UKRAINE MEDIA PROJECT (U-Media)

ANNUAL REPORT October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015

USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002

WAYNE SHARPE CHIEF OF PARTY

Josh Machleder, Vice President, Europe, Eurasia, and Asia Programs Internews Network www.internews.org 1640 Rhode Island Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20036 Phone: +1 202 833-5740, Fax: +1 202 833-5745 E-mail: [email protected]

SUBMITTED: OCTOBER 21 , 2015

Page 1 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acronyms ...... 3

Introduction ...... 4

Approach to Implementation ...... 6

Media Environment ...... 9

Key Activities and Results in Response to the Latest Challenges ...... 15 The Parliamentary Elections of 2014 15 The Information War 22 The Conflict and East/West Reconciliation 23 The Reforms Agenda 25

Key Activities and Results by Objective ...... 25 Objective 1: Support and Promote Freedom of Speech and Media Independence 25 Objective 2: Increase Variety of News Sources and Improve News Quality 30 Objective 3: Improve the Enabling Environment for Media and Freedom of Speech 34 Objective 4: Improve Organizational capacity of Ukrainian Media CSOs 39

Media Research ...... 41 Media literacy research 41 Media Audience Research 44 Journalists’ survey 45

Communication & Coordination ...... 48

Challenges ...... 51

Other Activities ...... 53

Appendix 1: List of Sub-Grants...... 57 Attachment 2: One of a Series of articles for Ukrainska Pravda by Internews Ukraine Attachment 3: U-Media Objective Four: Diversification of Partner Funding – 2011 to 2015 Attachment 4: Organizational Development Plan for Internews Ukraine 2015-2016 Attachment 5 (in excel): Monitoring and Evaluation Plan

Page 2 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 Acronyms Acronyms AUP NGO Academy of Ukrainian Press (www.aup.com.ua) CSO Civil Society Organization CUA United Action Center UA CURE Center for Ukrainian Reform Education (www.cure.org.ua) DG Democracy and Governance EC European Commission EU European Union GoU Government of Ukraine IAB Independent Association of Broadcasters (http://www.nam.org.ua/) IMI NGO Institute of Mass Information (http://imi.org.ua/) IMTUU Independent Media Trade Union of Ukraine (http://nmpu.org.ua/) IPC NGO Information Press Center (http://www.ipc.crimea.ua/) IR Investigative Reporting IUA NGO Internews Ukraine (http://www.internews.ua) IWP Institute for World Policy (http://iwp.org.ua) LCD Local Capacity Development LPC NGO Lviv Press Club (http://pressclub.lviv.ua/) MLI NGO Media Law Institute (http://www.medialaw.kiev.ua/) PACT Implementer of UNITER program (www.pactworld.org) PMEP Performance Monitoring and Evaluation Plan RPDI NGO Regional Press Development Institute (http://www.irrp.org.ua/) SF “Suspilnist” (Society) Foundation TK NGO Telekritika (www.telekritika.ua) UAPP Ukrainian Association of Press Publishers (http://www.uapp.org/) U-Media Ukraine Media Project (previously the Strengthening Independent Media in Ukraine program) (www.umedia.kiev.ua) USAID US Agency for International Development

Page 3 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 Introduction Internews is pleased to submit the Ukraine Media Project (U-Media) Annual report for October 1, 2014 to September 30, 2015. The Ukraine Media Project was awarded by USAID to Internews in August 2011 and launched on October 1, 2011. The Ukraine Media Project follows the eight-year USAID media support program, Strengthening Independent Media in Ukraine, also known as U-Media and implemented by Internews. U-Media is implemented according to the following program objectives: 1. Support and Promote Freedom of Speech and Media Independence; 2. Increase the Variety of News Sources and Improve News Quality; 3. Improve the Enabling Environment for Media and Freedom of Speech; and 4. Improve Organizational Capacity of Ukrainian Media CSOs.

Internews would like to highlight key accomplishments for the reporting period:

 On May 15, 2015 Law #1076 “On Public Broadcasting in Ukraine” came into force. Implementation of public service broadcasting reform required the continuous advocacy and expertise of several U-Media partners. U-Media partners contributed to the draft law, raised public awareness of public broadcasting through public seminars, including a critical gathering of key government and non-government stakeholders in March 2015 to discuss strategy in advance of the Parliament vote to transition the state TV and Radio network (First National channel) from a government mouthpiece into a true broadcaster for the citizens of Ukraine.

 On June 16, the Parliament of Ukraine approved by 240 votes in first reading a draft law # 1831 amending some laws of Ukraine to ensure the transparency of media ownership and implementation of the state policy principles in the field of television and radio ownership. The bill obliged the subjects of information activity, i.e. broadcasters and program service providers, to disclose their actual ownership structure and provide information about the final beneficiaries. A mechanism for monitoring the accuracy of such information was introduced. The National Television and Radio Council of Ukraine will request additional information about the ownership structure of the subjects of information activities. Also, those companies which disclose their final beneficiaries will get advantages during the tenders for licenses. U-Media partners – Media Law Institute, Institute for Mass Information and Independent Association of Broadcasters – were substantially involved in drafting and lobbying for this law.

 Suspilnist Foundation (SF), Internews Ukraine (IUA), Media Law Institute (MLI), Center UA and First National Channel united their efforts to organize the nationwide project “Parliamentary Debates 2014.” Zurab Alasania, Director General of First National, and Voice of America journalist Myroslava Gongadze, moderated the debates. Twenty-eight of 29 political parties participated in the debates, which were broadcast on

Page 4 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 seven nights from October 14-24, 2014. (The Communist Party of Ukraine refused to participate.) On Election Day, First National broadcast a 4.5-hour marathon called “Ukraine Tomorrow.” The program featured discussions about the Parliamentary Election results, upcoming reforms and the economic situation in Ukraine. The marathon became one of the highest ranked special projects on Ukrainian TV, with an average audience rating of 0.50% (source: Nielson Ukraine), or 1,567,077 viewers.

 In late 2014 and early 2015, the Independent Association of Broadcaster’s (IAB) media lawyers represented “Chernivtsi TRK” TV channel in a Supreme Court case lodged against the National TV and Radio Council of Ukraine to annul the results of the 2011 tender for digital broadcasting licenses. IAB lawyers managed to convince the National Council to support the position of the regional broadcaster and cancel its previous decision to deny a digital license to “Chernivtsi TRK.” A lawsuit requesting the elimination of all of the 2011 tender results is currently being considered by the European Court for Human Rights.

 Academy of Ukrainian Press (AUP) intensified its efforts to train teachers in media literacy. In cooperation with the Institute of Innovative Technologies, AUP held a series of training events for teachers and education officials in the regions, and developed model lessons, teachers’ books and methodological aid for all secondary school, college and university levels. To encourage schoolchidren to create their own media content, AUP supported media creativity events where students made their own newspapers and wrote essays about media literacy. In July, AUP and the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine formed a working group on Integration of Media Education into Teaching Humanities. The working group will develop a comprehensive curriculum integrating media literacy into humanities studies. The first model lessons were developed for inclusion in the history curricula during this reporting period.

 In October 2014, the Institute for Mass Information (IMI) launched the Presswatcher web platform (http://presswatcher.org/) which tracks the locations of journalists working in the war zones of eastern Ukraine. Using this tracking system, IMI alerts employers and officials if a journalist working in the conflict areas is hurt or goes missing. In the first five months of operation, 100 journalists registered on the platform and IMI supervised 40 trips to the conflict zone.

 By the end of FY 2015, a dramatic increase in viewership of media monitoring reports funded by U-Media was observed. Telekritika’s website, which presents monitoring reports on the professional standards of the Ukraine’s national TV channels, saw an increase in traffic four times above previous totals.

Page 5 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 Approach to Implementation U-Media aims to support and develop the Ukrainian media sector through activities that protect freedom of speech, improve the media enabling environment, create opportunities for new and innovative approaches by Ukrainian media outlets, and strengthen the capacity of media NGO leaders to effectively represent their constituencies. U-Media administers subgrants to Ukrainian NGOs and media outlets that support the development of an independent media, increase access to public information and improve the legal environment for media activities. U-Media technical advisors provide assistance and training to partners in the areas of new media and convergent newsrooms, professional journalism standards, and investigative journalism. U-Media includes institutional capacity building components (Local Solutions) in institutional and core subgrants, and also designs and manages organizational development trainings for selected partners. U-Media’s research-based approach to USAID’s Local Solutions organizational capacity development initiative ensures that local partner organizational development needs are identified and then addressed through training, consultation, and subgrant assistance. Due to the political turbulence brought on by the early Parliamentary Elections of October 2014, the introduction of wide-ranging reforms through the Reanimation Reforms Package, the continuing information war with Russia and the growing demand for information by and about Ukraine’s Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) population, Internews encouraged partners to adapt their Year 4 work plans to respond to these challenges and opportunities. Partners provided legal assistance and both physical and digital security training to journalists, media monitoring organizations adapted their analyses to provide the public with a critical view of how the media covered these historic events, and local partners organized regional public discussions to raise journalists’ and the public’s awareness of critically important issues for Ukrainians. In February 2015, U-Media announced an Open Door grants competition for national and regional media companies and organizations working for improvement of the media sector in Ukraine. The average grant for projects up to 6 months was $5,000. Priorities included self- regulation in the media sector, the role of media in solving the issues of internally displaced persons (IDPs), and media ownership transparency. Ten organizations implemented Open Door projects starting in April 2015. Subgrantee Categories The subgrantee categories and subgrant types described below reflect the diverse levels of institutional capacity, quality of service delivery, and demand for financial support of the local organizations that receive U-Media funding. At the end of each fiscal year, Internews evaluates the organizational development progress of all partners and makes adjustments to these groupings as necessary in consultation with USAID. Institutional partners Internews believes these organizations are most likely to play leading roles in the media NGO sector and be ready for direct implementation of international donor support. Institutional partners include:

Page 6 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 1. Internews Ukraine (IUA), promotes EU integration and Ukrainian values through media, organizes cross-regional media exchanges and cultivates critical thinking among journalists and media consumers, improves media representatives’ knowledge of cyber security, administers small grants for content production in the East and South of Ukraine, and conducts election-related activities when necessary. 2. Telekritika (TK), monitors and reports on the quality of regional TV news, arms journalists in the East and South of Ukraine with knowledge on political processes, electoral campaign and professional ethics, and organizes regional events with journalists to distribute the results of their media monitoring. 3. Independent Association of Broadcasters (IAB) facilitates the establishment of good governance in the field of broadcasting, promoting the adoption of media legislation that meets EU standards and Ukraine’s current needs; IAB monitors the activities of the National Council on TV and Radio and provides legal assistance to journalists and media managers.

Core partners Core partners are organizations that have been working with U-Media for the past 5-7 years (some longer), have strong track records as service providers and leaders in their technical areas, and have made strides in developing their organizational capacity. The core partners of U-Media are: 1. Regional Press Development Institute (RPDI) provides training and education for regional media professionals including investigative reporting, legal issues and new media tools, promotes partnerships and exchange of information and experience between media outlets of Ukraine and other countries. 2. Institute of Mass Information (IMI) monitors adherence to laws on journalists’ rights and provides training and legal support to journalists, publishes textbooks and reference materials, and conducts public discussions in the regions on practical issues related to media sector development under crisis conditions. 3. Media Law Institute (MLI) supports media law development (within the framework of the Reanimation Reforms Package) and organizes educational events on current and pending media laws for a variety of media-related and government counterparts. 4. Academy of Ukrainian Press (AUP) conducts quantitative monitoring and content analysis of the national prime-time news programs and implements a School of Media Literacy dedicated to launch and improve media literacy courses at schools of secondary and higher education. 5. Suspilnist (Society) Foundation (SF) develops convergent programs (including election debates) through Campus 3.0 online platform, involves active students of 24 Ukrainian universities in the national TV debates, and produces a national talk show on important political and economic issues in partnership with the First National TV channel. 6. Ukrainian Association of Press Publishers (UAPP) participates in an advocacy campaign on the de-statization of regional state and communal print media. 7. Lviv Press Club (LPC), through media events, serves as a platform for different political parties, local officials, NGOs, and civic leaders to discuss important issues of social and economic development of the region.

Page 7 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 8. Information & Press Center (IPC-Simferopol, now located in Kyiv), a leading Crimean journalist training organization, produces the online TV show “Issues of National Security” and maintains the Investigator.UA information portal. 9. Independent Media Trade Union of Ukraine (IMTUU) provides legal services to journalists through its Legal Bureau, as well as psychological aid to reporters returning from the conflict areas. When evaluating proposals from existing subgrantees for continued funding, U-Media applies a set of criteria designed to capture the effectiveness of each applicant’s prior activities, whether they have reached the goals they set for themselves, and their progress toward improving their own institutional capacity. These results help U-Media to determine not only which groups will continue to receive funding, but also encourage organizations to focus on their strengths. U- Media may decide to discontinue funding if results have not been achieved and/or a subgrantee has shown insufficient progress in capacity development. Emerging and Short-term Partners During this reporting period, Internews worked with several less mature, short-term partners implementing special projects within such U-Media priorities as media monitoring, gender issues, and local content production. Some of these partners joined the Project in response to recent challenges such as the information war, conflict in the East and reconciliation issues, the reforms agenda, etc.

Short-term Partners include such groups as:  First National TV Channel (Suspilne TV Foundation)  Pylyp Orlyk Institute for Democracy (POID)  Institute for World Policy (IWP)  Mykolayiv Center for Investigative Reporting

Page 8 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 Media Environment

A Nation Votes for Reform President Petro Poroshenko dissolved Parliament on August 25th, 2014, paving the way for Parliamentary Elections designed to clear out the remnants of Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions MPs and enhance his government’s legitimacy. The Parliamentary Elections, on October 26, sent Ukrainians to the polls for the second time in six months.

Snap elections called in the midst of the pro-Russian separatist conflict in the East posed myriad challenges to the conduct of free and fair elections. The growing population of Internally Displaced Persons (currently estimated at 1.4 million) could not return home to disputed territory to vote; the Central Election Commission addressed this issue by adding regulations that allowed IDPs to vote where they were. With so little time for campaigning, Ukrainians across the country were hard pressed to know the parties, the candidates, and the platforms that were competing for their vote. First National, Ukraine’s state TV network that is in the process of becoming the nation’s first public broadcaster, showed Ukraine that it is ready to make that transition by broadcasting a series of Parliamentary Election debates (see page 15) featuring 28 parties to an audience of millions. These broadcasts helped Ukrainians make informed decisions on Election Day.

Images from First National TV Parliamentary Election Debates

Several of the journalists and civil society activists who had worked for so long to see positive change in Ukraine seized the opportunity to make change from within and ran for seats in Parliament. Journalists Serhiy Leshchenko, Mustafa Nayem, Victoria Siumar and Igor Sobolev, and civil society activists such as Svitlana Zalishchuk, formed what they called a Trojan Horse; although they ran under the banner of competing parties, they vowed to work together to make reforms happen inside the Rada. "The fact is we've been criticizing everything that's happened in the country for the last decade," Nayem said. "Now we have two choices: either we can continue criticizing or we can now try and actually change things."

