Talk with Zakhar Protsiuk, The Fix Media, Ukraine

9 June 2022. Key sentences of the discussion with Zakhar Protsiuk, Co-Founder and Managing Editor of The Fix Media, Ukraine, on 8 June on Zoom. The discussion was moderated by M100 Advisory Board member Christoph Lanz, Head of Board Thomson Media Germany as well as Trustee of the Thomson Foundation and former Managing Director of DW TV. You can watch the recording of the one-hour discussion here.

• Before the war in Ukraine, The Fix Media was an outlet and knowledge hub for media managers. It started as an as a project inside a consulting company called Jnomics. The Fix is a relatively young organization which was founded less than three years ago.

The idea behind The Fix Media is that there is a lot of innovation happening in Europe that is not yet really covered. A lot of discussions about media are either focused on the US or not really taken into account the other parts outside of editorial that are super relevant for how media organizations function.

• The Fix is concentratin on two points:
1. To focus on Europe, especially continental Europe, and make sure that there is a cross-border knowledge-sharing of innovations, and not just between for example France and Germany, but also between Slovakia and Slovenia or Slovakia and Lithuania, to make it a bit more diverse.
2. Focusing on the sites of media business AI strategy, talent management, tech and all of these things that makes media and organization.

• When we woke up on 24 February, we knew that we had to act really quickly. We know the Ukrainian media market pretty well. We knew that what will happen next will damage Ukrainian independent media really hard. My colleague is currently the CEO of The Kyiv Independent, one of the main English language voices from Ukraine. We launched a crowdfunding campaign on GoFundMe, which went out to be pretty successful. We raised more than €1 million on GoFundMe.

• First aid was a short term kind of emergency support: equipment like security vests, helmets and so on for journalists who are covering the war; quick cash, emergency support for regional media. What interestingly worked well for us was crypto.

• The main role of The Fix was to save the Ukrainian media market as a whole. We set up a six month fund focused on national independent media. It is still ongoing and we are still kind of bridging their budget gaps.

• So far we raised more than 3 million Euro for Ukrainian media. A lot came from other European publishing houses like Financial Times oder Axel Springer, which donated 500.000 €, but also colleagues and managers from other publishers around Europe have donated. Currently we are supporting 14 national media on a six month basis, and there are slightly more than 50 regional media, which we supported in the first weeks.

• There is a lot of information out there about this war, about what is happening. But there is also an abundance of information. How do you get through this? How do you keep your head above all of this and see the bigger picture? Not to lose the perspective and being more susceptible to fake news is the role of journalism in this war.

• The role of Internet platforms in this war is tremendous. Telegram for example was very popular during the Belarus revolution in 2020: It’s a messenger to send easily messages. But it also can establish its own channel with millions of followers. Telegram plays an incredible role here. Most of the news consumption or information about dangerous situations are happening on Telegram. But this is also a challenge for journalism because it’s hard to understand what the source of the information is.

• Information is a weapon. And what’s getting lost first during a war is the truth.

• It is very important for media inside Ukraine to keep their head cool to distinguish between what they wish they want to be the truth versus what they really see. To stay objective.

• One of the initiatives we recently set up was a sales agency to support basically collected Ukrainian media in the country. The idea is that a group of media with an audience of some million is stronger and better positioned for negotiations with big international brands than one media with just a small audience. Now we help to connect Ukrainian media and some Belarus media in exile with international organizations and companies.

• There is a lack of visibility for even English publishing Ukrainian media in the Western media sphere, a lack of collaboration with big media outlets. The challenge now is to build up sustainable, content driven collaborations.

• Supporting Russian independent media matters because if they do not exist, someone else will take their place.