More Than Ukraine Fatigue

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At a conference this spring, a Ukrainian journalist told colleagues, “The world thinks about profits—while we, unfortunately, think about survival.” His words summarized my experience, as the CEO of Ukrainska Pravda, a twenty-four-year-old Ukrainian news outlet that began publishing in English in February 2022, when Russia invaded. Some of our challenges can be ascribed to “Ukraine fatigue.” But our analytics show that the challenges we face are not simply about diminishing attention—they are also the result of changes to how social media companies present our work.

The English version of Ukrainska Pravda was born unexpectedly, on the first day of Russia’s siege, when it became obvious that we needed to start delivering information to a global audience. We transformed our organization into the largest source of English-language news produced in Ukraine, outperforming even established English-first publications such as Kyiv Post and Kyiv Independent. We were among the first to report on Russian forces entering Kherson, in southern Ukraine; the English version of that story received hundreds of thousands of page views. We wrote about what happened when residents of Kherson rallied against the occupation—and how the Russian military fought back. We reported on the capture of Berdyansk, a major city on the Azov Sea.

For a while, the war drove unprecedented traffic to Ukrainska Pravda, with nearly a billion page views in the first thirty days. But the surge couldn’t offset a collapse in digital advertising, of the same variety media companies have experienced across the globe. So we opted to syndicate our English-language coverage on aggregator platforms—Yahoo News and MSN—which provided a crucial new revenue stream; at its peak, syndication brought in around fifty-five thousand dollars a month. We were featured alongside other international outlets—ranging from the BBC, Reuters, and the AP to New Voice of Ukraine and Kyiv Independent.

In recent months, however, that lifeline has been severed. I first noticed that our syndicated content on Yahoo News dropped to zero in March; when I emailed our partner manager to ask about it, she cited “recent content quality concerns” that had led Yahoo to block our site from its stream. She cited no examples, so I followed up with a senior business development manager, the person who onboarded us at Yahoo. Eventually, I heard back: “We are in the process of making some improvements to our algorithm to ensure that our publishers’ content can be presented in a more contextually meaningful way,” the manager wrote. “Until we have those mechanisms in place, we have had to put blocks in place with a number of partners. We have also received feedback from the editorial leadership team that there have been some content quality concerns related to your content.” The concerns included the presence of graphic imagery, bias, short articles “with little substance,” and a lack of videos where promised. Those supposed transgressions surprised my newsroom—they seemed contrived and inapplicable, considering the seriousness of our work, which has been recognized by, among others, the Committee to Protect Journalists. I later learned that New Voice of Ukraine and Kyiv Independent received similar eviction notices. (Yahoo did not respond to multiple requests for additional comment.)

Our coverage remains on MSN, but for Ukraine-based publications, the reach has decreased dramatically; at Ukrainska Pravda, we’ve seen traffic drop about 80 percent in the past several months. That’s not a reflection of quality, from what I can tell: if you go to the world news section on MSN, you’ll see content recommended from bogus sources such as the Daily Digest—which consists mostly of WikiCommons photos, minimal captions, and ads—but not from reputable Ukrainian outlets. (A spokesperson for MSN referred me to a general list of publishing guidelines, and declined to comment.)

Google has also caused turbulence. At first, its Discover feature—one of the largest traffic sources for news worldwide—deemed Ukrainska Pravda sufficiently authoritative to recommend our coverage to English-speaking audiences in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. That continued throughout 2022 and 2023—right up until the escalation of events in Israel and Palestine in October 2023. Suddenly, none of our news about Israel, even when related to Ukraine, made it into Discover. Audience interest in Ukrainian events waned significantly—understandable, we figured, given how long the window of attention had remained open. But even after November, we were dismayed to see that traffic from Discover fell for our entire website—including the Ukrainian and Russian versions, which have no connection to Israel or non-Ukrainian audience interests. 

When I reached out to Google, I was told, “Discover is always working to improve feed personalization to serve helpful content to users, and the ongoing work to improve Discover’s user experience means sites may see changes in traffic unrelated to the quality or publishing frequency of their content.” There was no reason given for the drop in our case. (When I followed up, a company spokesperson told me, “Traffic from Discover is dynamic and may change over time, depending on a variety of factors including changing user interests, shifts in trending topics, and improvements to our systems”; per Google, updates do not target individual sites.) Even worse: Apple News—essentially Google Discover for those with iPhones—has provided Ukrainska Pravda with no means of reaching readers at all: it’s unavailable to people outside the US, Canada, UK, and Australia, and only companies registered in those countries can create content for its platform.

