Mediazona on the brink. We need 5,000 monthly subscribers to survive

Half a year ago, as we marked Mediazona’s 10th anniversary, we should have been celebrating. Instead, we were sounding the alarm about our precarious financial situation.

Three years of war. Blocked in Russia. Criminal cases against our editor-in-chief and ex-publisher. A relentless wave of absurd “foreign agent” labels against our staff. Constant pressure, constant threats. Exile. Yet we kept going—documenting Russia’s slide into brutal authoritarianism and the war in Ukraine.

Before the invasion, our funding model was brutally simple: we relied almost entirely on reader donations. By early 2022, nearly 10,000 Russian supporters contributed to Mediazona every month. Thanks to them, we grew from a small publication focused on courts and prisons into a newsroom producing major investigations, documentaries, and breaking news across multiple platforms.

Then, overnight, it collapsed. When Visa and Mastercard pulled out of Russia, so did our funding from our readers. Last September, we warned that 2025 would be a battle for survival. That moment has arrived: to keep publishing, we need 5,000 subscribers.

For three years, Mediazona English has brought our reporting to global audiences. More than 2,600 people have stepped up to support us so far, and we’re incredibly grateful. It’s proof that our work matters.

But it’s still not enough. We’ve already made tough choices—letting colleagues go, slashing newsroom salaries, cutting costs everywhere we can. Now, our editor-in-chief, Sergey Smirnov, and editor, Dmitry Treshchanin, will work without pay.

If we don’t reach 5,000 monthly subscribers, the cuts will have to continue. You are our only hope: there is basically no alternative to reader donations (like grants from various foundations) in the current situation. We’ll fight to survive no matter what, but it won’t be easy. Fewer investigations. Critical topics left uncovered. In the worst case, Mediazona will shrink back to the tiny team it started with in autumn of 2014.

Without your help, the Mediazona you know today will be gone. We’ll be forced to scale back our work dramatically. Our in-depth data investigations may disappear—or become extremely rare. We won’t be able to maintain our independent count of Russian soldiers killed in action. We’ll struggle to cover political trials in real-time. Our ability to report from inside Russia, to produce documentaries and podcasts from Russia and Ukraine, to investigate key stories—everything will be in jeopardy.

Even our ability to maintain the high standards of journalism that readers and fellow reporters trust could inevitably suffer. Mediazona is currently the most-cited independent Russian news outlet, according to media monitoring service The True Story, ranking even above Russia’s Investigative Committee among all oft-cited sources.

We don’t want to cut back. Even now, we feel like we’re doing less than we should. And we believe we can avoid this.

We can only rely on you, our readers. That’s why we’re asking again: help save Mediazona—subscribe and donate at donate.zona.media/en.