Page 9 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 Once inside the Parliamentary system, the Trojan Horse went to work. While Victoria Siumar, former head of Internews’ partner the Institute of Mass Information and currently Chair of the Verkhovna Rada Committee for Freedom of Speech and Information, pushed for adoption of the law to create public broadcasting in Ukraine (passed into law on March 19 and adopted in April 2015), former investigative journalist Igor Sobolev, in his role as Chairman of the Anti- Corruption Committee of the Verkhovna Rada, led the charge to sack the sitting Prosecutor General. Sobolev started a petition and gathered the required number of signatories to remove Vitaly Yarema, who will be remembered for his inability (or unwillingness) to prosecute the worst offenders under the regime of Viktor Yanukovych. The book is still out on his replacement Viktor Shokin, who has dismissed corrupt prosecutors on his own team, but has yet to take on the worst offenders in the country, citing ill health as the reason. Reforms and the Media Outside Parliament, the Reforms agenda is championed by a group of more than 300 experts, activists, journalists, scientists, and human rights advocates who created the Reanimation Package of Reforms (RPR), a blueprint for removing corruption from every aspect of Ukrainian governance. Already, the experts of the Reanimation Package of Reforms have developed or amended 47 draft laws, including the Public Broadcasting law and amendments to the Access to Information law. Internews takes pride in knowing that the NGO chosen by the European Union and UNDP to MPs Mustafa Nayem and Serhiy Leschenko supporting the lead the RPR process of constitutional, legislative and Reanimation Package of Reform’s campaign within Parliament to pass draft law #1357-1 and create Public anti-corruption reform is the Media Law Institute, a Service Broadcasting. project incubated at Internews 10 years ago and still led by former Internews staffer Taras Shevchenko. The Law on Public Broadcasting, developed by the Media Reform working group under the Reanimation Package of Reforms and registered by the Parliamentary Committee for Freedom of Speech and Information, was adopted in April 2014, but hit several bumps along the road to becoming confirmed in Parliament. Parliament voted to accept in first reading the draft law 1357 on “Amendments to the Law of Ukraine on Public Broadcasting” in January; the draft Law was voted in with the condition that the suggestions voiced by MP Victoria Siumar (People’s Front party) and MP Mykola Tomenko (Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc) would be accepted for the second reading. MP Tomenko introduced an alternative draft Law (1357-1), which called for the oblast state broadcast media to remain under the control of local governments. Critics, including those of the Council of Europe, opined that “the suggestions that local broadcasting should remain linked to local government (either through governance arrangements or funding) should be rejected as contrary to CoE principles: ‘the independence of public service broadcasting should be guaranteed expressly.’”1

1 Opinion of DGI (Directorate of Information Society and Action Against Crime, Information Society Department, Media and Internet Governance Division). Prepared on the basis of the expert opinion by Eve Salomon on the Law on Public Television and Radio Broadcasting of Ukraine and proposed Amendments by the Head and Members of the Committee on Freedom of Speech and Information Policy, DGI(2015)3, 23 February 2015, Council of Europe, Page 3. Page 10 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 At second reading on March 19, 2015, Parliament voted 230 to 5 in favor of the law championed by Siumar, Shevchenko and the RPR. “Without an unbiased broadcaster Ukrainians will not know what is going on in their country,” MP Siumar said. “This (the initiative to create Public Broadcasting) has been a 10-year battle for us, and it is historic – we are making history,” she said. With this victory won, the hard work has now begun. The PSB Law requires that political factions and civil society appoint representatives to a Supervisory Board that will oversee the management of the public broadcaster. After much negotiation, it was decided that civil society would have one more Board member than would the political parties - a crucial decision that should protect the broadcaster from coming under the control of politicians or the government. Several further meetings among stakeholders resulted in a schedule for the election of Board members and launching of the Supervisory Board in October 2015. Zurab Alasania said at a key public forum to discuss the progress of PSB that, although the progress has been slow, he “did not suspect any type of sabotage” from government or other forces that might have had their own designs for the future of the nation’s state broadcaster. Who Owns the Media? Press freedom advocates scored another legal victory with the passage of a law to require transparency of media ownership in September 2015. The law not only forces media owners to come out from behind their offshore holdings to reveal their true identities, it also will prohibit public authorities, local governments, political parties, trade unions and legal entities registered in offshore zones from owning electronic media. The Media Law Institute, one of the leading proponents of this law, noted that “transparency of ownership is an indispensable tool to fight market monopolization, because in the absence of legally significant information about the owners, we cannot implement an effective anti- monopoly policy.” The law is an example of the effective cooperation between government, public representatives of the broadcast regulator, NGOs such as MLI and Telekritika, and the Parliamentary Committee on Freedom of Speech; this across-the-board cooperation has become a hallmark of the new spirit of reform at play today in Ukraine. The War Against Corruption Ukraine’s development and economic growth have suffered from pervasive corruption since the country declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. A 2014 global index of perceived official corruption released by Transparency International ranks Ukraine as one of the world’s most corrupt countries, ranking 142nd out of 177 countries and thus on par with Nigeria, the Central African Republic, and Iran. Recent surveying shows that of all the reforms included in the Reform Agenda, the fight against corruption is by far the top priority for Ukrainians (47% say fighting corruption is the highest priority, while 26% say resolving the economic crisis and just 2% say constitutional reform). In October 2014, Parliament adopted an array of anti- corruption laws; the laws went into force in April 2015, and created two agencies intended to investigate corruption cases and to increase transparency among Ukraine’s public officials. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau was established when Artem Sytnyk was appointed as the Director of the Bureau on April 16, 2015, and the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption (NAPC) was formally created on March 18. The key function of the Bureau is to reveal corruption and provide criminal investigations on such cases, while the NAPC, among other Page 11 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 tasks, will maintain the State Registry of officials’ income declarations. The NACB is now in the process of hiring personnel and detectives. However, neither agency is currently active. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s corps of investigative reporters has grown and made its presence felt in post-Yanukovych Ukraine. These journalists are watchdogging the effectiveness of the government’s corruption reforms on websites such as Transparency International Ukraine; Ukrainska Pravda, and the western Ukrainian Zik.ua portal, and TV programs Schemes (produced by Radio Liberty and broadcast on First National) and Slidstvo.info, broadcast on Hromadske.TV and First National. Internews currently supports the Slidstvo.info TV program through the Strengthening Investigative Reporting in Ukraine (SIRU) project, funded by Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development. While the government’s anti-corruption commissions organize their affairs, and since the current parliamentary opposition provides no effective check, it is critical that the media play its traditional role as the fourth estate and conduct its own monitoring and investigation of government and judicial conduct. The Information War The military conflict in the east of Ukraine runs in tandem Taking the High Road in the Information with the continuing information war waged by Russia War against Ukraine. Kremlin-controlled Russian broadcasters “Rather than fighting Russia’s media spin bombard Ukrainians and the world with a relentless doctors with bombastic “messaging” from the barrage of misinformation, all with the goal of portraying west or from Kyiv, we should concentrate instead on supporting excellent local Ukraine as a “failed state.” The newly formed Ministry of journalism and furthering the distribution of Information Policy hopes to establish a foreign objective news and information. This includes broadcasting channel called Ukraine Tomorrow to detailed reporting on ways to keep people safe, counter the propaganda spread by the Russian and pro- fed, clothed, sheltered, connected with families and friends, and how to rebuild their lives.” separatist media, while independent media projects like - Josh Machleder, Internews VP for Europe, Hromadske.TV, Platforma, and StopFake debunk Russian Eurasia and Asia, on the Foreign Policy propaganda while providing accurate and balanced website, May 12, 2015 coverage of Ukraine’s reform efforts and the eastern conflict. Supporting these independent initiatives, combined with promoting media literacy within Ukraine, are more effective (and cost-effective) ways to wage the information war than to create a government-run propaganda service that will face credibility challenges at home and abroad. Perhaps the most damaging impact of the information war is how media freedom has been compromised in its name. President Poroshenko banned from Ukraine three BBC correspondents, along with several Russian journalists and public figures in September 2015. The journalists were banned presumably due to the nature of their coverage of the separatist conflict in the East, but the measure sends a chilling message to all media in Ukraine that the government is watching and will not hesitate to restrict freedom of speech to win the war. The President subsequently met with the U.K.’s ambassador to Ukraine and called for the BBC journalists, two Spanish journalists (who are currently held hostage in Syria) and a German reporter to be removed from the list of 41 international journalists and bloggers barred from entering Ukraine for one year.

Page 12 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 Journalist Safety Despite the Minsk I and Minsk II ceasefire agreements signed in August 2014 and February 2015, the war continues to rage in the East of Ukraine, and the numbers of dead soldiers and civilians continues to rise. Journalists covering the war have not been spared; since the conflict between pro-Russian insurgents and Ukrainian forces began in March 2014, eight journalists have been killed, 322 journalists have been assaulted, and 61 have been abducted (see infographic); most cases occurred while journalists attempted to cover the fighting and the resulting humanitarian crisis. Several initiatives have been launched to protect journalists who choose to cover the hostilities, such as the Presswatcher project (see page Помилка! Закладку не визначено.), and Institute of Mass Information infographic describing the casualties among journalists have declined, but number and types of violations against journalists in Ukraine the problem remains that media sending journalists to the front lines do not offer insurance and often do not provide the gear needed to work in war zones with even a modicum of safety. On February 28, Sergii Nikolaiev, senior photographer with the Segodnya daily newspaper, died of his wounds after a land mine exploded at the front lines near the hotly contested Donetsk airport. Many think Nikolaev could have been saved if the journalists he was traveling with had basic first aid equipment and training. The Institute for Mass Information responded by organizing first aid trainings for journalists; they also produced videos that journalists throughout Ukraine can view Still from IMI training video about applying tourniquets to help online to help them better prepare for the unique keep wounded journalists alive until medical help can arrive. dangers of war reporting. It is hoped that this training will help save the lives of media workers reporting from the front lines.

Page 13 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 In spite of turbulent times for Ukrainian journalists, or perhaps as a result of them, Corruption Watchdogs investigative journalism has experienced a The journalists of the Hromadske.TV investigative program, renaissance in recent months. Starting with the Slidstvo.info, investigated a group of Kyiv District YanukovychLeaks project, and followed by a Administrative Court judges who took multiple trips abroad over the past four years. After review it was found that judges bevy of new investigative journalism TV were issuing verdicts from cruise ships. Many of the rulings programs on Hromadske.TV, First National went against the state’s interests and were in favor of alleged network and ZIK TV, investigative reporting corruption and tax-evasion cases involving close allies of is not only flourishing in Ukraine – it is getting ousted President Viktor Yanukovych. To gather information for the story, journalist Dmytro Gnap procured court records results. Treasonous military commanders have related to the judges’ travel – these were difficult to access but been sacked, corrupt government officials not classified documents. One judge in question applied to the have been investigated, and citizens are saying Prosecutor General, who opened a criminal case. The judge does not deny that he made court decisions while vacationing “enough is enough” and are acting as but does object to how the information was obtained. whistleblowers on corrupt businessmen and politicians. Ultimately, Ukraine’s journey along the path of wholesale reforms can only work if government is held accountable for doing the work. Working within a vibrant, free, and uncensored media environment, Ukraine’s journalists have the skill and the drive to cast a bright light on the reforms process, so that the Ukrainian public can clearly see how far their new leaders have taken them and how far they have yet to travel.

Back to the Polls After two pre-term elections in the extremely turbulent year of 2014 – presidential in May and parliamentary in October – Ukrainians will go to the polls yet again on October 25, 2015 to elect local city and oblast representatives. In July 2015, Parliament adopted a new Law on Local Elections; the drafting process was contentious and the resulting legislation fell far short of reformers’ hopes to design an open list format that would welcome candidates not tied to or controlled by the major parties. The issue of political advertising during election campaigns was hotly debated; the key argument of those proposing an absolute ban was that the majority of political parties’ election campaign budgets are spent on TV and radio PSAs, which stacks the deck against smaller parties and independent candidates. Legislators selected a local elections law that does not ban political ads. The October elections are intrinsically linked with Ukraine’s transition from centralized to decentralized governance. On August 31, Parliament voted in favor of changes to the Constitution that will transfer power to the districts in advance of the local elections; this enraged factions of the opposition, and a large protest outside Parliament on the day of the vote ended with a grenade attack that killed three National Guardsmen and injured over 100 other protesters

Page 14 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 and police.2 At the heart of the protest was outrage that the amendments will also award legitimacy to the separatist governments of Donetsk and Luhansk, a measure of autonomy agreed to by Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany in the Minsk II peace treaty signed in February 2015. The media will play a crucial role in training journalists and informing the public about the very complicated local elections law; a revised vote-counting process promises to be confusing and could lead to more protests about individual contests and the reforms that are bringing sudden change to the country on so many fronts. If allowed to report freely, the media can be of great assistance in communicating Ukraine’s wide-scale reforms to a public eager to see the democratic promises of the Revolution of Dignity become reality.

Key Activities and Results in Response to the Latest Challenges The Parliamentary Elections of 2014

Under the Parliamentary Elections support program, for which Internews received additional USAID funding, U-Media supported partner organizations to:  conduct legal training and consultations for journalists to ensure they were informed about the laws governing the October 26, 2014 Parliamentary Elections;  produce televised debates featuring candidates running for seats in Parliament;  monitor the mainstream media for political bias in elections coverage;  conduct public awareness campaigns to help media consumers distinguish real news from paid content and distribute information about voting procedures for internally displaced persons (IDPs);  track the reform agenda of the newly elected Parliament; and  monitor journalists’ rights and advocate on their behalf during their coverage of the Parliamentary Elections. National Debates on First National TV

Suspilnist Foundation (SF), Internews Ukraine (IUA), Media Law Institute (MLI), Center UA and First National TV united their efforts to organize the debates series called “Parliamentary Debates 2014”. Zurab Alasania, Director General of First National, and Voice of America journalist Myroslava Gongadze, moderated the debates. Twenty-eight of 29 political

2 “141 people stay in hospitals after Verkhovna Rada clashes, 10 in serious condition”, Kyiv Post, (http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/141-people-stay-in-hospitals-after-verkhovna-rada-clashes-10-in-serious- condition-396932.html), September 1, 2015. Page 15 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 parties participated in the debates, broadcast on seven nights from October 14-24, 2014. (The Communist Party of Ukraine refused to participate.) In addition to live broadcasts on First National, the debates were available online in two more languages – English and Crimean- Tatar (available on Hromadske.TV,

bigmir.net, Campus 3.0. Platform Outreach Rating and the First National YouTube 1,832,851 people on average average audience rating for channel). The October 22 debate, viewed each debate program the first broadcast of each featuring Oksana Andrienko aired on First National debate: 0.42% (Power and Honour party), Jan (source: Nielson Ukraine) Novoseltsov (Ukraine Civil Movement), Oleh Lyashko (Radical Party of Oleh Lyashko) and Egor Sobolev (Samopomich (self-help) Union), proved the most popular, with 2,392,597 viewers. The video archive is available at http://1tv.com.ua/uk/video/all/debaty. A post-debate show called “Campus Talk” was produced by the Suspilnist Foundation and engaged the candidates in an online dialogue with students from 23 regions of Ukraine. Election Day Marathon “Ukraine Tomorrow” On Election Day, starting at 6:30 pm, First National TV launched a 4.5-hour marathon broadcast called “Ukraine Tomorrow.” Two anchors – Inna Moskvina and Ilona Dovhan - moderated discussions about the Parliamentary Election results, the upcoming reforms process and the economic situation in Ukraine. Among the speakers were political analysts, experts, sociologists, civic activists, and students. The viewers were able to watch live reports from the Central Election Commission, as well as live broadcasts from all the headquarters of the political parties participating in the elections. The political parties made statements of their opinions on the preliminary Election results and shared their understanding of the reforms Ukraine badly needs. The marathon became one of the highest ranked special projects on Ukrainian TV and had an average audience rating of 0.50% (source: Nielson Ukraine) or 1,567,077 viewers. The “Ask the Candidate” Campaign Suspilnist Foundation, in cooperation with online newspaper Ukrainska Pravda, launched a campaign called “Ask the Candidate” (http://kandydat2014.pravda.com.ua/). Ukrainians posted online any question to any party participating in the debates. The questions that received the most votes from visitors to the site were then posed by the moderators during the live debates. A total of 725 questions, receiving a total of 24,226 votes, were posted. To promote the Debates on First National, Internews Ukraine conducted a promotional campaign. Two 20-second PSAs were placed on 3 radio stations - Radio Era FM, Hit FM, Radio Rocks (135 broadcasts in total). The audio PSAs encouraged voters to come to the voting stations and select their government for the next 5 years. In addition, 26 regional print media published advertisements with the same content, and banner ads were placed on 22 leading national and regional web platforms. The ad campaign was launched on Facebook and reached 643,330 users. Online Blitz Debates

Page 16 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 Lviv Press Club (LPC) conducted 21 one-hour online blitz debates for citizens of Lviv and western regions of Ukraine; political party representatives and single-mandate candidates talked about the parties’ platforms to help viewers make an informed choice in the Parliamentary Elections. LPC engaged 25% of the region’s single mandate candidates in the debates. The debates were broadcast online at DailyLviv, on LPC’s YouTube channel and on the LPC website. On average, each debate was viewed live by 600 people on the LPC YouTube channel. The debate videos were widely distributed through Lviv’s media – they were viewed on the Lviv Portal (up to 15,000 unique visitors daily), information agency ZIK (up to 70,000 unique visitors daily) and Gal-info (up to 20,000 unique visitors daily). On Election Day, LPC organized an 8-hour online marathon engaging 36 speakers. LPC provided election returns and provided local journalists with an opportunity to prepare summaries based on LPC’s briefings. As a result, local and national media prepared around 100 stories based on news received during the marathon. Lviv Press Club helped internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Lviv region to learn about their rights and the procedures for voting outside their home districts. LPC developed a guide on how IDPs could vote and delivered hard copies to them through the Department of Social Protection and Lviv City Council. As a result, 1 out of every 6 IDPs who were officially registered in Lviv voted in the Parliamentary Elections. National and Regional Media Monitoring Through its monitoring of national and regional TV news, Telekritika (TK) raised public awareness about the quality of news coverage of the elections. TK conducted two waves of media monitoring on eight leading national TV channels - ICTV, “1+1”, “Ukraina”, Inter, Channel 5, STB, Novy and First National Channel. They also published analytical reports about the newsworthy events the networks chose not to cover for political reasons; the Infographic by Telekritika on number of news reports that violated reports contain infographics and were journalism standards at 8 leading national TV channels (2012 vs 2014) translated into English (“What news wasn’t reported in September 2014”) and (“What news was not reported in October 2014”). In addition, Telekritika conducted weekly qualitative monitoring of the highest ranked TV talk- shows – “Shuster Live” (First National), “Svoboda Slova” (Freedom of Speech, ICTV), “The Right for Power” (1+1) and “The Black Mirror” (Inter) - for content analysis of opinion leaders’ positions on the elections. The monitoring experts analyzed manipulative techniques used by presenters and the TV show producers to demonstrate their political biases. In total, 13 reports were published on Telekritika’s websites, Mediasapiens and Media and Elections. The reports were viewed 22,448 times. Telekritika also conducted monitoring of the weekly news round-up programs produced by Inter, 1+1, Ukraina, Channel 5 and ICTV.

