What we did for nine years. "Mediazone" in numbers

The site "Mediazons" earned on September 4, 2014. Then the editorial office had only four journalists, including the editor -in -chief. Everyone in turn wrote the news, stuck in the ships for online and barely managed to write texts. Since then, we have become more and more diverse-now we have a full-fledged news department, we make a date-study and shoot a video, every day we write about the war and repressions, translate our materials into English. All this became possible due to the fact that readers supported us for years. After the invasion of Ukraine, support was greatly reduced due to the crisis, sanctions and the general sensation of disaster-today we think about survival and understand that this is impossible without readers. You can help the "mediazone" here. The production of people who believed and supported us is the main figure in the history of "Mediazons". But on our ninth birthday, we want to recall other important events and numbers for us.

Mediazon has been following the events in the war since the beginning of the Russian invasion - 558 days without a break. But we conduct not only daily military chronicle . Millions of Ukrainians became refugees, and we talked about people who stood at the border posts in the early days of the war and crossed the border, fleeing the shelling. We released an interview with Vladimir Zelensky and spoke with peaceful Ukrainians who stayed in their homeland and survived during the battles - in Gostol , Chernigov , Kharkov , Mariupol and Bakhmut .

Mediazona wrote how residents of captured cities opposed the occupation and how the Russian military protesters deal with the protesters, told the stories of Ukrainians who undertook to protect the country with weapons in their hands and became volunteers ) in fired and occupied cities. How they saved their relatives from the captured territories - and found themselves in Russian prisons for this.

In March last year, Buch, a city in the Kyiv region, was liberated, where hundreds of people died at the incomplete month of occupation at the hands of Russian soldiers. Bucha became a symbol of Russian war crimes. We wrote about the murders and torture of civilians, cited evidence of surrounding the occupation and refuted the allegations of propaganda that everything that happened was a staging.

We also talked about what is happening in the Russian army. We monitored the mobilization , compiled a map of looting, wrote about the refuseniks and continue to keep a singular list of Russians who died in the war with Ukraine.

On March 6, 2022, a week and a half after the start of a full -scale war in Ukraine, Roskomnadzor began blocking the Mediazone. Before this, the department demanded to delete our entire site for the distribution of “deliberately false socially significant information”, which, according to the authorities, created “a threat of harm to life and (or) the health of citizens, a threat of massive violation of public order and (or) public safety”.

The Russian authorities have long been building control over the Internet, and in the past few months it has become especially noticeable . Some mirrors of the Mediazone site worked for no more than a day and were also blocked. We do not want readers to lose us. Therefore, they made instructions on how to bypass state censorship.

In 2014, it became clear that the repressions in Russia would only intensify to the launch of the Mediazons. Today, they can initiate a matter for literally anything: for the truth about the war, memes in social networks, the prayer of the pope or in the joke of the pike an employee of the Russian Guard raised in the arms.

It is not surprising that the heroes of our online were not only “thieves in law” , employees of the torture colonies , governors and ministers - we had to go to the courts of musicians , artists and corrugatedists , actors , directors and poets .

We still continue to monitor the most absurd criminal processes in the country: the court of Sasha Skochilenko , accused under the article on the military “fakes” for anti -war price tags in the supermarket, new courts of Alexei Navalny , and the “discredit” of the army .

This calculation did not include our broadcasts dedicated to protest , economic crisis , elections and other events. Perhaps the strangest of them was dedicated to children: in 2015, Mediazona read the day Russian news, which the search engine issued at the request of the “minor” and “child”.

The chief edges of the Mediazons were detained on January 30, 2021 - the police approached Smirnov when he went for a walk with his son. The reason for this was the retweet jokes about the external similarity of Smirnov and the leader of the Tarakans! Dmitry Spirin. Such memes about Smirnov and bald musicians became popular after the pro-government telegram channel confused him with a famous rapper and published a photo of Smirnov with the signature: “On the question of protest leaders. This squalor is called oximiron. ”

The police considered a joke to the jokes by calling for inconsistent demonstrations - then Alexei Navalny returned to Russia after the assassination and treatment in Germany, the politician was immediately arrested, protests went throughout the country, and the security forces grabbed those who called for them. Actually, Smirnov took demonstrations on the eve of the new week .

