Here's your first weekly update (Patreon)

You are now part of the community of the Kyiv Independent, a Ukrainian media-in-the-making.

We are extremely grateful for your help in carrying out our mission: bringing true stories about Ukraine to the world.

This is the first of your weekly updates on the work of the Kyiv Independent:

On Monday, we launched our Patreon. Patrons can pledge a monthly contribution of $5 to $100. It has been going extremely well: As of now, 461 patrons have pledged $5,430 in monthly support for our publication. More than half of them signed up on the first day. It’s unprecedented for the Ukrainian media represented on Patreon. We are overwhelmed and grateful for your support.

On Wednesday, we launched a GoFundMe campaign to give an opportunity to those who wanted to make a one-time donation. In two days, we raised nearly half of our target sum of 10,000 pounds. This money will help us accelerate our launch.

On Thursday, the first episode of our podcast premiered. This podcast, “Media in Progress,” will document our journey of creating the Kyiv Independent. The first episode tells the story of how the Kyiv Post ended. It includes a recording from the newsroom meeting -- you can hear the exact moment when the 50-person staff learned the newspaper was shutting down.

On Friday, we published a Q&A with Brian Bonner, the long-serving former chief editor of the Kyiv Post. After the newspaper was shut down, he announced he was retiring after 45 years in journalism. He has said very little publicly about the newspaper’s end. Now he speaks. Read it here. 

We are talking to website developers to launch our website as soon as possible. A news media website is a complicated one, and normally takes many months to produce. We aim to roll out our website before the end of the year.

Meanwhile, we keep putting out our newsletter, Ukraine Daily. Make sure that you’re subscribed to it: LINK 

Phew, that’s been quite a week! Trying to launch a new media outlet is an uphill battle and our team is working 24/7. That’s not an exaggeration: our team members are in Ukraine, U.S., Canada, U.K. and Japan, so we never stop.

We will be back next week with another update for you.

Thank you for your support and have a wonderful weekend!