Page 17 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 The Academy of Ukrainian Press (AUP) conducted two waves of TV news content analysis during the pre-elections period. AUP’s assessment criteria were: news objectivity, percentage of news containing several points of view, and quality of reporting about political parties and governmental institutions. The study demonstrated a catastrophic decline of journalism standards during the elections. In September 2014, the percentage of news that was balanced with several points of view declined to 12% and in October 2014 to 10%, while in April 2014 the balance percentage was 21%. AUP experts found that very little attention was paid in the news to the Parliamentary Elections: 13% of news stories covered the Elections as a main subject and just 7.3% as a secondary subject; in September 2014, that level was even lower – 6.8%. On average, 43% of news flow reported on events in eastern Ukraine – the anti-terror operation (ATO) and life in the occupied and reclaimed territories. AUP presented its findings on October 31, 2014 in Kyiv with participation of leading media representatives and experts. The Pylyp Orlyk Institute for Democracy (POID) conducted two pre-election waves of print and online media monitoring in eight regions of Ukraine - Donetsk, Lviv, Kharkiv, Sumy, Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, Chernivtsi and Zhytomyr. Media that POID has been monitoring for the last two years – in Lviv, Donetsk, Sumy and Kharkiv – demonstrated much less jeansa compared to the regions that were added to the monitoring pool during the election campaign period, such as Odesa, Zhytomyr, Chernivtsi and Dnipropetrovsk. POID experts published a number of analytical reports in national and regional media, introduced the monitoring results during regional public discussions, appeared in the media to discuss their findings, and delivered public lectures at regional universities. Journalism professors in Odesa, Sumy and Chernivtsi universities told POID that they used their analytical reports, publications, video interviews, and roundtable videos as aids in teaching journalism standards. POID experts were often named as a reliable source for practical knowledge about good journalism. POID monitoring reports were published on the Telekritika/MediaSapiens website, on the Nashe misto website (Sumy), and the Union of Journalists of Ukraine referred to POID reports in writing about journalists’ responsibility. The national newspaper Den (Day) interviewed POID’s director, Svitlana Yeremenko, about the major trends in Ukrainian journalism in 2014. Election-Related Content Production 1. Telekritika (TK) renewed publication of its website Media and Elections for the Parliamentary Elections period and updated it daily with news and analytical reports. The total number of page views reached 203,000 (the data was gathered from the Google Analytics service and the management systems of the “Media and Elections” site); the number of unique visitors was 45,000, 26% of which revisited the site. Media and Elections was the only thematic internet platform that presented complex and topical information about media influence on the elections process. The content included monitoring findings, legal advice, ethical issues and legislation on journalists’ rights during the elections. Several postings were reposted by other media and civil society organizations. A total of 151 online resources reposted Media and Elections publications. 2. Independent Association of Broadcasters (IAB) promoted voting in the early Parliamentary Elections through 15 video PSAs that included analysis of political parties’ platforms. Two videos outlined the legislation that protected the needs of internally displaced people (IDPs) from Donbas and provided advice on getting state aid. The 2.5- Page 18 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 minute videos covered the issues of language policy, decentralization, efforts to solve the conflict in the East, IDP issues, lustration, the banking system and currency regulation, taxation, the Ukrainian army, healthcare, social protection, agriculture, police reform, education and infrastructure and energy independence. IAB broadcast the videos through its membership network of 24 regional TV companies in prime-time during the election campaign. The videos are available on the IAB webpage. Seven broadcasters - IAB members Channel 27 (Dnipropetrovsk), Pervy Gorodskoy (Odesa), Novy Chernihiv (Chernigiv), Rivne 1 (Rivne), Alex (Zaporizhzhia), Vikka (Cherkasy), and TV4 (Ternopil) – produced online TV bridges that connected guests and viewers from the eastern and western regions of Ukraine during the elections period. Studio guests and viewers discussed their expectations of the new Parliament and issues of common concern to the East and West. Studio guests representing different political groups, analysts and local opinion leaders discussed the situation in their regions.

Guests in Odesa and Ternopil studios speak about the role of volunteers and the government in assistance to IDPs. TV-Bridge Odesa-Ternopil, October 16, 2015

IAB’s legal hotline provided 12 regional broadcasters with consultations on regulation of media activities during the elections period. The consultations helped clients avoid violating political advertising regulations. Elections Coverage in Regions The Mykolayiv Center for Investigative Reporting (MCIR), through its information portal (http://nikcenter.org/), provided citizens in the southern regions of Ukraine (Mykolayiv, Kherson and Odesa) with unbiased and timely information about local political and economic processes during the Parliamentary Elections in a special section of their website. Visualization of Single Mandate Candidates in Mykolayiv Region Page 19 prepared by Mykolayiv Center for Investigative Reporting Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 Trainings for Journalists on Election Legal Issues (organized by a coalition of four U- Media partners) Sixty-eight journalists and editors (36 print, 17 online and 15 TV) from different regions of Ukraine (those working in the East and South were on a priority list) improved their knowledge and skills in legal aspects of coverage of the Parliamentary Elections at a series of trainings called "Legal Aspects of Coverage of Parliamentary Elections in Ukraine in 2014" conducted by Internews Ukraine (IUA) in five cities - Lutsk, Vinnytsia, Dnipropetrovsk, Kirovohrad and Mykolayiv. The key topics covered were: the new edition of the Law on Elections in Ukraine; the electoral system; voting procedures (including the rules for IDPs); the formation of parties; political party funding; and the rights and obligations of journalists during elections.

In the post-elections period, Internews Ukraine (IUA) conducted 5 training sessions “New Parliament: Challenges and Expectations,” in November 2014, at which 72 regional journalists and editors participated (31 print, 22 online and 19 TV). Discussions covered analysis of the incoming parliamentary majority and the opposition; the ability of the new Parliament to implement reforms; ways Parliament can cooperate with the public and the first steps for Parliament to begin implementation of the Association Agreement with the EU.

The Independent Media Trade Union of Ukraine (IMTUU) implemented the project “Legal Bureau: Protection of Journalists’ Rights during 2014 Parliamentary Elections.” In October 2014, IMTUU conducted 3 trainings in Chernivtsi, Poltava, and Uzhhorod for Ukrainian journalists and media workers, where participants gained skills and knowledge on election regulations and journalists’ rights and responsibilities while covering the election campaign. On Election Day and during the vote counting after the election, IMTUU’s Legal Bureau experts, via the Journalists Support Center, provided journalists with necessary assistance and support. Yuka Havrylova, the Head of the IMTUU’s Legal Bureau, Oksana Vynnchuk, IMTUU Executive Secretary, and Oleksandr Tarasov, a media lawyer, delivered online consultations for journalists, monitored violations of journalists’ rights on Election Day according to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) methodology, spoke to the media about journalists’ rights on Election Day, and participated in a teleconference with their Polish media colleagues. In September and October 2014, the Regional Press “All the issues – how to distinguish Development Institute (RPDI) conducted two-day political ads and jeansa, what workshops called “Legal and Journalism Standards in should be done if the candidates Covering the 2014 Parliamentary Elections Campaign” for mask their campaigns behind the 90 journalists in 4 cities – Kyiv (2 workshops), Kharkiv, ‘charity’, what rights and Odesa and Lviv – to help participants from all over Ukraine obligations the journalist should pursue during the elections revisit and improve their knowledge of election legislation, campaigns – were well-covered and get acquainted with best practices of elections coverage that will help me to perform my job both in Ukraine and abroad, and discuss professional and professionally.” (Ivan Savych, ethical standards of journalism. “Volynski Novyny”, Lutsk) “I’m grateful to the trainers! Meeting with you gave me The Regional Press Development Institute (RPDI) confidence and proved once again conducted 6 webinars on media law, focusing on election that our work is really needed. We issues, for 102 regional journalists. RPDI’s online service just have to be professional and subscribers received prompt consultations on political effective”. (Iryna Romaniuk, “RIA- Plus”, Ternopil) Page 20 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 advertising pricing and could view a sample agreement on placing campaign materials in the media (http://irrp.org.ua/tutorials/zrazky/). RPDI provided journalists with comprehensive legal counseling about elections legislation during the campaign and on Election Day via its 24-hour hotline; on the eve of the Parliamentary Elections, RPDI lawyers delivered 22 written legal consultations on election legislation, and conducted an all-time high number of legal screenings of election campaign stories (29). From October 26 to October 27, RPDI ran a legal hotline with 9 lawyers on hand to provide online legal services to journalists. RPDI media lawyers fielded 18 requests for advice from journalists and other citizens. Overall, in October-December 2014, RPDI media lawyers provided 76 legal consultations, including 22 written consultations, 31 face- to-face consultations, and legal screening of 23 reports about the elections.

Telekritika (TK) organized four trainings called “Global Standards of Socially Responsible Election Reporting” in Lviv, Odesa, Kharkiv and Poltava and three seminars called “The Work of Journalists and Election Reporting in Conflict Zones” in Kyiv. In total, 131 journalists (101 women and 30 men) from 15 regions of Ukraine participated in the events. The journalists also received post-training advisory support from TK experts on elections coverage. As a result, trainees produced 35 media reports with TK’s financial and consultation support. The media products were published on TK’s Media and Elections website. Also, TK announced a competition among training participants for the best media report on the 2014 Parliamentary elections. In total, 20 stories were submitted for the contest. The jury used the criteria of informational capability, readability, the standards of accuracy, reliability, fullness of information, balance and differentiation of facts and comments. The jury selected four stories (hyperlinked here - Story 1; Story 2; Story 3; Story 4) to receive $200 awards from Telekritika.

Media Literacy Campaign during Elections One month before the Elections, the Institute of Mass Information (IMI) conducted a “Catch Jeansa!” contest among media consumers of Ukraine. The goal of the contest was to attract citizens’ attention to the issue of paid journalism within the elections period and cultivate critical media consumption. Motivated by small money awards, citizens submitted samples of jeansa they found in the regional media. The contest was advertised through the partners’ regional media and social networks, and 550 samples of paid journalism were collected. The jeansa samples were submitted from Vinnytsia region (122), Ternopil (86), Khmelnytsky (62), Lviv (61), Sumy (59) Zhytomyr (42) and Donetsk (29). IMI placed the most interesting pieces on its Facebook page. The winner got small prizes (office devices and supplies).

Page 21 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 The same interview with a single-mandate candidate – a former member of Party of Regions – appeared in three different newspapers in Zakarpatska oblast (Western Ukraine). One of those newspapers marked the interview as “political advertisement”; two others - did not.

Regional Town Hall Meetings The Pylyp Orlyk Institute for Democracy (POID) organized nine town hall meetings in Sumy, Kherson, Odesa, Khmelnytsky, Ternopil, Dnipropetrovsk, Chernihiv, Zhytomyr and Lutsk to discuss regional election issues. Among the issues discussed: journalists’ professional responsibility under the conditions of the undeclared war and informational aggression in the East; resistance to propaganda, independent coverage of political parties’ platforms, political advertisement and jeansa, access to information; and regional media content quality. Speakers were media experts, political analysts, a military psychologist and media lawyers. Two hundred journalists from regional, district and municipal media attended the town hall meetings; the meetings were covered in about 120 print/online publications. In addition to 25-30 journalists, every discussion involved staff of 2 or 3 local TV channels and executives of the local municipal councils. After the discussions, the project experts were interviewed by local TV channels and they delivered lectures at regional universities.

The Information War The military conflict in the east of Ukraine runs in tandem with the continuing information war waged by Russia against Ukraine. Russian media distributes fake news about Ukraine’s government, claiming it is a junta that came to office through an armed rebellion and that a “civil war” is now being wages in the East of Ukraine. The ultimate goal of the propaganda barrages is to paint the image of Ukraine as a “failed state.” U-Media partners countered this by raising citizens’ awareness about the real situation in Ukraine while exposing the fake news as propaganda.

Telekritika (TK) renewed its monitoring of Russian TV channels in order to reveal myths, stereotypes and fakes that could potentially influence Ukrainian media discourse. The mission of Page 22 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 this monitoring was to inform people in Ukraine and abroad about the trends in Russian propaganda, and to increase the capacity of Ukrainian journalists to distinguish true stories from fakes, and to reject the false messages disseminated by Russian media. The three reports that were published in summer 2015 were viewed approximately 15,000 times.

Lviv Press Club (LPC) organized 13 online discussions engaging NATO spokesmen, foreign militaries and representatives of the West Ukraine regional media center of the Ministry of Defense to discuss how local journalists could improve their reporting of military conflict. The events were broadcast live on the Daily Lviv website and the LPC YouTube channel, as well as by the national information agency UkrInform.

The Conflict and East/West Reconciliation Since March 2014, the conflict in Ukraine’s Donbas region (Donetsk and Luhansk regions) and the Russian occupation of Crimea have displaced more than 1.4 million people. As the conflict continues and the economy worsens, host communities throughout the regions that have shown solidarity and generosity in hosting IDPs are beginning to feel the pressure in their own communities. To help fill the information gap and contribute to peaceful dialogue, U-Media partners facilitated discussions of the challenges facing people living on both sides of the frontline and possible routes to reconciliation.

Internews Ukraine (IUA) produced a series of articles titled “Life of Ukrainians” for the Ukrainska Pravda-Life website, focusing on the common values of people in western and eastern Ukraine. A sample of these articles (translated into English) can be found in Attachment 2.

At the Lviv Media Forum (May 28 - 30, 2015), the Independent Association of

Broadcasters (IAB) organized a masterclass IAB master class on psychology in media communication conducted at for journalists called "Psychological aspects of Lviv Media Forum in May 2015 media communication during war." Participants learned about military communication, advice on how to deal with people with post- traumatic stress disorder as a result of combat, and terms and phrases journalists can use to build trust in and understanding of their coverage of humanitarian crises. The trainer, Oleh Pokalchuk, is a social psychologist and author of research articles on social anxiety. Encouraged by the success of this seminar, IAB is now developing an expanded teaching module for journalists.

Through its daily news programming, Hromadske Radio (a U-Media Open Door grantee) provided news-you-can-use information to IDPs and host communities, covering news about psychological support available for adults and children affected by the war, work retraining programs available for displaced persons, and humanitarian aid. Hromadske also profiled families who are restarting their lives in a new city. The programs were broadcast on FM “Radio 24” (Donetsk and Konstantynivka)

Page 23 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 as part of the program “Donbas Chronicles.” On Sundays, the best interviews were broadcast on Ukrainian Radio (UR1) as part of the program “Hromadska Khvylya” (Public Wave). Approximately 3 million people listened to the “Hromadska Khvylya” broadcasts, and text versions of the stories were viewed 21,237 times on the Hromadske Radio website.

A presentation by the Pylyp Orlyk Institute for Democracy (POID) executive director Svitlana Yeremenko titled “The Informational Environment of Ukraine: Urgent Challenges” at the roundtable of the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine was well- received by the government and civil society community. As a follow-up, she delivered public lectures at the Institute of Journalism of the National Taras Shevchenko University, the Donetsk National University (which moved to Vinnytsya in 2014), Opora’s “Elections prospects in Donetsk and Luhansk regions” conference, and at a barcamp in Uzhhorod called “Journalism between East and West of Ukraine,” where journalists from 8 regions discussed the state of relations between media in the East and in the West of the country.

The Donetsk Institute of Information (DII) (a U-Media Open Door Grantee) was forced to leave Donetsk in 2014, but in 2015 it produced a cycle of TV programs about people who moved from the Donbas region to other regions of Ukraine; the programs told the stories of IDPs who successfully reintegrated into society after fleeing the conflict. DII produced sixteen 20-minute programs, broadcast on Hromadske Donbasa (YouTube Channel, 9,000 subscribers), Hromadske TV (330,738 subscribers on YouTube), Espresso TV and the Donetsk Regional State TV and Radio Company. The Donetsk regional TRC broadcasts into the Donetsk People’s Republic. The approximate audience of Donetsk TRC is 3.5 million. The programs were also broadcast on Zaporizhzhia Radio and TV Company (to an estimated audience of 1.3 million) and Sumy RTC (estimated audience of 1.2 million).

