sure that everyone is aware of how things work.
So if Pegasus exists, we need to know how it works and make sure that everyone else understands how it works. We don’t want information here and there, where things are not 100% clear and everyone starts getting rumors. No, let’s make sure everyone knows what could happen, what couldn’t happen and then it makes it a lot easier also to rely on them and say okay, this is their agency.
They make this decision. And in a way, the best thing that we as outlets can do is not to stop them, not to stifle them, not to tell them, no, we don’t want to put you at risk. It’s no, we don’t want to put you at unnecessary risk.
Ivan:
I have a question for you. Have you ever experienced it as a publisher? You have been a publisher of Meydan since what year?
Matt:
Since 2019.
Ivan:
Since 2019. And how many journalists have been attacked by the authorities in Azerbaijan since 2019?
Matt:
I can’t put a number on it. We have not had people in jail, but detainments are pretty regular. We have spent hours without knowing where the journalists are, without having any contact with them at all, with people trying to break into their phones, etcétera.
That’s why we need to make sure we have a security protocol. It’s also about understanding how your digital devices work, how the security measures that we put in place work, and why they work that way. It’s about making sure that it becomes second nature to follow them.
Ivan:
Yeah. I mean, it’s just always when someone is detained. I experienced it multiple times. Unfortunately in different countries, not only in Russia. Our reporter, for example, was detained and he was tortured in the protests in Belarus. You’re always asking yourself when something like this happens, is it worth it?
I mean, even if you have a very clear idea of journalism and its importance for society, and even if you understand that you are working for this society, is it worth it? You still keep asking yourself in these circumstances, I guess.
Matt:
Yes and no. I mean, of course, you do, but I’ve always found that —I can speak only to my interactions with our team— it’s the people being detained that are the least likely to question this. They were the ones who were being spied on and were saying: okay, we don’t care. It’s worth it if I get detained, it’s worth it if I have a travel ban for four years. It’s worth it if x,y,z happens. It’s worth it if my family gets kicked out of their jobs, harassed, being pretty much pushed out of the country. It’s still worth it.
So for me, in that situation, is to say: Okay, I am the one who is in Germany, who is protected from all of this. So who am I to say don’t do it, right? It’s me, then, who says I need to make sure that you can do it. If you want to do it, well, we believe in the same value. You (the journalist) are the one that’s actually doing it. I’m just doing the paperwork.
Ivan:
I agree. I think what can I do is do research on tools for cyber security issues, and I can provide these technological solutions for my journalists. This is my responsibility. This is what I have to do. But the real decision of going on the ground or not, can only be done there, on the ground, by this particular person.
Matt:
Okay, let’s pivot. So, we’re talking about how to work with people in the country. But what do you do now, on the other side of things? How is it to work in exile? And how do you work in exile? You’re not there. What can you report on?
Ivan:
Well, that’s another frustrating part of our work. Again, as I already mentioned, until the beginning of the invasion, in 2022, we had about a third part of our team based in Russia. Almost all of our reporters were there. One reporter left a year before the invasion because she was followed by the police, and we had concerns about her security. She was the first reporter who was evacuated from the country.
For me, as an editor, this allowed me to think about how a reporter, like a real reporter, normally goes and sees events. How can this person operate from the outside? And then, after the 24th of February, all our reporters were evacuated from Russia and many of them were really depressed and frustrated. Many of them asked themselves, how can we do our work? We are reporters, not explanatory desk editors or podcasters. We can’t do everything from the office.
I think it’s a real challenge. I don’t underestimate it. I think it’s really difficult for someone who used to work on the ground to completely change the framework. So there is a metaphor I use when I talk to my journalists, with my fellow report editors, with my fellow editors:
You have your senses and one day, you lose one of your senses. How can you live after that? Well, probably your life is not gonna be as easy as it was before the event, but on the other hand, you can learn how to compensate for it with your other senses. In terms of reporting, you can ask yourself, how often do you witness events if you are a reporter? You often talk to people and you reconstruct a lot of stuff. So you need to talk more, make deeper interviews, and use your imagination as much as possible. And you need to reconstruct stuff way bigger, you know, on another scale, than you used to do when you could go on the ground, when you could go to the place where the event took place.
Matt:
What would be some practical examples of doing that? I mean, it’s a good metaphor. But how do people put that into practice other than having more detailed interviews? If you need to cover something and you want to be able to show visual footage for example, how do you get it?
Ivan:
Well, it’s 2023. You can use a lot of digital tools. You can use Google Street View, for example. You can use a lot of data that comes from social networks. You can talk to people, you can read comments. You can read the local press. You have a lot of resources to reconstruct the events, much more than in the previous era.
But of course, you can’t imagine everything, you can’t reconstruct everything. Sometimes you just need to go and see something, feel something, smell something, say something. It’s all important. It all can be really important for the reporting. So what we do is we use people on the ground, our freelancers. According to our security protocols, it is almost impossible to do the entire reporting, especially related to the war, from the ground. So we often use our freelancers as so-called proxy reporters. So they do their part on the ground. They can go and see something, say, some specific building that we need to describe. Or they can go and they can talk to some random people and get some information from the ground. They are not making the entire story, but they are making a very, very important, significant part of the story. This is a sense you can get from using proxy reporters.
Matt:
Before we wrap things up, I would like to go over the things that we discussed today, because, as I stated in the beginning, the idea of this podcast is to also offer some solutions, which we’ve discussed as well. So I’m going to list them through and… in a very administrative kind of mentality, go over what we discussed one more time to make sure that we all agree on it.
Ivan:
You are a publisher. You do your stuff.
Matt:
Exactly. So we talked about the ethical side of working with people. I would say, again, and this is for the administrators, it’s pretty much impossible to protect someone 100%. It’s all about training and informing. That’s your responsibility on the admin side, as the publisher or whatever the name of the position is in the organization. That’s your job, right, to make sure that you’re on top of things, that you are speaking to the experts, that you have got good protocols, and that you’re reactive and you’re proactive, and that you’re looking ahead and seeing what might come next. And having that preparation to keep people as safe as they can be. We talked about working in exile, using your other senses. I think that this proxy reporting, Google Street View, and these are really smart ways to be innovative to be able to get the work done even if you’re not there physically. So there’s a lot to think about. I want to thank you for taking the time today to speak with me.
Ivan:
Thanks, Matt.
Matt:
To our listeners, I hope that you enjoyed this episode. We have other episodes, so check them out on topics from donor bureaucracy to psychosocial support and more. We speak with different experts and different media outlets, and they have a lot to share.
So again, Ivan, thanks.
