Top Secret Submarines and the Joys of Media Development

I realized just how incredibly far media development has come as myself and some colleagues entered the bunker-like submarine tunnels the Soviet navy built to withstand 20 kilotons of nuclear explosion (roughly twice the power of those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) The tunnels are encased in a stone mountain in Balaklava, Ukraine, just south of Sevastopol in Crimea, and offered both a secret spot for storage and an ingenious passage out to the Black Sea via the tunnels in the mountain. As little as 25 years ago, it would have been unthinkable for citizens of the newly independent Ukraine to enter this city’s boundary lines, let alone two American journalists, a pair of NGO workers, and a Ukrainian newspaper editor, who’d spent the same morning discussing the importance of advertising revenue and how best to attract it.

My job is awesome.

I’m in Sevastopol this week as part of the Ukraine Media Partnership Program, which pairs Ukrainian regional media with local American media outlets for yearlong professional partnership exchanges. This week, I’m with the managing editor and marketing director from the Daily Press in Newport News, VA. (Follow their impressions on managing editor Marisa Porto’s blog.) They’re here to work with Sevastopolskaya Gazeta, one of a few independent newspapers in all of Crimea. Their work is critical in a region, where Russia exerts a strong influence given its continued naval presence (the Black Sea Fleet docks in Sevastopol.) The staff of Sevastopolskaya Gazeta freely admit that they’re never sure what tomorrow will bring but they’re determined to continue publishing the news and, hopefully, make enough of a profit to keep them a viable business. So far, they’ve done a solid job. The paper launched in 1992 along with dozens of others in the heady early days of independence from the Soviet Union. But today, it is one of the only independent newspapers that has remained viable and independent. It gets me excited about the possibilities for the future of journalism, both here and abroad.

Eleeza Agopian is a Program Officer at IREX