Center for Research on Donbas Social Perspectives (CRDSP) (U-Media Open Door Grantee) developed an information section for IDPs on its “OstroV” webportal. The “IDPs Project” section targeted residents of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, IDPs, and governmental agencies in charge of dealing with the humanitarian crisis. Since May 2015, the CRDSP has produced 120 news reports and 11 analytical articles on the website. CRDSP conducted press conferences to bring public attention to the plights of IDPs and produced the weekly Occupation radio program on the National radio network.

Uzhhorod Press Club (UPC) (U-Media Open Door Grantee), while running its informational and educational campaign “Internally Displaced People (IDP): Life without Stereotypes” aimed to overcome, with media involvement, the negative attitude that is prevalent among many residents of the Trans-Carpathian region toward their compatriots coming into their region from Crimea and eastern Ukraine. UPC stressed among local media how important it is to cover the influx of IDPs impartially and to promote understanding among host communities. UPC produced nine stories about IDPs living in the Trans-Carpathia region for the Zaholovok.co.ua website. Articles Page 24 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 have titles such as “Why did these people come?”, “How have IDPs adapted to the new circumstances?”, “How did they manage to realize their full capacity in their new homes?”, and “How do IDPs interact with locals?”. These stories were republished in 17 leading Trans- Carpathia websites and 4 newspapers (Novyny Zakarpattia, Zakarpats’ka Pravda, Fest and RIO).

Television company TV-7, Mariupol (U-Media Open Door Grantee), produced a nine program series “Mariupol – City of Peace,” encouraging tolerance among the people of Mariupol towards Ukrainian military personnel located in the city and suburbs, and addressing the psychological tensions building in the community as a result of the fighting happening just beyond Mariupol city limits. In addition to the TV broadcasts, TV-7 distributed the program via Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/semerka) and VKontakte (https://vk.com/semerka_mariupol).

The Reforms Agenda Within the Reanimation Package of Reforms’ (RPR) media expert group, the Media Law Institute (MLI) identified the following priorities for April-September 2015: transparency of media ownership, objective media coverage of local elections, and de-statization of print media. RPR issued a public statement in June 2015 on the necessity for immediate print media reform and expressed readiness to team up with Ukrainian lawmakers to get this reform implemented. MLI ensured that a draft law On Reforming State and Municipal Print Media, as well as a draft law # 1831 On Media Ownership Transparency, were included in the RPR-Agenda, and submitted to the Parliamentary Speaker and the leaders of political factions before the start of the third Parliamentary session in September 2015. On June 16, the Parliament of Ukraine approved the law with 240 votes in first reading.

Key Activities and Results by Objective

Objective 1: Support and Promote Freedom of Speech and Media Independence

Legal awareness and advice Independent Association of Broadcasters (IAB) provided 99 legal consultations to journalists, editors and experts of regional broadcasting companies via their hotline. Most of the questions were about political advertising during the local elections in the fall of 2015. IAB media lawyers represented “Chernivtsi TRK” TV channel in the Supreme Court in a lawsuit against the National TV and Radio Council of Ukraine to try to invalidate the results of the regional digital license tender held in 2011, which excluded regional broadcasters in favor of national networks. IAB lawyers convinced the Council to support the position of the regional broadcaster and annul the tender results. IAB lawyers continue lobbying for an inclusive tender re-announcement by the National Council.

Media Law Institute (MLI) provided 104 consultations to journalists on the issues of defamation in online media, access to MPs’ declarations, use of anonymous sources in video reports, preparing journalistic materials on criminal cases, and digital TV, etc. MLI posted on its website responses for frequently asked questions on such topics as disclosure of information by Page 25 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 private companies and instructions on how to attend parliamentary sittings. MLI prepared and distributed 18 briefs on legislative issues. In order to emphasize the importance of media reforms and raise public awareness of current media challenges, MLI prepared a short overview of the key draft laws in the sectors of information and media that were not considered during the second Parliamentary session and should be included in the third session agenda.

MLI provided advisory support to First National channel, including legal consultations to the producers of the Schemes: Corruption in Details investigative reporting program, a joint project of the First National and Radio Liberty. In particular, two defamation cases against Schemes journalists were subjects of MLI consultations - a conflict between the former and the current owners of the private company “Flora” and the state-run Ukrposhta (Ukrainian Post). MLI lawyers assisted in drafting official responses to letters demanding retraction of allegedly false information broadcast by the journalists.

Institute of Mass Information’s lawyers successfully represented Cherkasy journalist Alla Demchenko in a lawsuit against Cherkasy Oblast State TRC “Ros’” for her dismissal. Kyiv Court of Appeals ruled that her termination was “the illegal dismissal of a journalist,” restored her in her position as chief producer and obliged “Ros” to pay monetary compensation.

Media literacy education Internews Ukraine (IUA) organized four information seminars/lectures for 100 industrial workers in Mariupol, Dniprodzerzhynsk, and Kharkiv. The key topics were critical thinking in media consumption and explaining techniques of media manipulation that are used to influence public opinion. The participants learned how to form a general picture based on different information sources, how to verify information received from media and how to diminish the effects of media manipulation. The seminars also focused specifically on common Russian propaganda techniques and distortion of information in news in the post-Yanukovych period. IUA distributed a manual on critical thinking titled “Information deception--How not to be trapped?” The seminars were organized in cooperation with the Institute for Social Partnership and local trade unions.

Academy of Ukrainian Press held the Third International Media Literacy Conference “Practical media literacy: international experience and Ukrainian prospects” in Kyiv in April 2015. Organized in cooperation with the Institute of Innovative Technologies and Educational Content under the Ministry of Education of Ukraine, the conference gathered 130 secondary school teachers and lecturers of colleges and universities to share their best practices. AUP introduced a compendium of 45 media literacy lessons at the conference. The following month, AUP conducted a workshop for teachers called “Media education: effective models and techniques in contemporary education” in Dnipropetrovsk for more than 110 teachers, school managers and instructors of regional institutes for teachers’ continuing training. Dnipropetrovsk region was the first to publish a media literacy reference book to be used by 47 schools participating in the media literacy experiment.

In August-September, AUP held two Media Literacy Summer Schools for 47 secondary school teachers and instructors of regional institutes for teachers’ continuing training; 80% of the participants were already using AUP manuals. The schools focused on critical thinking and Page 26 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 resistance to manipulation in media during the information war. AUP’s interactive portal “Media education and media literacy” www.medialiteracy.org.ua and its Facebook page are updated with 50 new materials quarterly. The portal has 581 actives users and its Facebook page has 1,444 followers.

Media monitoring Telekritika (TK) continued regular monitoring of national TV channels and distributed reports about the quality of TV reporting. Three monitoring waves of national TV news content at seven leading channels (UA: First, ICTV, 1+1, “Ukraina”, Inter, Channel 5 and STB) were conducted. The monitoring results measured adherence to journalism standards, quantity of biased journalism (jeansa) and stories that were not covered for political reasons.

Institute of Mass Information (IMI) monitored six national online media (Liga, LB.UA, UNIAN, Obozrevatel, Ukrainska Pravda and Ukrinform) to search for hidden advertisements (jeansa) and observe adherence to six professional journalism standards - balance, distinguishing facts from comments, timeliness, accuracy, reliability and completeness of information. Ukrainska Pravda and Liga proved to be the best samples of online journalism at the national level; Obozevatel and UNIAN - the worst.

IMI maintained a dialogue with the media that were the subjects of their monitoring. Ukrainska Pravda editor-in-chief Olena Prytula sent a letter of gratitude to IMI for their monitoring efforts. IMI continued communication with other media outlets that did not participate in monitoring. As a result, Ukrayinski Tyzhden (Ukrainian Week) magazine improved its content after IMI’s recommendations. Several Volyn newspapers improved their IDP-related reports after receiving IMI’s evaluation of their content. Kramatorsk journalists asked IMI to assess the level of journalism standards in their newspapers. IMI distributed their monitoring findings to 700 subscribers. IMI’s partnerships with regional universities and journalist organizations made possible seven workshops and three roundtables on journalism standards and jeansa with participation of about 500 regional students and journalists from Kherson, Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Lutsk, Sumy, Dnipropetrovsk, and Donetsk regions.

Advocacy Media Law Institute (MLI) provided an expert opinion on the draft Concept of Information Security of Ukraine prepared by the Ministry of Information Policy’s Expert Council. With a view to ensure that the Concept would not violate freedom of information, MLI lawyers keep monitoring the process of the Concept’s development.

Institute of Mass Information (IMI) continued advocating for freedom of speech in Ukraine via public statements. Based on its Freedom of Speech Barometer data, IMI distributed four statements on behalf of Stop Censorship! and Ukrainian media organizations. The statements condemned the closure of Crimean Tatar TV channel ATR, and called for the immediate release of Ukrainian journalist Maria Varfolomeyeva from captivity in Luhansk People’s Republic, where she has been held since January 2015. In response, the Presidential Administration initiated a workgroup in order to investigate attacks on journalists.

Page 27 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 IMI experts investigated 40 cases of violations against journalists in Ukraine in 2015, including the occupied territories. The monitoring results demonstrated an improvement over last year, but in 2015, the number of violations in Kyiv, Odesa and Chernivtsi passed the number of cases in occupied Crimea and occupied Donbas, a fact that was echoed in the annual press freedom report of Freedom House. IMI produced a report covering the state of freedom of speech in Ukraine for 2014 and the first 8 months of 2015.

Security for journalists Institute of Mass Information (IMI) organized six seminars for 100 journalists on physical security, first aid and psychological support. Training outputs and presentations are available on the Presswatcher website. IMI also organized a one-day training specifically for female journalists working in the conflict areas (see the video story here). IMI provided 173 sets of body armor and helmets to journalists covering the fighting in the ATO zone. In total, 147 journalists and 10 volunteers registered on the Presswatcher platform and the journalist tracker program monitored 52 trips to the ATO zone.

Journalists apply theoretical knowledge during practical exercises at IMI training. Photo: Institute of Mass Information

IMI lawyers prepared guidelines for journalists on how to get accreditation to travel in the conflict zone. Every month, IMI lawyers provided up to 10 personal consultations to the journalists, and established a working group to help with accreditation issues for journalists who travel to the ATO area. The working group includes representatives of the Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Information, Security Service of Ukraine, MPs, insurance companies and media lawyers and experts. In June 2015, IMI developed the procedures for the State Guards Service of the Interior Ministry and the Titan special forces service to assist media in the ATO and riot zones to ensure they can carry out their professional duties safely. An IMI psychologist provided support to journalists returning from the conflict zone. IMI also conducted a psychological survey of journalists going to the conflict zone for the first time, and produced “Before You Go” recommendations to prepare reporters for covering the conflict.

Page 28 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 In 2015, IMI initiated negotiations with the leading insurance associations of Ukraine, which resulted in the launch of insurance for journalists for the first time in Ukraine. On IMI’s initiative, the Parliament Committee on Freedom of Speech and Information created a special working group to develop policy for medical insurance for Ukraine’s journalists. Thanks to IMI’s efforts, discussions with representatives of three insurance associations of Ukraine resulted in an agreement with 10 insurance companies to provide medical insurance to journalists travelling to the ATO zone and/or riot locations. IMI’s Barometer of journalist rights violations helped insurance operators to calculate coverage for damages in the most likely circumstances. IMI consulted a Canadian insurance corporation which shared its insurance programs available for media with Ukrainian insurance companies and provided a sample of a typical insurance agreement for journalists.

Media ownership transparency Press freedom advocates scored another legal victory with the passage of a law to require transparency of media ownership.The law was approved by the Parliament on September 3 and comes into force on October 1, 2015. The law not only forces media owners to come out from behind their offshore holdings to reveal their true identities, it also will prohibit public authorities, local governments, political parties, trade unions and legal entities registered in offshore zones from owning electronic media. The adopted law is also an example of effective cooperation between the government, public sector, MPs, representatives of the state regulator, CSOs and media experts who joined the working group at the Parliamentary Committee on Freedom of Speech and Information, including U-Media partners Media Law Institute (MLI) and Institute of Mass Information (IMI). MLI lawyers contributed to drafting the law and their proposal on effective “The majority of rayon newspapers cannot mechanisms to secure ownership disclosures survive in market conditions, because there was included in the bill. MLI and IMI are not enough advertisers to generate prepared and distributed analytical papers on newspapers’ incomes. We should forecast the legislation to raise public awareness consequences for small editorials from about the media ownership transparency destatization.” - former owner of Ukrainian issue. Media Holding (UMH) corporation, Valentyn Reznichenko. With U-Media support, Litsa newspaper of Dnipropetrovsk launched a campaign to inform voters in the 2015 local elections about how media owners try to influence public opinion during elections. Litsa investigated the media owners of leading Dnipropetrovsk region media outlets by conducting a survey of newsrooms, making official requests to regulators, and communicating with unofficial sources of information such as police officials and former editors. They learned that most media owners conceal their identities from their own media outlets. For example, to identify the owners of Dnipropetrovsk online media outlet, Dnepr-Glavnoe, Litsa had to use an anonymous source in the local police. Another search – for the owners of local Channel 34 – led to an off-shore company in Cyprus, where, sources told Litsa, Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov is the actual owner. Litsa also found that “Dniprograd,” a newspaper that was launched three months before the October elections with a circulation of 350,000 copies, belongs to a new political party called UKROP. This Dnipro region newspaper is the property of oligarch Igor Kolomoyskiy, according to Litsa. Page 29 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015

The Litsa survey of editors revealed “I think, that destatization should have been concerns about the growth of production done 15 years ago. That was the right time costs and shrinking incomes in newsrooms because communal press was stronger and – both private and communal. Several could generate income better than now,” media were forced to move from print to editor-in-chief of a communal newspaper in an online format as a result. Some Apostolove district, Dnipropetrovsk region responses about destatization were not unexpected: editors of private media did not want municipal media to compete with them in the private media market. At the same time, editors of communal media were optimistic about the opportunity to compete with for-profit media (http://www.litsa.com.ua).

Objective 2: Increase Variety of News Sources and Improve News Quality

Regional media and cross-regional linkages Internews Ukraine (IUA) organized two inter-regional visits for journalists from the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine to the west - Lutsk and Lviv in April, 2015; 20 journalists from Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Mykholaiv, Kirovohrad, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Odesa and Zaporizhzhia met with local governments, NGOs, and successful media startups in these western cities. They also visited IDP volunteer centers. Among the highlights of the visits were meetings with members of the civil society initiatives “KrymSOS” and “Krymska hvylia” (Crimean wave) in Lviv to discuss IDP integration strategies. These East-West exchanges were covered by several local media in Lutsk and Lviv.

Lviv Press Club (LPC) organized 9 online video bridges between the cities of Lviv and Kherson, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Moscow and Saint-Petersburg. The online bridges were broadcast through the LPC Public Internet TV channel, which was relayed on a jumbotron in Lviv’s main square. Through online bridges, LPC informed people in the East and South of Ukraine about the advantages of European integration and its benefits for the effective social and economic development of a united country. The bridges were broadcast on YouTube and then made available on LPC’s partner websites, offering viewers in the east and south of Ukraine several ways to view the programs. The most popular video bridges were with Moscow and Saint-Petersburg, covering topics such as ‘how to stop the war’ and ‘what to expect after the signing of new agreements in Minsk.’ In March, LPC organized a video bridge with the occupied city of Luhansk. The topic for discussion was “The Economic Situation in the ATO Zone”. Several media reported on this video bridge.

Journalist training and professionalism To raise journalists’ awareness of Ukraine’s reforms and EU integration, Internews Ukraine (IUA) organized two training sessions for 45 national and regional journalists on “European integration and Ukraine’s reforms.”

The key topics covered included:

Page 30 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015  EU-Ukraine relations in the context of the current political situation;  European integration as an agenda for key pro-European reforms;  Debunking myths about the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement;  Pro-European reforms in local self-governance;  Essentials for journalists to cover current EU-Ukraine relations.

In August 2015, IUA published a guidebook for journalists on coverage of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement. The publication contains information on European integration, foreign policy, economic policy, comprehensive explanations of principal terminology, main advantages and challenges Ukraine is facing, key points of the roadmap for Agreement implementation, and a database of speakers and experts who can comment on these topics. IUA circulated 500 Russian and 500 Ukrainian versions at the training sessions, to partner organizations, and to media outlets, and they posted it online. The Kyiv-Mohyla School of Journalism and journalism departments at Vinnytsia, Zaporizhzhia and Mykolaiv universities included the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement guidebook in the list of mandatory papers for students’ reading.

As part of its plan tie help the staffs of eastern Ukrainian TV companies that had to move to other regions due to the military conflict, Internews Ukraine organized a series of trainings for 18 representatives of the Luhansk State TV and Radio Broadcasting Company on “Standards and ethics of news journalism” and “TV reporting techniques”.

Independent Association of Broadcasters (IAB) jointly with Ukrainian Association of Press Publishers (UAPP) held the Sixth “Honour of Profession” professional journalism competition. The awards ceremony was televised for the first time in 2015, and 57,000 people watched the program on First National TV. The promo video for the show can be viewed here.