Ukraine is one of Europe’s poorest economies, suffering from war and a massive outflow of people. I would understand if the only reason a major tech company might establish anything beyond a minimal presence here would be combating disinformation—and yet that has not proved sufficient incentive for Meta, which, over the past couple of years, has effectively disbanded its news partnerships team in central and eastern Europe. (A spokesperson for Meta sent me general points on the company’s commitment to halting misinformation—the demotion of content from Russian state-controlled media outlets, for instance—but declined to comment on the record about specifics.) Google has several programs in place to bolster journalism and combat misinformation in Ukraine; a spokesperson told me, “We’ve increased our support since the war began.” But its news partnership managers in the region are responsible for juggling several countries—Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, and Montenegro, for instance—which, in my view, doesn’t serve anyone especially well, certainly not a country in existential crisis.

Sometimes I have mixed thoughts about Ukrainska Pravda’s English version. It’s helping us survive, but it also highlights how the Ukrainian press is viewed as part of the “rest of the world”—a designation that feels absurdly misplaced for a tier-one media organization here, or in any country. Now my newsroom is caught between two imperatives: to inform an international audience about a critical geopolitical conflict, and to push back against the cold realities of a tech ecosystem that stubbornly reinforces existing power structures. We can only hope for a world where news can break through the invisible barriers of algorithmic bias and corporate indifference.

Other notable stories:

• A court in Russia convicted Alsu Kurmasheva—a US and Russian dual citizen who works for the US-backed broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and was arrested while visiting family in Tatarstan last year—of spreading fake news about the Russian military and sentenced her to six and a half years in a penal colony. The decision, which followed a secret trial, was handed down on Friday, the same day that a different court sentenced the jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich to sixteen years in prison; unlike in Gershkovich’s case, however, Kurmasheva’s sentence was only confirmed yesterday. As we noted in yesterday’s newsletter, the expedited trial of Gershkovich—and, now, of Kurmasheva—could indicate Russia’s willingness to finalize a prisoner swap, though that remains an uncertain prospect for now.

• Meanwhile, in the US, Vice President Kamala Harris quickly consolidated support in her bid to take President Joe Biden’s place on the Democratic ticket, following the latter’s decision to drop out of the race on Sunday; yesterday evening, Harris spoke at her new campaign headquarters and all the major cable networks carried it live. The Washington Post’s Jeremy Barr assessed the early right-wing coverage of Harris’s candidacy, which has characterized her, variously, as an extremist and a diversity pick—though Media Matters for America’s Matt Gertz argues that Harris’ ascent has caused right-wing commentators to “flail.” Elsewhere, the LA Times presented “CliffsNotes” after combing through twenty-five years of its Harris coverage. And CNN got a “brat” correspondent.

• The Wrap’s Mike Roe reports that Shirley Halperin has resigned as editor in chief of Los Angeles Magazine amid a wave of complaints that the publication has failed to pay freelancers and other vendors; Roe reports that the magazine’s financial situation has “worsened considerably” under new owners, though its publisher said that it would have a “profitable year.” In other media-business news, Front Office Sports, a site that covers the business of sports, hired Daniel Roberts as its editor in chief. And Semafor announced that it will launch a Gulf-focused edition later in the year under the leadership of Mohammed Sergie, a journalist who has previously covered Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

• In international press-freedom news, Andrea Joly, a reporter for the Italian newspaper La Stampa, was hospitalized after two members of a neofascist group attacked him in Turin on Saturday. “I was afraid of being strangled,” he said. “I couldn’t breathe.” Elsewhere, protesters called on Len Blavatnik—the owner of Israel’s Channel 13, which has been accused of muzzling critical coverage—to defend press freedom in a demonstration outside a building named for Blavatnik at a London art museum. And the Washington Post’s Jason Rezaian reflected on the tenth anniversary of his imprisonment in Iran. 

• And, ahead of the opening of the Paris Olympics on Friday, Christina Assi and Dylan Collins—two journalists with Agence France-Presse who were injured when an Israeli tank fired on them in Lebanon last year, in a strike that also claimed the life of Issam Abdallah, of Reuters—were invited to join the torch relay. Yesterday, French officials revealed that Snoop Dogg, who is slated to contribute to NBC’s coverage of the Games, will be among those to carry the torch on the day of the opening ceremony itself.

ICYMI: Biden brings the drama, at last

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Andrey Boborykin is the executive director of Ukrainska Pravda, one of Ukraine’s leading independent news outlets.