Timea Steingart
Mar 22, 2022
The Pioneer Foundation's "Pioneers for Ukraine" campaign supports Ukrainian journalists, bloggers, and media professionals, providing sponsorships to aid independent reporting during the conflict. The campaign has established sponsorships with several Ukrainian media outlets, including Ukrayinska Pravda, New Voice of Ukraine, 24tv.ua, and ZN.ua, helping to fund editorial teams, translators, and expand English-language content.
The charity campaign “Pioneers for Ukraine,” launched by the Pioneer Foundation at the end of March, has been a success. With this campaign, the Pioneer Foundation supports threatened or displaced journalists, bloggers, and media professionals from Ukraine and provides unbureaucratic sponsorship. Thanks to numerous donations, the Foundation has so far taken on four sponsorships:
The first sponsorship was concluded with the editorial team of “Ukrayinska Pravda.” Thanks to the support of the Pioneer Foundation, the team for the English-language website has been significantly expanded. In addition to the project management, three editors and three translators now work for the site. “With the new team, we can produce significantly more content – we are not only able to publish new and exclusive content, but also to professionally translate existing analyses and reports,” says editor-in-chief Sevgil Musayeva.
Support is also provided to the online editorial team “New Voice of Ukraine,” which employs around 150 people. The media company to which the online editorial team belongs also has its own radio station and magazine. Editor-in-chief Vitaliy Sych expresses his gratitude for the support: “By supporting our English-language version, you are helping us reach people in Western Europe and North America. This will help us offset the dramatic loss of advertising revenue and continue to provide objective reporting during the war, which all Ukrainians urgently need.”
The Pioneer Foundation entered into its third sponsorship agreement with the editorial team of the online portal 24tv.ua. The website belongs to Channel 24, an independent media company founded in 2006, and has been providing information on political, economic, and social events in Ukraine and around the world since 2014. Before the war, the editorial team employed 135 people; today, around 70 still work for the website. The Pioneer Foundation supports the financing of editors and translators and also assists editor-in-chief Olga Konsevych, who is currently staying in Germany due to the war. She says: "In difficult times, it is important to be heard and to receive genuine support. The Pioneer Foundation contributes to independent journalism in Ukraine and the expansion of key areas in our editorial office. I am equally grateful for the tremendous help I have received as a journalist. Empathy and cooperation maintain the fragile balance in the democratic world affected by war."
The Pioneer Foundation took on its fourth sponsorship for ZN.ua. ZN.ua has always been at the top of the national rankings for independent media and meets the highest standards of press freedom. Together with the Pioneer Foundation, journalists who stand for strong and politically independent reporting in Ukraine will now receive further support.
The news website was founded in 1994 as Zerkalo Nedeli (Weekly Mirror) and is now one of the oldest independent and reputable media outlets in Ukraine. A total of 57 employees work daily in Kyiv to publish news in English and Ukrainian, with ZN.ua producing an average of 6,000 news reports per week with a daily reach of up to 500,000 people. For more than two decades, the independent media outlet has shaped the agenda of the authorities and society. Editor-in-chief Iuliia Mostova is a recognized top journalist in Ukraine and has been awarded the #1 Top Journalist Award three times.
The donations so far consist of individual transfers from nearly 700 Pioneers, contributions from large companies, and proceeds from the charity auction of artwork by artist Mia Florentine Weiß. Among other items, a 3x6-meter light installation made of glass and steel was auctioned off, which alternately displays the words “NEW” and “NOW.” Part of the installation are thousands of “messages in a bottle” that were collected in the fall of 2021 during the journalistic “Germany expedition” of the news portal The Pioneer.