IAB organized a master-class for journalists titled "Psychological aspects of media communication during war" at the Lviv Media Forum on May 28-30, 2015. IAB, with the help of social psychologist Oleg Pokalchuk, advised journalists on ways to treat people with post- traumatic stress syndrome, and discussed the terms and approach journalists can use to build trust and understanding when interviewing people in crisis situations.

The Institute of World Policy (IWP) engaged 30 regional and Kyiv-based journalists in discussions about the European integration process and its coverage in media through two roundtables organized in Kyiv. The participants discussed challenges journalists could face while producing stories on the benefits and challenges of European integration. Polish journalist Michal Kacewich shared the Polish experience of European integration; he explained the importance of the journalists’ role in EU transformation. IWP introduced case studies on how journalists can talk about EU integration in simple and creative ways, i.e. through caricatures, figures, pictures, etc., and introduced a database of Ukrainian and international experts to contact concerning European integration issues.

Content production Information and Press Center (IPC-Simferopol, now located in Kyiv) produced 19 episodes of the TV program Issues of National Security, broadcast live on Chernomorska TV (broadcast Page 31 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 through cable in Ukrainian controlled territory, and online and satellite in Crimea), Sotsialna Krayna TV (online and satellite) and on IPC’s YouTube Channel. Among the program topics were violations of human rights in Crimea. The Center published 33 articles and reposted 4,557 news stories on its www.investigator.ua website to an average monthly audience of 180, 000 visitors (43% in Crimea, 9% in Russia, and 41% in Ukraine).

The Federal Security Service (FSB) of Russia continued to intimidate Information and Press Center (IPC) journalists in Crimea. The ex-author of the Center for Investigative Journalism site, Ms. Anna Andriyevs’ka, was named as a suspect, and the editor of the same site, Ms. Nataliya Kokorina – as a witness in a case that was initiated in annexed Crimea under Article 280.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation on public incitement to commit acts aimed to violate the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation. This was reported by Ms. Valentyna Samar, the Head of the Center for Investigative Journalism, during a press conference in Kyiv held on March 16, 2015. The OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Dunja Mijatović, in her statement on March 13, 2015 condemned the intimidation of independent journalists in Crimea following the detention of Kokorina: “This detention is a reminder of the ongoing practice of the de facto authorities in Crimea to intimidate and persecute independent media representatives for their work,” Mijatović said.

With U-Media support, Mykolayiv Center for Investigative Reporting (MCIR) maintained an information web portal for Mykolayiv, Odesa and Kherson regions. On average, 130,000 viewers visited the portal monthly. The Center focused on anti-corruption issues and analyzed the income declarations of 120 judges in Odesa, Kherson, Mykolayiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhiia regions. They developed a series of infographics about the region’s richest judges. The journalists also exposed the members of the Mykolayiv executive committee who falsified documents in their own business interests. The Mykolayiv prosecutor’s office opened a criminal case based on the Center’s work.

Debates: PRO

 On April 1, 2015, First National TV and Suspilnist Foundation (SF) launched a 60- minute weekly talk show Debates:Pro, 12 weekly 60-minute programs on First National’s terrestrial, satellite, and online channel, on Campus 3.0 (the Suspilnist Foundation’s website), and on Hromadske.TV. A moderator led discussions between politicians, experts, journalists, and citizens representing various regions of Ukraine. The program: o United Ukraine’s citizens, youth in particular, while discussing priorities for the country’s progress; Page 32 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 o Organized discussions about realistic ways to reform Ukraine; and o Discussed mechanisms of combating corruption, improving business climate, promoting inter-regional cooperation, etc.; o Raised issues of government transparency and accountability and fostered citizen engagement in the reform process.

When the program started, in April 2015, the rating of Debates: PRO was 47% higher than the TV channel’s average rating in the 7-9:00 pm time slot, and although viewership declined during the summer months, the overall audience of the Debates: PRO in from April to June was 5,701,045 and the audience for the re-broadcasts the following morning reached 2,381,586 viewers. First National will organize focus groups before the launch of the new debate season in the fall 2015 to update the TV program’s format and gather viewers’ suggestions for topics.

 Internews Ukraine (IUA) conducted two waves of a small grants competition for content related to the Parliamentary elections, reforms in Ukraine and the conflict in the East. The first competition resulted in grants to media in Odesa, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolayiv, Donetsk, Kharkiv and Luhansk regions. As a result, 90 media reports were developed: 14 print, 49 online, 25 TV and 2 radio. The same regions were represented in the second wave of small grants - 73 stories were developed on subjects such as the composition of the new Parliament and its impact on reforms, addressing the issues of the war in Donbas, and the IDP crisis. Among the best reports were: o NikVesti (Mykolayiv), “Single-Mandate Districts in Mykolayiv Region: Party of Regions Members of All Colors Unite!” This online story revealed that most of the single- mandate candidates in Mykolayiv region were former Party of Regions members. o TV channel YaTB (Kherson), the “Conscious Choice of New Authorities” TV program discussed Ukraine’s military defense capacity. o Newspaper Litsa (Faces) (Dnipropetrovsk), published “Procedural Notes for Voters,” which explained in detail how journalists could check voter names on the electoral lists, how to communicate with the election commissions on election day and how to file complaints if any violations were found.

Investigative journalism Regional Press Development Institute (RPDI), being a part of the Global Investigative Journalism Network, successfully fundraised to provide travel grants to Ukrainian journalists to attend the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Lillehammer in October 2015. Thanks to RPDI facilitation, two Ukrainian investigative centers, “Slidstvo.info” and “Svidomo,” were admitted as members of the Global Investigative Journalism Network; presently there are 7 Ukrainian investigative organizations in the GIJN, including RPDI.

RPDI’s closed Facebook group, launched to provide a space for online communication among Ukrainian investigative journalists, expanded to 253 professional journalists doing investigations on various topics. RPDI added 280 investigations to its collection of the best journalistic pieces for journalists to study; the total number of pieces on the RPDI portal is 1,113. Page 33 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015

RPDI, as part of its Investigative Journalism Development, New Media, and Legal Support and Training for Journalists project, conducted the Sixth Annual All-Ukrainian Investigative Reporting Conference in Kyiv on December 5-6, 2014. The Conference attracted 118 journalists from 10 countries, including Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan. Called “Investigative Reporting in Ukraine and Europe: Achievements, Obstacles and Development Opportunities”, the conference was primarily supported by U-Media, with further support provided by the International Renaissance Foundation, the Danish SCOOP Project, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Sveriges Television AB (SVT), Sweden, Free Press Unlimited, Netherlands, and the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, USA.

The conference has become a core event for Ukraine's vibrant investigative journalism community. The main goal of the event is to gather investigative journalists to discuss IR issues and present case studies and innovative practices, but this time the conference went further and offered something new. Taking into account the challenges, current topics and conditions under which many journalists work, organizers paid special attention to safety in its various aspects: physical, psychological, legal, and digital. A legal panel dedicated to discussing Ukraine’s raft of new anti-corruption legislation and how to lodge access to information requests had an immediate impact; RPDI’s media lawyers received and acted on several access to information requests from journalists who attended the conference, and had several successes in securing government documents.

Objective 3: Improve the Enabling Environment for Media and Freedom of Speech

For several years, Internews has provided support to media law advocates to effectively engage Parliament and government agencies in campaigns to introduce and pass several media laws. U- Page 34 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 Media partners Media Law Institute (MLI), Independent Association of Broadcasters (IAB), Institute for Mass Information (IMI) and Internews Ukraine (IUA) played leading roles in moving the Law on Public Broadcasting and the Law On Media Ownership Transparency forward for passage in the past year. These groups continue advocating for other laws, including a law on the de-statization of state-owned and communal print media.

Adoption, amendment, enforcement and implementation of media-related laws and policies

After 10 years of effort, the media development community finally reached a major milestone with the creation of public broadcasting in Ukraine. After a failed attempt following the Orange Revolution of 2004, media advocates like the Media Law Institute worked closely with MPs, as part of the Parliamentary Committee for Freedom of Speech and Information, to draft the law. On January 13, 2015, Parliament voted in first reading for the draft law #1357 on “Amendments to the Law of Ukraine on Public Infographic on Amendments to the Law on PSB developed by First National TV Broadcasting.” The Reanimation Package of Reforms collective and media organizations urged the Members of Parliament to vote for the draft law in second reading during its March 19, 2015 session. An infographic featuring five reasons to vote for the law was placed on MPs’ seats in the Parliament that day (see above). Parliament voted 230 to 5 in favor of the law.

The Parliamentary Committee working group then drafted a road map on implementation of PSB reform in Ukraine. It provides a plan of legislative and administrative steps to be taken in order to set up a public service broadcaster. The process of re-structuring all state-owned broadcasters started in earnest on August 5, 2015, when the Cabinet of Ministers issued a Decree to establish PSB as a Public Joint Stock Venture.

At the same time, the National TV and Radio Council started the procedure for electing the PSB Supervisory Board. A combination of political party representatives and CSO representatives will form this Board; the media advocacy community successfully lobbied to change the PSB Law to ensure that the CSO community will have one more voting Board member than will the political party representatives, ensuring that government and parties cannot control the broadcaster. MLI lawyer Tetiana Semiletko became a member of the civic selection committee and contributed to pre-filtering of CSOs who applied for participation in the national election conferences. MLI applied to participate in the competition and will field a candidate for a place Page 35 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 on the Supervisory Board. MLI developed and distributed a guideline on how CSOs could apply to be considered for the PSB Board. The election conferences are scheduled for October 2015.

The Liquidation of the National Expert Commission on Public Morality (NEC) Due to the advocacy campaigning of the Reanimation Package of Reforms (RPR) collective, “The liquidation of the (Morality) the Stop Censorship! movement and media Commission does not mean that a community, Parliament approved on February 10, morality disaster will happen in 2015 the law #1647 on Amendments to the Law of Ukraine since other state agencies Ukraine on Protection of Public Morality. By issue will perform protection of public of this law, the National Expert Commission on morality. In this difficult time for Public Morality was eliminated. The Morality Ukraine, this entity that consumes Commission was considered to be a redundant and UAH 4-5mln per year has to cease antiquated body, responsible for controversial, to exist.” 3 sometimes ludicrous , statements restricting freedom Olha Chervakova, MPPoroshenko Block, of expression rights on LGBT issues. Responsibility ex-journalist for the protection of public morality was transferred to other executive bodies - the Ministry of Interior, the national executive bodies regulating state policy in the areas of culture, cinematography, taxation, and customs, the State Committee for TV & Radio and the National Council for TV & Radio.

President Poroshenko signed the amended law in March. Taras Shevchenko, director of the Media Law Institute, commented on the approved law: “The law’s adoption and its signage by the President would mean that the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine shall dissolve the Morality Commission that was established in the past to implement the law On Protection of Public Morality. It means that in addition to the law’s adoption, the Prime Minister’s decision is needed to liquidate the commission.” On May 27, 2015 the Cabinet of Ministers issued a decree on liquidation of the commission within a 5-month period.

Election Legislation Institute of Mass Information (IMI) lawyers opposed a legal initiative of MPs Yegor Sobolev (Samopomich) and Oleg Lyashko (Radical Party) to ban all political advertisements on TV and radio during the elections and remove all restrictions for political advertisement in print press. If adopted, IMI claimed the bill would push media to sign secret deals, leading to a sharp rise in hidden advertisement (jeansa) in the press. IMI lawyers developed an alternative bill to limit political advertisement which proposed a number of mechanisms to combat jeansa. In particular, the bill introduced an administrative responsibility for hidden advertisement and regulated the length of political party PSAs. The draft law #№2474-a On Amendments to Some Legislative Acts of Ukraine to Limit Political Advertisement and Combat Hidden Advertisement, was registered at the Parliament on August 20, 2015 by MPs Mustafa Nayem, Serhiy Leshchenko, Igor Lutsenko, Oleksandr Chernenko (Petro Poroshenko’s Block) and Hanna Hopko

3 Ukraine’s Morality Police Probe ‘Gay’ Sponge Bob, The Wall Street Journal website, http://blogs.wsj.com/emergingeurope/2012/08/15/gay-spongebob-offends-ukraine-morality-commission/, August 15, 2012.

Page 36 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 (Samopomich). The draft law is still under consideration and was not approved by the Parliament before the local elections.

De-statization On December 1, 2014, a draft law #1123 On De-Statization of Print Media was registered in Parliament. In order to bolster the discussion and advocate the law’s approval, the Media Law Institute (MLI) and the Ukrainian Association of Press Publishers (UAPP) conducted a series of public events both on a national and regional level. Media Law Institute (MLI) lawyers analyzed regional and local budgets for print media across the country and presented the results in the article Microphones for Government. In June 2015, MLI organized an expert discussion on further steps concerning the draft law. A joint statement was released calling MPs to vote to approve the law. Later, the Parliamentary Committee on Freedom of Speech and Information recommended Parliament adopt the law. MLI lawyers developed an advocacy plan for de- statization reform that included developing a module for public oversight of the state media.

The Ukrainian Association of Press Publishers (UAPP) organized regional events to discuss de-statization, engaging editors-in-chief of communal press, successful local media businesspeople and local authorities. The discussions were held in Chernihiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Khmelnytsky in the spring 2015. Based on the discussions, UAPP lawyers developed a number of amendments to the draft law #1123 and presented them as a roadmap for the de- statization process. The road map was submitted to the State TV and Radio Committee, the Parliamentary Committee on Freedom of Speech and Information and the Ministry of Information Policy.

Regional Press Development Institute (RPDI) resumed its activities on facilitating de- statization of communal media and held two training cycles on the topic; 19 communal press staff members learned about the structure of a media company, its income and expenses, and management and monetization of online and print media etc. The workshops on media management will facilitate the long-term transition of state communal media from government to private enterprises.

Digitalization The Independent Association of Broadcasters (IAB) promoted the interests of independent broadcasters by calling on the Zeonbud company to offer lower digital broadcast license fees. IAB urged the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine to classify digital network operator "Zeonbud" Ltd. as a monopoly. The court decision paved the way for Ukrainian broadcast regulators to enforce stricter guidelines on the digital multiplex owner to include more regional TV stations in the switch to digital, and yet the actual owner of Zeonbud (which was awarded control of the digital spectrum by the Yanukovych regime) remains a mystery.

State institutions Internews Ukraine (IUA) set up a mechanism for monitoring data transparency on state institutions’ websites. Ministry of Healthcare, Ministry of Education and Science and Ministry of Internal Affairs were selected for monitoring. IUA experts analyzed the level of technical usability and interactivity of the websites. Also, a sample group of Ukrainian journalists was surveyed to find out if the websites were user-friendly enough for journalists to receive the Page 37 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 necessary data from the Ministries for their everyday work. To ensure comparative analysis of the Ukrainian and European state institutions’ websites, IUA selected the corresponding websites in Georgia, Lithuania and Sweden for assessment of their openness to the public. The websites of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Healthcare were found to fall short of modern criteria for user-friendliness for the general public and for journalists. Monitors discovered websites with outdated design, bad navigation, a lack of data visualization and hidden or absent press service contact information. The Ministry of Education and Science website was the best in terms of design, applicability of information posted, relevance to users’ needs, and for journalists, clear directions to press service contacts.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs’ website carried the most traffic (560-660,000 users per month), followed by the Ministry of Education and Science (610,000) and the Ministry of Healthcare (140,000); 43% of the surveyed journalists responded that they used the Ministries’ websites daily. Findings were provided to the Ministries through their respective Public Councils.

Internews Ukraine (IUA) reformatted its Media Expert Club and coordinated a “Ukraine - World” group consisting of key Ukrainian players from state institutions, donors, media and NGOs – the group consists of the National Security and Defence Council, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ukraine Crisis Media Centre, Hromadske International, Ukraine Today, UA: First National, Krytyka, Euromaidan Press, the International Renaissance Foundation (IRF), Centre UA and StopFake. The “Ukraine - World” group meets on a bi-monthly basis to discuss strategies to provide balanced and accurate information about Ukraine to the world.

The following group meetings made a contribution to the strategy for improving Ukraine’s image abroad:  On April 14, 2015, ways to establish cooperation between the “Ukraine – World” group and the Ukrainian Think Tanks Liaison Office in Brussels were discussed.  On May 12, 2015, proposals from Ukrainian media and expert community were developed for the UNESCO Media conference of the Eastern Partnership (Riga, May 13- 14, 2015).  On June 23, 2015, methods of cooperation of “Ukraine – World” with the European External Action Service Information team concerning resistance to Russian propaganda were discussed.  On July 7, 2015, areas of cooperation between “Ukraine – World” and the European Endowment for Democracy (EED), as well as the recent EED report on a strategy for countering Russian propaganda were discussed.