First, the court appointed the chief editor of the Mediazones 25 days of arrest. Later, in the appeal, the termwas reduced to 15 days - after many publications and journalists publicly supported Smirnov and were indignant at the arrest (thanks to all colleagues for solidarity!).

For a day, Sergei Smirnov was serving in the infamous special -well -known specialist in Sakharovo in New Moscow - he was then full of detained in protests. The editors visited him: they brought packs of printed tweets and even secretly recorded the episode of the podcast about the arrest.

It was unclear whether Smirnov would leave for freedom or go from Sakharovo to a pre -trial detention center (while the “sanitary case” had just begun with the same accusations of organizing the speeches for Navalny).

It was lucky that time, but from that moment it became clear that the attack on the Mediazone is a matter of time. It was clear that they decided to crush independent journalism in Russia (“undesirable organizations”, “foreign agency”, criminal cases), it would be worse and it will be possible that it would be necessary to work from abroad. But of course, no one, of course, could not imagine a war in Ukraine and the current sneighs of repression in Russia.

In November 2018, the correspondent Nikita Sologub went to Adygea to Aslan Hutu, who was twice sentenced to execution on charges of murder and for 47 years tried to prove his innocence. The article about him came out at the Mediazone only on August 3, 2021. Her black version totaled 15,140 words, or 100,852 signs. Nikita in detail reconstructed a picture of a crime committed on a night country road in 1974.

Behind the plot that he brought from another business trip to the south of Russia, the Mediazon watched for 5 years. In October 2015, we first wrote about Maxim Litasov - who was killed under strange circumstances, the resident of Apheronsk, whose head was lost in the Krasnodar morgue during a forensic examination. Litasov was posthumously accused of attacking the parents of a local policeman. All these years, the Maxim's family tried to return a good name to him, and only in February 2020 did the Supreme Court put an end to this case, refusing to accept the complaint about the posthumous sentence.

Politics shot in 2015 on the Big Moskvoretsky Bridge, right near the Kremlin, in October 2016 a trial began on five executors of the assassination attempt (the degree of their involvement raises questions, we analyzed all the evidence here ). The process stretched for almost nine months, all this time we, of course, were online.

For almost three days, the expectation of the jury was taken - the version of the prosecution caused them a lot of disputes, after the trial the jury themselves told about this “Mediazone”.

The investigation did not look for the organizers and the customer. We continued to study the murder and, together with journalist Mikhail Maglov , talked about people who are clearly connected with the attempt, but did not interest the investigators. And in a mention of the chronology of the calls and movements of the killers group, they restored . All traces of them lead to the nearest environment of Ramzan Kadyrov.

In 2020, several young journalists from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Belarus decided to launch their own publications in the format of the Russian “Mediazones” - this is how the Mediazone Central Asia appeared, and a little later the Mediazone Belarus.

The latter had the most difficult thing - the editorial office began work just a few days before August 9, when Belarus was seized by unprecedented protests against fraud in the next presidential election. Hundreds of thousands of Belarusians took to the streets, the security forces accelerated them with light -school grenades, and the detainees sophisticatedly mocked in the sad Minsk insulator on the surroundings. Correspondents "Mediazons of Belarus" conducted an almost round-the-clock online broadcast from protests, finally finalizing a new site. It was a peaceful democratic revolution - alas, failed: a few months later it became clear that Lukashenko’s regime resisted. The country entered the gloomy period of reaction. “Mediazon Belarus” and all its social networks were included in the list of “extremist materials”. The editors continues to work and develop the site, but already in exile.

