Reinventing Revenue: Reform.news
When the Belarusian authorities seized Reform.news‘s domain in 2024, it was just the latest blow in a years-long campaign to silence a newsroom that had, by 2020, become a daily destination for hundreds of thousands of Belarusians. By then, the team had already been reporting from exile in Warsaw for three years – separated from much of their audience, their country, and eventually even their web address. What they kept was their editorial identity, and a stubborn willingness to innovate their way toward survival.
Today, Reform.news is planning to open a bar.
In this conversation, we speak with Fyodar Pauluchenka, editor-in-chief of Reform.news, about what it means to rebuild a media organization in exile – and how physical spaces, new skill sets, and constant adaptation can become part of a newsroom’s survival strategy.
At this year’s International Journalism Festival, you described your creativity as coming from “a need for survival, not from being great entrepreneurs.” What has that survival instinct forced you to do differently – editorially and as a business?
Before exile, Reform.news was designed as a fairly traditional digital media business. We relied on traffic, advertising, and online distribution. But after 2020, that model stopped working. Our audience mostly remained inside Belarus, while the ability to monetize that audience almost disappeared. So we had to start thinking not only as journalists, but also as a community project trying to survive under abnormal conditions.
The bar grew out of that reality. We do not see it as a classic investment project with a clear profit model. It is mainly an attempt to create an offline space where we can connect our audience, our brand, and some form of sustainable income. Around 50,000 Belarusians from the new wave of emigration now live in Warsaw, and many of them already know and trust Reform.news.
We will definitely make mistakes and probably lose efficiency because of that. But the point is not only profit. The newsroom itself is a co-founder of the bar, so the space can support journalism financially while also becoming a place to host events, record shows, and meet our audience offline.
You’ve experimented with several revenue streams beyond grants, including Poland’s 1.5% income tax donation mechanism and a planned analytical newsletter for diplomats and researchers. How did you identify these opportunities, and what has the uptake been so far?
With crowdfunding and Poland’s 1.5% tax donation mechanism, which allows taxpayers to allocate part of their income tax to NGOs, we turned to the part of our audience that had moved abroad. Many of these people are deeply involved in the Belarusian context themselves – journalists, analysts, cultural figures, civil society activists, and other professional consumers of information who use Reform.news content in their own work. Our crowdfunding campaign raised more than €45,000 and later grew into recurring support of around €2,000 per month, providing an important source of stability for us and showing that our work is genuinely valuable to this audience.
The analytical newsletter came from a different idea – an attempt to monetize our expertise. Reform.news processes a huge amount of information about Belarus every day, so we developed a product for embassies, researchers, universities, donors, and international organizations. There was a strong initial interest, especially from diplomatic actors. We paused the launch when the broader funding environment shifted and used that time to refine the product. The demand was and is still there.
A bar is a very different kind of revenue experiment than a newsletter or a crowdfunding campaign. What made you confident enough to hire a construction worker and commit to a physical space?
Honestly, we were probably thinking about the idea for more than a year before actually deciding to do it. But what finally pushed us to move from discussions to reality was the understanding that classical monetization models are simply not available to us anymore in exile. We needed to find a way to move at least part of our work from online into offline space, where independent media can still function as a more traditional business.
The bar is not being built from zero around an abstract business idea. We already have an audience and a community that knows Reform.news and trusts us, especially among Belarusians in Warsaw. For a place like this, that is probably the most important starting point.
At the same time, support from JX Fund made it possible to treat this as an experiment we could realistically attempt. In some sense, this support gave us the chance to test whether a media outlet in exile can build a more sustainable model around not only content, but also a physical community space.
The Belarusian diaspora in Warsaw is scattered and growing. What role do you imagine the bar playing for that community – and what does it mean for Reform.news to become a physical gathering point, not just a media outlet?
During the renovation, we received a huge amount of support from our readers. Dozens of people offered to help. Some were professionals who contributed high-quality work for free. One person who organizes concerts in Warsaw helped plaster many of the walls in the bar and suggested hosting some of his events there in the future. Another person, who is starting an acoustics business, offered to design the sound system for the bar for free as a pilot project for his company.
Very quickly, it stopped feeling like just “our” project. People began bringing their own ideas and initiatives into the space. We already have volunteers planning events there, and we expect the final stage of renovation itself to become a community event.
This showed that the Belarusian diaspora in Warsaw is looking for places where people can meet, collaborate, and remain connected to each other. We hope the bar can become one of these places – not only for Reform.news audiences, but also for new initiatives, collaborations, and perhaps even future Belarusian businesses that grow out of this environment.
Looking back, what is one lesson about media innovation that other independent media operating under pressure could learn from Reform.news?
Probably the main lesson for us is that community and trust are more important than any specific business model.
Many media in exile are forced to constantly speak the language of crisis and survival. But people are more willing to support you when they see not only vulnerability, but also effort, ideas, and attempts to build something sustainable for the future. We learned that it is important not to stay only in the position of “victims asking for help,” but to show initiative and keep experimenting, even when there is no guarantee that something will work.
At the same time, we were genuinely surprised by how many Belarusians in exile managed to rebuild their lives abroad, create successful careers or businesses, and still remain deeply connected to Belarus. Many of them are willing to invest part of their time, money, skills, and energy into independent media and civil society projects. For us, this became a reminder that audience support is not only about donations – it is about people feeling that your project is also partly theirs.