Internews Ukraine developed an infographic containing ideas from Ukrainian journalists on how to counteract Russian propaganda. The infographic was widely distributed through social networks and partners’ websites, including the website of the Ukrainian Think Tanks Liaison Office in Brussels.

Page 38 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015

Daily communication among the group members is accommodated through a Google Group and Google Calendar. The Google Calendar contains a schedule of important international events dealing with the Ukraine crisis. Group members send their representatives when possible to these events to make the voice of Ukraine heard.

Objective 4: Improve Organizational Capacity of Ukrainian Media CSOs

Strengthen organizational capacity of Ukrainian media partners U-Media conducted a training on “Proposal/Modification Writing and Grant Reporting” in February 2015 for 40 representatives of 18 U-Media partner CSOs; some partners outside Kyiv joined via Skype. Internews staff worked with the partners to improve their skills in developing project proposals (including project descriptions, budgets and their justification, and calendar plans) to assist them in both competing in new grant competitions and in developing modifications and extensions to their existing U-Media grants. U-Media’s experts provided practical instructions based on lessons learned from several years of U-Media’s multi-year partnerships with its grantees.

From July to August 2015, nine U-Media partners (Internews Ukraine (IUA), Regional Press Development Institute (RPDI), Media Law Institute (MLI), Telekritika (TK), Independent Association of Broadcasters (IAB), Institute of Mass Information (IMI), Academy of Ukrainian Press (AUP), Lviv Press Club (LPC), and Suspilnist Foundation (SF)) conducted their

Page 39 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 organizational development self-assessments according the “SATT/OSS Index” methodology as part of a program launched by the U-Media SATT/OSS Self-Assessment program in March 2013.

For Suspilnist Foundation and Lviv Press Club, it was their first experience in organizational development self-assessment; for the other 7 CSOs, this was the second run of their “SATT/OSS Index” self-assessments. The nine organizations are using the results to develop their Organizational Development Plans for the period of Q4 2015 – 2016, following the recommendations of the SATT/OSS Index Methodology (See Attachment 4: Organizational Development Plans for Q4 2015 – 2016 of Internews Ukraine). All the organizations demonstrated progress in their organizational development with Index scores higher than the previous year. The second implementation of the U-Media SATT/OSS Self-Assessment program proved that this instrument can be effectively used by U-Media partner CSOs on their own without external guidance.

Year 4 Local Capacity Development highlights include:

Internews Ukraine (IUA) extended its donor database by exploring and soliciting new funding opportunities. It employed two grant managers to advance the organization’s fundraising capacity. In January 2015, IUA held its annual performance appraisal of the organization’s staff with individual development plans developed for each employee of the organization. In April 2015, IUA successfully passed an audit by Deloitte.

The Regional Press Development Institute (RPDI) hired a new Executive Director, Olga Trufanova, to replace Katya Laba during her maternity leave. RPDI passed its external audit performed by the Riqueza Capital Group LLC. To further diversify its funding, RPDI developed and submitted 10 project proposals to international organizations, funds and embassies, and 5 were successful.

The Media Law Institute (MLI) made progress in evolving from a project-based organization to a CSO that operates according to the organization’s overall Strategic Plan. MLI convened a strategic session in July to reflect on the achievements of the first six months of the year and decide on priorities for the second half of 2015. MLI made progress with its Gender- Mainstreaming Plan.

The Information and Press Center (IPC) came under pressure from pro-Russian authorities in Crimea and was forced to move the Center for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) board and editorial department to Kyiv. IPC managed to preserve the organization and split its activities between Crimea and Kyiv. In November-December of 2014, IPC finalized the re-registration of its legal address in Kyiv, and the new CSO’s Statute became effective in compliance with Ukraine’s requirements for Crimean CSOs. The IPC was recognized by the Swiss Press Club’s Press Emblem Campaign (PEC) for the dedication and courage of its members to defend media freedom in extremely difficult circumstances in Crimea. The PEC Prize is given annually in Geneva by the PEC committee to reward a person or an organization who worked for the protection of journalists and the freedom of the press during the past year.

Page 40 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 Diversification of funds of U-Media grantees As part of its local capacity development strategy, Internews works with local partners to reduce their financial dependence on USAID funds. After an array of U-Media proposal writing trainings within the Local Solutions (capacity building program) component, the core partners started winning direct awards from European, Canadian, and other funders. While U-Media funding formed 42.1% of all funds for partners in 2010, by 2015 that percentage had decreased to 22.9% on average. Complete data on U-Media partner funding diversity can be found in Attachment 3.

Strengthening investigative reporting organizations’ capacity – U-Media’s in-kind contribution to the Strengthening Investigative Reporting in Ukraine (SIRU) project Internews conducted external assessments of the organizational capacity of five local implementing partners of the Canada-funded Strengthening Investigative Reporting in Ukraine (SIRU) three-year project. As with the U-Media project partners, the “Seat at the Table Index (SATT) and Organizational Standards and Systems (OSS) Index” was used to assess these groups. The assessment was performed by Oleksandra Baklanova, an independent consultant and a managing partner of the pro.mova consulting firm. The Information and Press Center (IPC), Bureau of Investigative Journalism “Svidomo”, Mykolaiv NGO “Journalistic Investigations Centre”, “Rivne Investigative Reporting Agency”, and Hromadske.TV were assessed, and the consultant found weaknesses in governance and leadership, mission and strategic management, human resources management and financial viability and resource mobilization. Based on the reports’ findings, U-Media will offer further consultancy and training to these groups.

Media Research

Media literacy research Stage 1 (November – December 2014) U-Media conducted a survey of the participants of the media literacy school programs implemented by the Academy of Ukrainian Press (AUP). The respondents were lecturers from selected Regional Institutes for Teachers’ Continuing Training. The survey demonstrated that 95% of respondents considered the media literacy course important for secondary schools. All respondents said they widely used the AUP workshop materials and the curricula of the Ministry of Education and Science in teaching media literacy trainers. The AUP portal for teachers (http://www.medialiteracy.org.ua) is also an important source of guidance and training literature. In addition, instructors at the Regional Institutes developed their own thematic modules and special courses for teaching media literacy.

Page 41 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 Teachers who attended the media literacy courses at the Regional Institutes expressed their interest in the topics of manipulation in media and media’s impact on people’s behavior.

According to the survey:  Over the past 2.5 years of the AUP media literacy curriculum program, the Regional Institutes’ teacher-trainers reached more than 73,000 teachers with media literacy materials, including 53,000 teachers at secondary schools, lyceums and gymnasiums.  680 teachers participated in in-depth training on teaching specific media related courses (including internet security for children, production of school newspapers, etc.).  200 teachers took a 48-hour special course on media literacy for coordinators of experimental schools in Dnipropetrovsk region.  260 teachers were trained to create a media studio in the school; and 220 teachers participated in master classes at a media festival in Zaporizhzhya.  60 psychologists and social workers attended an 18-hour special course on media literacy in Poltava.

Obstacles in teaching media literacy:  Lack of technical resources such as video studio equipment (Dnipropetrovsk) and classrooms equipped with computers, screens and video equipment (Kirovohrad, Chernihiv);  Lack of funds for proper monitoring of the implementation of media literacy teaching in schools;  Limited number of academic hours in Regional Institutes’ schedules for teaching media literacy – insufficient time for a full study course.

Needs in technical assistance and state support:  A regulatory framework should be established by the Ministry of Education and Science through orders and instructions regarding the implementation of the new course, and allocation or reallocation of training hours is needed for media literacy implementation.  Teachers need different training and methodological tools for different grades; that would include a student’s workbook and handbook, and guidelines for teachers. Without this support, media literacy teaching is hardly possible. Schools experience the lack of academic hours of media literacy lessons in school schedules. Some respondents observed resistance of school administrators because of limited hours and high student- teacher ratios; some teachers were reluctant to teach media literacy because this is a complicated subject and there is no additional payment to a teacher for doing so.  Questions teachers asked at the Regional Institutes’ sessions were related to salaries and difficulties to teach media literacy as an optional course (beyond the standard curriculum).

Stage 2 (March – April 2015) This research aimed at assessing the effectiveness of media literacy education at secondary schools in various regions of Ukraine. The study reviewed the methods of media education, availability of necessary resources, analyzed difficulties that secondary schools faced teaching media literacy. One hundred telephone interviews were conducted with media literacy teachers, Page 42 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 six in-depth interviews with school administrators (directors and deputy directors), and six focus groups were organized with pupils studying media literacy.

Key findings:  Secondary schools use different approaches to media literacy implementation: some focus on psychological aspects, i.e. critical thinking, while others – on practice, i.e. media content production.  Teachers focus on integrating media literacy elements into various subjects throughout all school grades, and involve older pupils in mentoring younger ones. During classes, teachers focus on the development of critical and creative thinking and cyber security issues.  83 out of 90 surveyed teachers (92%) use the resources of the AUP portal (http://medialiteracy.org.ua). Presentations and model lessons are the most popular.  One third of the surveyed teaches implemented a media literacy course as an extracurricular activity; 26 teachers did their own research on the topic. Several teachers began developing their own course outline and became chairs of media literacy clubs.

 Pupils say that media literacy education is necessary for parents as well. Children think poorly of their parents’ level of media literacy and try to “educate” their parents with knowledge gained from the media literacy courses.

Teacher needs:  Share inter-regional experiences in teaching media literacy, including teachers’ own papers on media literacy teaching methodology.  Integrate media literacy into various disciplines such as history, mathematics, biology, etc. Page 43 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015  Media literacy courses for all school grades.  Apply testing to assess the level of media literacy knowledge.  Have media libraries at schools.

Media Audience Research Internews’ annual media consumption survey showed a dramatic drop in Ukrainians’ use of Russian media over the preceding year. The media consumption survey was conducted in May and June of 2015 in cooperation with the Research Company In Mind with a sample size of 4,048, including 300 respondents or more in each of 12 oblasts – Kyiv, Lviv, Vinnytsia, Poltava, Sumy, Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk and Kharkiv. A smaller number of respondents in the remaining regions were added to provide a national picture. Donetsk and Change in trust in media 2014-2015

61% 47% 51% 40% 34% 39% 36% 35%

8% 2015 4% 2% 3%

TV Web print radio TV Web print radio TV Web print radio Russian Ukraine National media Ukraine Regional media Luhansk interviews were held in the areas under the control of the Ukrainian government. Media Ukrainians use at least once per Russian TV viewership shrank to 8% from week 27% in 2014,4 and Russian internet use slid (covering 10 regions) to 27% in 2015 from 44% in 2014. While lower consumption rates for Russian TV Ukrainian TV channels 84 might be partially explained by the 79 Ukrainian government’s initiative to ban Ukrainian web sites 42 47 transmissions of Russian TV signals within Ukrainian radio 28 the country, internet access has not been 27 restricted. Ukrainian print 24 22 2014

Russian TV channels 27 2015 The most evident dynamic in 2015 was the 8 decrease in trust of Russian media of all Russian web sites 21 15 types. Ukrainians care a lot about honesty Russian radio 3 and reliability in the news – it’s their top 2 priority, with 46% putting it in first place. Russian print 2 While overall trust in Russian media is 2 declining, trust in Ukrainian media has

4The comparison of 2014 and 2015 results are restricted to the 10 control regions surveyed in both years - Kyiv, Vinnytsa, Donetsk (under control of Ukrainian government), Lviv, Mikolaiv, Odesa, Zakarpattya, Sumy, Kharkov, Cherkasy. Page 44 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 improved since last year.

However, many Ukrainians became more skeptical about the quality of the news they have access to. Compared to 2014, 8% fewer respondents said they were satisfied with the objectivity of TV news (a decline from 51% to 43%) and just 1% more respondents said that journalists are providing complete information in the news (from 50% to 51%). The public’s ability to distinguish jeansa did not change over the last year; 49% of respondents said they were aware of jeansa in media content and 57% of those people said they could distinguish jeansa from regular media content (about 28% of all respondents). The complete Internews/InMind survey in English can be found here.

Media consumption Ukrainians traditionally depend on Social media Ukrainians use to get television for their news, but in the past news, year TV news viewership (both national (% of Internet users) and regional) declined; 85% of those surveyed watch TV news regularly, a VKontakte 38% drop of 8% (national networks), while 64% 31% 79% watched regional network Odnoklassniki 60% newscasts, a drop of 9% from 2014. 20% Facebook 38%

Twitter 2% Older age groups watch more TV news 10% 1% than younger age groups; 93% of those Other 2% use for news aged 46 to 55 and 95% of those in the 4% Hard to say 2% use social age group 56 to 65 get their news 11% primarily from television. Young people None 12% network in the age range of up to 25 prefer online social networks (like VKontakte and Odnoklassniki) for news (80%) rather than TV (66%), and they consume news via online news sites (63%), but rarely read newspapers (17%).

Overall, the use of the internet to get news (as opposed to entertainment) increased by 6% in 2015; 51% of respondents in 10 regions visit news websites regularly. Of those who visit online news sites, most (88%) use national websites and 28% use regional websites to get news. Although internet users in Donetsk in all age groups use the national online news sites the least of all regions surveyed (70%), Donetsk region was the largest consumer of regional online news media (69%).

The most popular online social networks, like in 2014, are the Russian sites VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, regularly visited by 38% and 31% of surveyed internet users respectively. Facebook is a source of news for 20% of internet users in Ukraine.

Journalists’ survey A survey of 300 journalists gauged their views on the state of their profession.

Page 45 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 2015 journalist survey Key findings included: Role of journalism and standards Regional media 71% 81% journalists see their main role in society as providing Nationwide media 29% information and developing society. Protection of Press 38% democracy as a journalists’ role declined from 11% in Web-based 42% 2014 to 4% in 2015. Television 16% Radio 4% Assessment of professional journalism standards Reporter/Journalist/Freelancer 35% 82% of respondents consider news reliability as a key Editor/Editor and standard; 71% - objectivity and 67% - truth. Compared to 56% reporter/Journalist 2014, more journalists named impartiality as a key Executive editor 5% standard (increase from 38% to 47%). 79% of journalists are familiar with a professional Columnist / Blogger 2% journalism ethics code. Over the last year, 50% of national media accepted the ethics code and followed it (compared to 34% in 2014).

Jeansa and Censorship Journalists demonstrated tolerance for hidden advertising (jeansa) at a level unchanged from 2014. One-third of respondents were neutral and could justify paid journalism. National media practice jeansa less frequently than do regional outlets: 40% of journalists in national media and 65% in regional press acknowledged they produced jeansa over the last year (53% and 55% in 2014 respectively). However, jeansa producers noted these were sporadic rather than regular placements. Influence of authorities on editorial policies in both national and regional media decreased from 51% in 2014 to 37% 2015. Most of the cases of authorities’ influence on media were related to prohibitions against covering certain topics/personalities (23%, 36% in 2014), and instructions on how and when to cover a certain topic (21%, 35% in 2014). There were no requests to terminate any story or investigation.

Cases of management’s influence on topics to be covered have reduced: in 2015 50% of journalists indicated that they did not face this kind of limitation (versus 41% in 2014). Also, journalists saw fewer edits to their work by editors for the sake of self-censorship security: 32% of respondents indicated that they never experienced situations when their texts underwent editing or cutting for the “peace of mind” of the editor/editorial (25% in 2014 and 19% in 2012). Over the last year, the influence of media owners on editorial policy did not change considerably: journalists know their media owners and evaluate their influence level as rather high.

Labor rights and wages In 2015, 63% of respondents had official employment agreements; however, only 52% had official (taxed) wages, 10% received “envelopes” (black cash), and 24% had “gray” salaries consisting of taxed and black cash portions. Overall, 45% of journalists receive “black cash”: 63% in national media and 36% in regional press. 35% of journalists faced violations of their labor rights. Among the violations - percentage of illegal dismissals/pressure to dismiss (23%, 13% in 2014), especially in the national media (an increase from 5% in 2014 to 38% in 2015).

Page 46 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015

Journalists’ security 61% of surveyed journalists said they have travelled to the ATO zone to cover the conflict. National media provided considerably better protection of their journalists compared to regional media; only 48% of regional journalists were provided steel helmets and armored vests and only 19% with equipment (radio sets, cell phone).

Only 29% of respondents from regional media and 40% from national said their newsrooms had and followed digital security policies. At the same time, 37% did not have any idea what a digital security policy was; 13% of journalists working in newsrooms with a digital security policy have never read it.

Training needs 61% of journalists articulated their needs for professional training. New media tools, monetization of media sites and promotion through social media were in great demand (over 60%), training on digital security and investigative reporting were requested by 52% and 48% respectively. Interest in legal training decreased from 51% in 2014 to 43% in 2015; training on electoral legislation was in demand, at 37%.