Journalists “Mediazons Central Asia” had a chance to see no less dramatic events: they illuminated the change of power in Kyrgyzstan and the January protests in Kazakhstan, who put an end to Nursultan Nazarbayev’s near 30-year rule.

Before blocking after the outbreak of war, we played cats-mouse with Roskomnadzor for many years-an agency that is censored by the Internet and the media. For years, we have received the requirements to remove this or that fragment from texts - most often when it came to suicide or drugs.

Under the threat of fines and locks, we obeyed, but tried to do this as maximally as possible - and replaced seditious words with [Roskomnadzor] in square brackets so that the meaning remained clear to the readers.

As a result, the designs seemed to be “calling for mass [Roskomnadzors] when trying to suppress the rebellion” or “returning home, the young man decided to test the substance and [Roskomnadzor] with the thickness of the little finger - with [Roskomnadzor], a smaller amount of Mephedron would not work.”

There was another game with censorship: replacing matches with matches so as not to get a fine, but leave the reader the opportunity to guess the word (the number of stars was always equal to the number of letters in the word). There were simple cases (for example, the well -known expression “Putin is fabulous *******”), but sometimes you have to break your head. For example, trying to understand what the blogger Lech Kochegar said in Stream, for which he had a criminal case:

“I propose to demolish this, *****, in *****, Cordon and arrange a fucking, ***** *****, revolution, without blood, without *****. I think, ***** *****, the police also have people. I don’t think, I know, there are very good people. They will understand and go to our side. But in order to arrange a bloody massacre ... They are waiting for us to be each other ***********. "

The editorial staff has a total of 15 dogs, 27 cats, two lizards, one frog and one snake.

Behind many pets “mediazons” are terrible, kind and funny stories: a shaggy dog ​​Media Mediazona found at the place of murder of a whole family in the village of Kosai Gora of the Tula region. Correspondents took the orphaned Mishka to Moscow, and now he walks along Harlem along with the photo editor Margarita Filippova.

The cat Cognac - now Istanbul resident - “Mediazona” met in the Armenian diliges with a small driven hungry kitten. Cognac owes his new life to the manager of the editorial office of Gale Latygovskaya, and in the name of the Armenian cognac, to whom the editors celebrated the last day of rest.

Our pets share with us editorial gliders, common picnics and walks, and sometimes burdens fall on their lot: the dogs of Olya Romashova Masik and Cassie, along with the hosts, survived a heavy search, the hero and ears of the Petrozavodsky UFSIN, covered in one of the investigations, followed Alla Konstantinova and her dogs. Alla, and the dachshunds and cats of Sergey Smirnov were on the trustees of the Mediazons employees in turn, while the editor -in -chief was serving the arrest for the retweet of ironic tweet.

Many animals of the editorial office after the outbreak of war found themselves in exile with the owners, some, on the contrary, had to stay in Russia. Chats "Cats Mediazons" and "Dogs of Mediazone" in Telegram are the most lively non -working chats of the editorial office.

At the end of 2017, we declared crowdfunding and became one of the first media in the country to finance the readers themselves.

At that time, the Payvol model, that is, paid access to publications, was more popular, but it was especially important for us to leave the mediazone accessible to everyone without restrictions. Therefore, we decided to ask everyone who considers our work the necessary and important, to help the "mediazone" and then work and be.

During the work of our crowdfunding campaign, more than 30 thousand people supported us. You sent hundreds of thousands of donates, regular and one -time, small and large. Together with the donates, we also get thousands of supports of support that every day help us remember: what we do, we do not in vain.

Now it is becoming increasingly difficult to utter an independent media - the state calls us and our colleagues “foreign agents”, “undesirable organizations”, we are blocked and liquidated, and the punishment for the help of those who try to write the truth are tightened. Unfortunately, frightening measures work, and many readers refuse donations, fearing risks. And we understand everyone.

Therefore, now we are in particular to those who left Russia: the more repression intensifies, the more important to us your support. If you are safe, please support Mediazon for yourself and for those whose risks are higher.

Thank you for being with us.