Meduza is 10! Meet the people who bring you the latest on Russia, every single day. How did they end up at Meduza in English? And what makes their work so interesting?
Meduza is 10! Meet the people who bring you the latest on Russia, every single day. How did they end up at Meduza in English? And what makes their work so interesting?
On October 20, 2024, Meduza celebrated a major milestone — our 10th anniversary. There were times we weren’t sure we’d make it, but despite the Kremlin’s best efforts, here we are, still kicking. Our survival is largely thanks to our international audience — you, the readers of Meduza in English. We’re grateful to you for reading our stories, subscribing to our newsletters, listening to our podcast, and supporting us financially. To mark the occasion, we’d like to introduce you to the journalists behind Meduza in English. We asked them to share how they came to Meduza and what they find most interesting about covering Russia and the wider region.
Kevin Rothrock
In late November 2014, about a month after I’d corresponded with Ivan Kolpakov to write about LentaRu’s collapse and the launch of Meduza, he sent me another email that began: “У меня к вам есть небольшое (а может, и большое) дело.” It turned out to be the latter thing: a conversation that became a job offer that has shaped the last decade of my life. We started small with a few translated news briefs per day. Ten years later, Meduza in English offers breaking news coverage, original feature reports, two newsletters, and a podcast with more than 150 episodes.
Covering the news in most places is often depressing work, and that’s especially true in Russia, where it feels quaint today to talk about the “democratic decline” during Putin’s early terms. The invasion of Ukraine has made Russia’s news cycle even more bleak and demoralizing, but the country is also more important now than at any point this century. This rising significance has attracted more reporting and analysis from Western news outlets, but Meduza and the rest of Russia’s exiled independent media remain the best available resources. It is my privilege to call these journalists my colleagues.
Listen to a podcast episode hosted by Kevin here:
Eilish Hart
I started reading Meduza as a student to keep up with current events. I had been studying both European and Soviet history, but after the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, I realized I still had a lot to learn.
A summer spent interning at a media outlet in Kyiv cemented my interest in working in journalism. Turns out, I found the newsroom much more engaging than the archives. And working alongside Ukrainian journalists taught me a valuable lesson about the importance of allowing local reporters to tell their stories and finding ways to amplify their work.
I started freelancing immediately, taking on whatever writing, editing, and translation jobs I could get until I landed at Meduza in 2020 — a month into the coronavirus pandemic. Despite being unable to travel to Russia (or anywhere else, for that matter), I found myself covering some of the biggest stories in the world, from Russia’s skyrocketing case numbers to the pro-democracy uprising in Belarus and the poisoning of Alexey Navalny. Most importantly, we stayed on these stories long after international media had moved on.
For me, this has always been the most interesting part about working at Meduza: contributing to in-depth, innovative coverage of Russia and the wider region you won’t find anywhere else. As editor of The Beet, having the chance to collaborate with journalists across Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia is the highlight of my work. And being able to play a small part in keeping Russia’s war against Ukraine from fading from the headlines is close to my heart, too.
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Sam Breazeale
I started working for Meduza in 2020, after I met a previous news editor through a translation workshop and translated a few articles on a volunteer basis. I worked part-time as a features editor, translating or adapting a single feature story each week, until 2022. Then, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I abandoned my grad school plans and joined Meduza full-time as a news editor. I was based in Kyrgyzstan at the time, and my Meduza in English colleagues were both in North America, so we were able to cover the news pretty much around the clock.
The most interesting part of this work for me is the chance to gain a deeper understanding of processes and events in the region that are often only given a passing mention in general news coverage: How exactly does Moscow force migrants to join the army? How did Ukraine come to rely so heavily on Telegram? How can the Kremlin downplay a real Ukrainian offensive on Russian soil? Because most English-speaking readers don’t have the same background knowledge about these issues as Russian speakers, adapting Meduza’s Russian-language reporting for them generally means doing some research myself, which I really enjoy.
Meduza also excels at providing a window into the perspectives of the ordinary people affected by news events, such as people in Russia’s ethnic republics whose residents were disproportionately drafted into the army. These human-centered stories are my favorite pieces to translate. And when I encounter a question I want to explore more deeply (How are the Baltic states preparing for the possibility of a Russian invasion?) or a person whose story I want to tell (such as Lena Wolf or the Dungans living near the Kyrgyzstan-Kazakhstan border), I appreciate that Meduza gives me the freedom and resources to do original reporting.
Emily Laskin
Here’s the main thing you need to know about how I started working for Meduza: I spend too much time online. A few days after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, I was up at about 1:00 a.m. scrolling Twitter (as it was still known at that point) for updates, when I saw a tweet from Kevin Rothrock, the managing editor of Meduza in English, asking for volunteer translators. I was an academic at the time, and I’d done a lot of Russian-to-English translation for my own scholarly work, and published a thing or two here and there, so I sent Kevin a message on Twitter.
Kevin, who also spends too much time online, saw my Twitter message, responded right away, and the next day I was working on translating a feature about how Russians were responding to the economic sanctions that the U.S. and Western European countries hastily imposed after the full-scale military invasion. I continued to translate whatever Kevin and the English-language news team threw at me for the next several months, and when the Meduza in English team expanded over the summer of 2022, I was lucky enough to join the team officially as a news editor.
I’ve changed roles since then, and now I’m working on a long-form project (yes, it’s exciting, stay tuned!) about Russian state propaganda and the role Putin’s rhetoric plays in shaping Russia’s domestic and foreign policies. I spent a few months basically begging anyone who would listen to let me do this project, so it’s a bit of an understatement to say that that’s my favorite aspect of covering Russia.
It’s sometimes a heavy topic, but as Russia becomes increasingly closed off from much of the rest of the world, figuring out what Russian authorities think about their own country, and the countries they consider adversaries, gets more interesting. This job combines two things I love: wonky between-the-lines analysis of the written (and sometimes spoken word); and Internet discourse, which is, incidentally, both an avenue for Putinist disinformation and one of Russia’s remaining links to the rest of the world.