Page 47 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 Communication & Coordination

Weekly Briefer

U-Media packages program/partner updates together with significant events affecting the media sector, including legislative changes, industry developments, journalists’ court cases, public events and labor actions, into a weekly email publication. From October 2014 to September 2015, Internews published 50 briefers focused on the early parliamentary elections (October 26), the transition of First National channel (the state TV network) into Ukraine’s first Public Service Broadcaster, the new media ownership transparency law, violations of journalists’ rights and attacks on journalists, journalists’ safety while working in the military conflict zone in eastern Ukraine, the information war with Russia, and media coverage of Ukraine’s EU integration efforts. The Weekly Briefer is distributed to a wide audience, including USAID, the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Embassy/Kyiv staff, the EU delegation, and locally-based international donor and implementing organizations.

Monthly Look-Ahead

U-Media collects activity plans for the month ahead from each of its partners and distributes a consolidated monthly calendar to a wide audience, including USAID, the US State Department, the U.S. Embassy/Kyiv staff, and locally-based international donor and implementing organizations.

Website (umedia.kiev.ua) and Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/umedia.Internews)

In October 2014 through September 2015, 11,148 people visited the U-Media project website umedia.kiev.ua; February was the peak month with 2,378 visitors. On average, each visitor looked through two pages on the website.

Viewership of umedia.kiev.ua website, Oct.2014-Sep.2015

hits visitors 4 615

3 189 2 719 2 347 2 287 1 908 1 617 1 752 1 750 1 375 1 306 1 466 1 362 1 306 986 689 671 552 753 659 608 551 581 265

Oct. Nov. Dec. Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr. May Jun. Jul. Aug. Sep.

On average, 929 monthly visitors visited 2,071 pages for an average of 2.2 pages per visitor. The “media and democracy” and “media research” sections attracted the most attention.

Page 48 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 For announcements of partner programs, research reports, and news reports, readers visited the U-Media Facebook page. The number of followers (likes) for the page increased from 500 to 931 in the last year since October 2014. In the first half-year, each post was viewed by on average 74 people; after April 2015 – that indicator rose to 214.

U-Media FB readership is 65% women and 35% men. The core group of 41% U-Media followers on FB consists of women and men aged 25-34 years (27% and 14% respectively); the next largest group, 22%, are 18-24 year olds (19% women and 3% men) and 20% of readers are 35-44 (11% women and 9% men). U-Media FB page followers Poland U-Media’s Facebook postings are USA 1,0% primarily Ukrainian language; 93.4% of 1,6% Russia users are registered in Ukraine, 1.6% in 0,8% the US, 1% in Poland and less than 1% in Germany 0,6% other countries. Ukraine Belarus 93,4% 0,3% Hungary Media and Civil Society Donor 0,2% Coordination Turkey Other 0,2% 1,8% U-Media held and/or participated in several meetings/discussions with partners and donors during Year 4:

 September 11, 2015 – Internews coordinated a meeting of a group of Ukrainian media organizations with the USAID Deputy Mission Director John Pennell. Among the participants were U-Media partners UA: Pershyy channel (First National), Internews Ukraine, Telekritika, Institute for Mass Information, Independent Association of Broadcasters, Media Law Institute and the Pylyp Orlyk Institute for Democracy. U- Media management presented key program milestones, and the partners discussed achievements towards U-Media Objectives and current challenges in the media sector, such as lack of media literacy in society, the information isolation of people in the occupied areas in East Ukraine and Crimea, the need to launch a new freedom of expression advocacy movement (replacing Stop Censorship!), and journalist safety.

 July 13, 2015 – Internews participated in a media donors meeting (organized by the EU Delegation) to discuss Hromadske.TV’s 5-year strategy. The donors suggested Hromadske.TV cooperate with UA: Pershyy (First National), sharing content and reducing costs.

 November 12, 2014 and June 4, 2015- Internews organized brainstorming sessions with U-Media partners discussing the needs/challenges of the media sector. Topics discussed: the need for media campaigns to increase content quality, journalists’ security, pressure on regional media, legislation on print media de-statization, the new local elections law, and reform of the National TV and Radio Council.

Page 49 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015  October 2014 – September 2015 – Internews participated in the regular media donors meetings organized by USAID and the Canadian Embassy. During the Parliamentary Elections campaign and in the run-up to the Local Elections of 2015, Internews attended regular preparation meetings hosted by the Canadian Embassy.

 March 16, 2015 – Internews co-funded and attended the final meeting of key stakeholders to discuss prospects for a successful vote in Parliament on March 19 in favor of the establishment of Public Service Broadcasting. U-Media partners the Media Law Institute, Telekritika, and the Independent Association of Broadcasters presented final updates and arguments in favor of the Draft Amended PSB Law (On March 19, Parliament voted in favor of the Law, leading the way to the establishment of Public Service Broadcasting in Ukraine).

 December 11, 2014 and March 10, 2015, 3rd one in September – Internews participated in meetings of the donors supporting First National TV’s transition to Public Service Broadcasting. Participants included the Council of Europe, Deutsche Welle, the Media Development Fund of the US Embassy, USAID and First National TV management. The donors shared their plans to support First National and discussed the challenges related to the Law on Public Broadcasting, First National’s technical needs, and various feasibility studies being conducted to decide the best ways for First National to rehabilitate its systems as it transitions to PSB.

Advisory Board From April to September 2015, the U-Media Advisory Board (AB) went through many changes – two AB members had to leave the group because due to conflict of interest. One of the members (Taras Petriv) served as a president of a local organization that became a U-Media grantee, necessitating his departure from the Board. Olga Sedova became a manager at the Swedish International Development Agency, and SIDA does not allow its staff to serve on boards.

The current composition of the Advisory Board is: 1. Andriy Shevchenko (a former MP, now the Ambassador of Ukraine to Canada); 2. Oleh Rybachuk (Chair of the Board, Center UA); 3. Yevhen Fedchenko (Director of Journalism School, Kyiv-Mohyla Academy); 4. Ihor Kohut (Chair of the Board, Laboratory for Legislative Initiatives, now a member of the Constitutional Commission); 5. Maksym Savanevsky (Editor-in-chief, Watcher.com.ua); 6. Andriy Dligach (Director general, Advanter Group); 7. Victoria Marchenko (AOTR, USAID).

In the fall of 2015, U-Media will recruit two new AB members.

 In 2015, U-Media engaged individual AB members for advice on various issues. In December 2014, U-Media hosted an Advisory Board meeting to discuss: Media sector status under the new Parliament and new Government,

Page 50 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015  Partners’ activities that the Advisory Board members believe are priorities under the changing circumstances,  Advisory Board’s recommendations to U-Media concerning programmatic changes based on the current needs of the media sector. Challenges

 Media monitoring experts reported a decrease of media content quality in 2014-2015, especially at the regional level. Reshuffles in the media community after Euromaidan, the 2014 Parliamentary Elections and the military conflict in the East of Ukraine caused several experienced regional journalists to move to Kyiv. Also, several well-known national journalists became Members of Parliament or started working for certain political parties in 2014. These changes had a negative impact on media content quality. In addition, sound media initiatives like Stop Censorship! disbanded when many of its champions left the media profession to join Parliament as legislators. It is now more crucial than ever that journalists find the means to self-regulate. U-Media encouraged its partners to include self-regulation strategy activities in their Year 5 proposals. As a result, the Media Law Institute will work to create an independent media expert commission to serve as a first step to journalist self-regulation, by advising the community on media ethics and by facilitating the improvement of media content quality.

 Objective war reporting became a prominent issue as the military conflict in the East of Ukraine continued into 2015. The journalists traveling to the ATO zone were in danger of being killed, captured or physically injured. Also, journalists needed to balance the public’s right to know with the military’s desires to keep its movements a secret from the enemy. The Institute for Mass Information (IMI) and Telekritika (TK) addressed these challenges by conducting a number of trainings/master classes for journalists suggesting ways they could walk this fine line in their reporting. IMI launched the Presswatcher web platform (http://presswatcher.org/), to register journalists traveling to the East and launch rescue procedures should a journalist encounter problems in the war zone.

 With the ongoing information war against Ukraine and the need to raise public awareness of current political and economic developments, the organizations implementing media monitoring projects needed to improve their public outreach to better inform the public about the Kremlin’s propaganda efforts and ways to decipher real news from fake news. Monitoring organizations - Telekritika, Institute for Mass Information, and Pylyp Orlyk Institute for Democracy –increased the number of substantive discussions on the essence of political, economic, and media reforms required by the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement. Public officials of all levels were invited to the discussions to build constructive professional relations between media and state institutions.

 Objective 4 of the U-Media project (designed to meet the requirements of the USAID Local Solutions and USAID Forward initiatives) became challenging for most U-Media partners during this turbulent period in Ukraine’s history. The 2014 U-Media external assessment of partners’ institutional capacity revealed that the core partners have reached

Page 51 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 quite a high level of institutional growth and are eager to further improve their internal and external systems and standards. However, the need for ad hoc adjustments to their projects in light of quickly changing events left the organizations’ management with very few financial and time resources to dedicate purely to institutional development. U-Media managers noticed a decline in the quality of partners’ narrative and financial reports during this time. To help partners return to prior form, Internews staff organized training for partners on proposal/report writing in February 2015. Also, organizational self- assessment sessions were scheduled for nine media NGOs in the summer 2015 to provide the partners with an opportunity to re-evaluate their capacities under Ukraine’s challenging circumstances. After successful efforts of most of the U-Media partners to achieve diverse sources of funding, several groups such as Telekritika and the Independent Media Trade Union experienced difficulties in development of the organizations’ master budgets. U-Media managers organized meetings with the grantees’ financial staff to explain the workings of the “master budget.”

 Early Parliamentary Elections on October 26, 2014 caused additional turbulence in Ukraine’s media. The media community was unclear what legal framework was to be applied for journalists’ work while the amendments to the Law on Elections went into force. Also, the political and economic situation in Ukraine before the Elections was complicated by the continuing conflict in the East. Surprisingly, the Parliamentary Elections were not a priority for the media even after the official start-up of the campaign. U-Media encouraged partners to make the Elections a top priority of their development programs; in response, they conducted an array of legal and cyber/physical security trainings for regional journalists, monitored violations of journalists’ rights within the elections campaign, produced a series of televised debates, distributed information on voting procedures for internally displaced persons (IDPs), organized public discussions on how to distinguish real elections news from paid content, and tracked the reform agenda for the newly elected Parliament.

Page 52 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 Other Activities

The Open Door Grant Competition

In February 2015, Internews conducted an Open Door grant competition to support national and regional media outlets and media non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Internews called for proposals with budgets of $ 5,000 for periods up to 6 months focusing on the following activities:  Self-regulation in media;  Media role in addressing Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) issues;  Media projects for reconciliation in society and encouraging a national dialog;  Media ownership transparency.

Internews received 116 applications from 112 organizations, and 10 projects were supported in April 2015.

The Open Budget Initiative

In 2014, Internews implemented a pilot project called “Open Budget,” in cooperation with the United Nations Development Programme in Ukraine, to increase local government budget transparency and promote civic engagement. The pilot began with a series of workshops to answer the question, “What do people want from open budgets?” and to ensure that the platform would be designed to suit users from a variety of backgrounds. In these workshops, it quickly became clear that citizens do not understand the budgeting process, making it hard for them to influence budget priorities. The listening sessions with civic activists, local officials and journalists revealed two key questions. First, they wanted to understand how to interpret the numbers and codes in city budget files. Second, they wanted to understand the stages of budget creation and get informed about what emerged from each milestone so that they could engage in the process.

With this information in hand, the Open Budget project ‘The reports on budget execution were team developed a free, user-friendly online tool that regularly presented through the Lviv city allows local governments to present budget information council website. However, the reports through a variety of graphic data visualizations. The were just general figures, e.g. open-source tool was launched in early 2015. It consists expenditures on education or communal services. From now on, the citizens will of two independent components: 1. Budget visualization see the detailed expenses – for each (up to 10 types of visualization for both revenues and school or kindergarten. The citizens can expenses of the city budget); 2. Calendar of the budget also participate in budget formation and cycle (budget estimation and drafting, public discussion, submit proposals on funds distribution. approval, execution and reporting). The program This builds trust and is another step to maximize the transparency of the budget proposed visualizations and generated the code to process in the city.” embed the graphics into official city websites. Any Lina Mykolayiv, Deputy Director of Finance municipality that wants to do so can access the tool Policy in Lviv City Council online and upload the data on city expenditures and revenues into the system.

Page 53 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 Helping local governments to get better at presenting their budgets in a comprehensible way was just part of the puzzle, however. Once the data was simplified, that’s when journalists and transparency activists decided what information is important for the public that don’t visit the cities websites to know about, including “What does that data tell local communities about how their local government is spending on health facilities, schools, local infrastructure?”, and “How does their region compare to other regions with similar or different numbers of inhabitants?” Internews trained journalists on how to read the budget data provided by municipalities, so they could explain these details in illustrative and engaging ways. The cities - Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv, Dolyna, Vinnitsa, Cherkasy, Ternopil and Kherson - have added the budget visualizer to their municipal websites. Lviv also launched a survey asking Sample visualization. citizens what information is missing in their budget visualizations. Lviv city plans to improve the presentation of the city budget based on this feedback from the public. So far seven Ukrainian cities are using the budget visualization tool. The hope is that many more will follow, as part of the efforts to make Ukrainian government more accountable to its citizens.

Tech Soup-Internews Software Donations Program In response to a high demand from Internews partners and small-scale internet media to protect their email accounts and websites from cyber-attacks, Internews teamed with the NGO Tech Soup to provide free Microsoft software to 30 CSOs and media. Tech Soup connects nonprofits, charities, and public libraries with free tech products and services, and licensed operating system software. Internews supplemented the Tech Soup offering with a train-the-trainer program; five Ukrainians are now trained to help local organizations install cyber security tools, once the free Microsoft software has been downloaded. The trainers provided media outlets in East and South Ukraine with 2-day trainings on digital security, secure communications and information management policies. Internews distributed 70 free Microsoft licenses (with a retail value is $10,500) to media organizations and outlets.

USAID Informational Fairs In 2015, Internews took part in three USAID Informational Fairs (Mistechko USAID) held in Ternopil (August 28), Sumy (September 5) and Chernihiv (September 19) to popularize the USAID projects in Ukraine among local residents. U-Media focused its public education efforts on media literacy issues and media content quality. U-Media materials distributed at the fairs included leaflets and brochures to inform the readers about hidden advertisements (jeansa) in media including raising its volume on the eve of the local elections campaigns, as well as advice

Page 54 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 on critical media consumption. Internews distributed the Institute of Mass Information brochure describing about the 5 features of jeansa and encouraged citizens to participate in their local elections project called “Catch Jeansa!”, which encourages citizens to collect examples of jeansa they see during the election campaign to raise awareness of this recurring problem in the Ukrainian media.

U-Media organized a quick survey and asked media customers to write their feedback “what should be improved in media content.” The survey revealed a high demand for unbiased reporting and diversification of reporting topics. Sumy residents required more content on social issues and culture, youth requested more musical and teenage-adapted films, elderly people requested user-friendly language in reporting on reforms and politics and more news on energy efficiency and communal services issues. Sumy Press Club managed young journalists to make a Sumy Civic Newspaper that reflected citizens’ expectations for better journalism. In Chernihiv and Ternopil, people demanded more truth in media and less manipulation, wanted more coverage of elderly people’s issues, communal services, reforms and healthy lifestyle for the younger generation. To raise the importance of media ownership, U-Media designed a questionnaire on media owners for the three cities. People had to fill out the names of media owners of the key national and local media.

The U-Media also offered a computer media literacy game, “Znaika,” for Mistechko USAID visitors. The Academy of Ukrainian Press (AUP) designed the game for media literacy courses at secondary schools of Ukraine. Teenagers and adults answered Znaika’s questions on media history, journalism standards and specifics of media work – TV, radio, print and online. All participants got small prizes – pencils, notebooks or stickers. Internews involved local media NGOs to assist in preparation and delivering presentations during the USAID Fairs – Press Clubs in Ternopil, Sumy and Chernihiv.

Page 55 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015

Page 56 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 Attachment 1: List of Sub-Grants U-Media Partners Sub-grantee name Contact Project Title Duration Award Brief Description information INSTITUTIONAL PARTNERS 1 Internews Ukraine Natalia Pedchenko, Institutional Partner Sub- December $149,925 Internews Ukraine project was mainly focused on: empowering (IUA) +38-067-243-6352; grant to Internews 1, 2014 – people to resist media manipulations and propaganda, establishing npedchenko@intern Ukraine September communication amongst the regions of Ukraine, raising public ews.ua 30, 2015 awareness of the issues crucial for and providing international audience with the objective information about Ukraine. To meet the targets IUA held seminars for over 100 industrial workers of the east and south of Ukraine; produced series of articles “Life of Ukrainians” on “Ukrainska Pravda” (Ukrainska Pravda.Life) covering stories of Ukrainian citizens (incl. those from conflict areas); held trainings for over 45 regional journalists to raise the awareness of reforms and EU integration, as well as inter-regional (east-west) exchanges for journalists, including school of media leadership. It also established a 2-stage data transparency monitoring mechanism to evaluate the transparency of government agencies, continued its small grants’ program for more, than 25 media outlets, organized a media club connecting Ukrainian communicators with international audience; continued its capacity building, PR and financial management development. 2 Telekritika (TK) Diana Dutsyk: +38- Institutional Partner Sub- December $70,285 Telekritika conducted regular waves of profound monitoring of the 067-976-2473; grant to Telekritika 1, 2014 - national and regional TV channels with further dissemination of [email protected] September reports about the quality of TV reporting. It continued developing 30, 2015 its media literacy online resource – MediaSapiens, where it placed over 1300 articles, video, interviews, media studies, best international practice and market overviews, covering the issues of media literacy, freedom of speech, professional journalism standards, current developments in media, including special- purpose articles to raise journalists’ professional level, etc. TK further promoted changes in media regulation field, as well as

Page 57 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 enhanced its capacity building activities. 3 Independent Kateryna Institutional Partner Sub- October 1, $ 71,448 Independent Association of Broadcasters (IAB) continued to Association of Myasnikova, +38- grant to IAB 2014 – improve legislative environment for independent broadcasters, and Broadcasters (IAB) 067-405-1109; September thus managed to reduce the number of violations of their rights by [email protected] 30, 2015 means of: monitoring and assessing all legislative initiatives, m.ua disseminating public appeals, building coalitions with other media NGOs for advocacy campaigns, etc. IAB contributed to transferring the broadcasters to convergent platforms, promoted good governance for electronic media through participation in the reform of the National Council on TV and Radio, continued supporting the digitalization process of Ukrainian television to smooth switching off the analogue TV signal. The association also organized its regular “Honor of Profession” Contest, this year televised on First Public TV Channel (First National) (627 works submitted vs 596 in 2014), to encourage the development of high quality journalism; held its annual conference for media managers: “New Media – New Opportunities”, as well as continued an organizational development effort based on the recommendations of foreign auditors. CORE PARTNERS 1 Regional Press Olga Trufanova, Investigative Journalism November 1, $ 120,336 Within the framework of its investigative reporting activities, RPDI Development olga.trufanova1@gm Development, New 2014 – further maintained and expanded its top-notch investigative Institute (RPDI) ail.com, +38-067- Media, and Legal September 30, reporters’ network through conducting webinars, roundtables, 507-29-64 Support and Training for 2015 consultations, monitoring of investigative reports, social media Journalists maintenance, other. In December 2014, the organization conducted its Sixth Annual International Investigative Reporting Conference in Kyiv that gathered 118 participants from 10 countries. RPDI continued to deepen legal knowledge of regional journalists and provide an access to professional legal advice/help and defense at courts: the total of 554 legal advice services offered over the period. RPDI organized press-tours to Kyiv-based authorities and experts for the journalists from the east. It concentrated also on strengthening the capacity of the de- statization pilot group, stimulating a dialogue between the pilot Page 58 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 media and their governmental owners, and conducted several round tables for representatives from oblast municipal media and their current owners to deliver the novelties in de-statization legislation. To top it all, the Institute improved the regional coverage of EU integration-related issues via the “best regional story” contest thrown after a series of workshops on “How to Create Local Analytics on Euro-Integration”, and enhanced its organizational capacity building. 2 Independent Media Oksana Vynnychuk, Legal Bureau Aid for November 1, 2014 - $ 59,990 IMTUU contributed to the professional growth of journalists and Trade Union of +38-050-356-5758, Journalists in Post- September 30, 2015 other media employees, as well as helped increase their safety by Ukraine (IMTUU) sekretar@profspilka. Maidan and during providing them with legal support and protecting their rights by org.ua Military Conflict Period means of running Legal Bureau. To meet the goal, IMTUU has used a wide spectrum of tools, i.e. trainings, seminars, over 1000 legal consultations, hotline, interviews, Legal Bureau’s Rapid Response Teams, psychological crisis group-work, etc. The organization additionally kept monitoring and updating the database on the journalist rights’ violations to combat censorship and oppression towards journalists by media owners, governmental structures, employees, and other actors. 3 Academy of Oksana Content Analysis and October 1, 2014 – $71,937 AUP concentrated its efforts around media literacy education for Ukrainian Press Volosheniuk, AUP Media Literacy September 30, 2015 teachers of pedagogical universities and colleges. The media (AUP) Executive director, Development literacy activity of the organization, i.e. media literacy schools, +38-067-504-9802; lectures, regional institutes for continuing teachers’ training, etc. [email protected] provided teachers with the key knowledge and methodological a material that enforced younger generation to be conscious media consumers and avoid media manipulations. Under this umbrella, AUP also held its Third National Conference on Media Literacy for 130 participants that considered the barriers and prospects for the implementation of media literacy courses, and continued to update an interactive platform for communication of media teachers at the Media Education and Media Literacy portal (www.medialiteracy.org). In addition to the above, AUP conducted content analysis of televised news at eight national TV channels to provide media consumers, journalists and international community with objective and unbiased information about the Page 59 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 quality of Ukrainian TV news. 4 Lviv Press Club Shostak Olga, On-Line Bridges November 15 – $36,960 LPC conducted its regular online video bridges “East-West-Russia: (LPC) [email protected], between Journalists of September 30, 2015 European Vector” with enormous viewership, that connected +38-050-513-5993 West and East/South journalists, newsmakers and opinion leaders from Lviv with their colleagues in Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk, Sumy, Kharkiv, Kherson, towns of Donetsk region, Moscow and St. Petersburgh. As its second priority, LPC pitched a so-called school of military journalism where it invited NATO spokesmen, experts from the West regional media center of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine and Academy of Ground Forces to mentor the peculiarities of military/conflict journalism. Besides, 13 interactive discussions were organized for local journalists engaging 40 US and Ukrainian Army representatives, 58 international journalists, 5 NATO experts after which numerous media products were produced and distributed relating to the cooperation between NATO and the Army of Ukraine, international military standards and implementation of these standards by the Army . 5 Institute of Mass Oksana Romanyuk, Sub-grant to IMI for print November 1, 2014 - $ 69,969 IMI kept monitoring national print and internet outlets to detect Information (IMI) +38-050-446-3912; and internet media September 30, 2015 violations of journalists’ rights and further inform media community [email protected] monitoring, protection of and general public thereabout. The results were also submitted to journalists’ rights and government agencies – the General Prosecutor’s Office, Ministry institutional of Interior, State Security Service and National Security and development Defense Council for the relevant feedback. All violations were posted in the IMI-website “Barometer database”. To top it all, on the International Day of Impunity, IMI conducted a press conference to forge a journalists’ march against impunity. Among other activities, IMI continued its “jeansa” monitoring of over 45,000.00 journalistic materials; legal support to journalists and media organizations; advocacy work amongst government agencies in support of journalists’ rights; cooperation with the “Reanimation Package of Reforms” as to the improvement of media legislation; upgraded its organizational policies and procedures .

Page 60 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 On-line platform to September 1, 2014 – $ 62,009 IMI established and largely promoted PressWatcher SOS online secure journalists’ work September 30, 2015 platform aimed to track and thus protect journalists working in and at war zones broadcasting from conflict areas in Ukraine. 139 journalists were registered on the platform, as of Aug 2015. In this respect IMI largely collaborated with military and law-enforcement agencies to ensure their involvement in the “safely work” and facilitate journalists’ accreditation procedures.

6 Suspilne TV Kateryna Maltseva, “Persha Shpalta” (Front September 1, 2014 – $ 154,203 In 2014, STV launched a pilot Persha Shpalta” (Front Page) Foundation (STV) +38-067-448-3737; Page) Program June 30, 2015 weekly program on First National TV channel to raise public e.maltseva7@gmail. Production at First awareness of the economic processes in Ukraine. The program com National and Final contained an array of economic segments including gas, tax, Debates program – banking system, investment climate, reforms under the crisis « Ukraine Tomorrow » situation, and gathered well-known experts, decision-makers, real National Talk-Show sector representatives in the studio. Also, it served as a tool for “Debaty Pro” on First voters’ during Elections. U-media also supported STV’s Election National Day marathon called “Ukraine Tomorrow”. In 2015, STV in tandem with Sousplinist Foundation, initiated a weekly nationwide 60-minute talk show “Debaty Pro” (Debates about) broadcast on First National, thru Campus 3.0 platform and Hromadske.TV, the total viewership being 6 792 934. The talk show was meant to highlight the priorities of the country’s progress, discuss mechanisms of combating corruption, improvement of business climate, inter-regional cooperation, etc. Both TV shows became a step forward in the establishment of Public Service Broadcasting in Ukraine.

Page 61 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 7 Mykolayiv Center for Oleg Oganov, Establishing Information October 1, 2014 – $ 15,030 CIR continued providing the south of Ukraine (Mykolayiv, Kherson, Investigative +38-096-408-0567, Web Portal for the South June 30, 2015 Odesa) with unbiased and timely information about local political and Reporting (CIR) oganov.oleg@gmail. of Ukraine – Odesa, economic processes resulting from the Parliamentary Elections via com Kherson and Mykolaiv July-December, 2015 $ 7, 791 its informational web-portal http://nikcenter.org/. CIR has generated (EPP Funds) over 1531 diverse news on human rights, land issues, issues related to the state and local budgets, health, education, justice system, housing, communal services and others. The publications cultivated citizens’ critical thinking in consuming local and national media information. CIR is also committed to continue monitoring the Ukrainian public procurements list, the Single State Register of Court Decisions and declarations of local politicians and judges, as well as to cover the decentralization reform and inform citizens in case they discover any violations committed by public officials. 8 Suspilnist (Society) Taras Petriv, 067- Media Driver of Reforms January 1– August 31, $70,845 A multi-vector project aimed at facilitation of the establishment of Foundation (SF) 505-6960, 2015 Public Broadcasting in Ukraine, including the development of a [email protected] convergent platform for the national 60-minute convergent talk- om shows “Ukraine Tomorrow” and “Debates Pro” produced in tandem with the First National TV, broadcast thereon and online via Campus 3.0 platform and Hromadske.TV. SF project activities included, above all, those fostering a new generation of responsible and skilled media professionals through “Media Mobility Hub” spring- summer internships for 34 journalism students and young professionals from 9 regions; as well as monitoring of politicians’ promises through the portal Vladometr.org. and distributing its results via numerous televised videos, infographics and articles. 9 Media Law Institute Taras Shevchenko, Improving media October 1, 2014 – $56,676 MLI put special emphasis on monitoring media legislation (MLI) [email protected] legislation and September 30, 2015 initiatives and distributing results thereof; conducted numerous ev.ua increasing journalists’ media law awareness activities, provided 168 recorded legal +38-067-508-5115 legal awareness consultations to journalists and legal support to First National to help avoid legal risks, i.e. defamation lawsuits, and ensure higher quality of anti-corruption journalistic materials. In tandem with the “Reanimation Package of Reforms” it forged the advocacy work to promote positive changes in media sector, such as: creation of a public broadcaster; de-statization of print media; establishing

Page 62 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 media ownership transparency; disband of the national commission on public morality, digitalization, protection of journalists’ rights, freedom of speech and media independence, the latter through the coalitions with Stop Censorship! and New Citizen. The organization also continued its institutional capacity building. 10 Information Press Valentyna Samar, Institutional grant to IPC October1,2014- $70,000 IPC’s priorities included trainings on journalism standards, content Center (IPC) [email protected] September 30, 2015 production, investigative reporting, and Crimea-focused TV et, +380 50-591-68- programming. Keeping in mind the occupation of Crimea by the 42 Russian Federation, IPC aimed at strengthening the position of its news portal “Center for Investigative Reporting” (the Center), as a source of high quality content and investigations for and about Crimea. Its audience reached 1,060,643 unique visitors, approx. 43% from Crimea, 9% from Russia, 41% from Ukraine. The Center also produced “National Security Issue” TV Programs broadcasted online at CJI website, Chornomorska and Sotsialna Krayina (Social Country) TV Channels (online, via cable and satellite) and in Youtube. The topics raised were: “What does it take to build the Crimean house”, “How Crimean migrants should come out of the shadow”, and other issues important for the region. In addition, IPC has committed to provide consultations to journalists and bloggers as to their rights’ protection in the occupied Crimea and to continue its capacity building activities. 11 Ukrainian Olexandr De-Statization March 1 – May 31, $4,890 UAPP targeted at improvement of media environment by drafting a Association of Diachenko, Discussions 2015 roadmap for print media de-statization reform through public panel Press Publishers [email protected] discussions held in 3 cities of Ukraine engaging communal print (UAPP) +38-097-481-7778 press journalists, private media businesses, local authorities, media lawyers and experts. The roadmap was submitted to the State TV & Radio Committee, the Parliamentary Committee on Freedom of Speech, other agencies and media outlets. 12 “Hromadske Gumenyuk Natalia , Institutional November1,2014- $70,000 This project of Hromadske.TV was focused on the organizational Telebachennia” 067-329-23-20 development, September 30, 2015 development to ensure trouble-free and effective production of (Hromadske.TV) ngumenyuk Hromadske.TV unbiased and accurate TV content on urgent issues for Ukraine. @gmail.com HTV started and successfully developed English and Russian language newsrooms, launched a weekly live Sunday Show, a Page 63 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 flagship prime time TV-show explaining the Eastern European geopolitical storm in English, launched Hromadske in Russian show targeted at the global Russian-speaking community from Tallinn to Astana, unfolded its regional network and re-designed its web-portal. It also assessed the quality of its programming, trained HTV journalists in professional standards, enhanced its organizational structure, upgraded HR and marketing strategies, and elaborated a corporate professional ethics code. 13 Institute for World Olena Get’manchuk, Wider integration: you May 1, 2014 - $27,772 IWP conducted media events/public discussions involving over 234 Policy (IWP) [email protected] shape the future February 28, 2015 journalists and media experts, and workshops for a total of 129 rg.ua, +38-044-253- regional journalists in three cities of Ukraine on the topics of the 2853 political reform, EU integration, forms of partnership with NATO, etc. during and after the Presidential Elections. In the aftermath of the events , IWP encouraged journalists to create media products on the topics and distributed them via IWP’s website, social networks, otherwise. 14 International public Svitlana Yeremenko, Regional Media December 1, 2014 – POID has inherited regional media monitoring of print and internet organization “The Svitlana.Yeremenko Monitoring and Public September 30, 2015 $79,820 media from CURE, and, over the reporting period, held monitoring Pylyp Orlyk Institute @gmail.com, Education waves in 8 regions of Ukraine (Donetsk, Lviv, Sumy, Kharkiv, for Democracy” +38-050-470-1159 Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, Zhytomyr, and Chernivtsi). It conducted 11 (POID) public discussions/roundtables involving journalists, public opinion leaders, NGO activists and educators in different cities of Ukraine; held a master class, 4 presentations and 6 lectures, the latter gathering up to 250 participants each, and a national roundtable where regional media monitoring results were discussed from the perspective of self-regulation and counteracting Russian propaganda. POID also became a co-organizer, co-developer and a participant of the Donbas Media Forum to discuss the informational environment of the occupied territories. The project, above all, raised public awareness of journalism standards, problems of regional media, promoted self-regulation mechanisms within media sector and facilitated quality content production.

Page 64 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS GRANTS Sub-grantee name Contact information Project Title Duration Award Brief Description 1 Academy of October1- $14,535 AUP conducted content analysis of the televised news at eight Oksana Volosheniuk, Content analysis and webinars Ukrainian Press November30, national TV channels during the 2014 Parliamentary Election AUP Executive for journalists during 2014 (AUP) 2014 campaign. The analysis results were disseminated via director, +38-067- Parliamentary Elections in international organizations and media outlets - sector opinion 504-9802; Ukraine leaders. AUP also organized webinars on the use of [email protected] sociological data for journalists during the Elections. 2 Lviv Press Club September $7,640 The project informed citizens of Lviv and all western region Shostak Olga, On-Line Video Blitz Debates (LPC) 15- about the parties’ and single-mandate candidates’ platforms by [email protected], November conducting video blitz debates to help voters make an informed Tel: +38-050-513-5993 30, 2015 choice. On Elections Day, LPC organized an online marathon to enable citizens follow the elections process. Another project’s priority was to help internally displaced persons (IDPs) located now in Lviv region, learn about their rights and provide them with information on the voting procedures. 3 Internews Ukraine Natalia Pedchenko, Institutional Partner Sub-grant to September 18 $109,918 IUA provided legal and substantive training for journalists, small (IUA) +38-067-243-6352; Internews Ukraine: Elections – November grants program for content production and headed the npedchenko@internews Activities 30, 2014 promotional campaign for the televised National Debates on .ua First National. 4 Telekritika (TK) Victor Galkin: +38-050- Institutional Partner Sub-Grant September 1 $49,969 TK raised public awareness of the quality of national and 382-9107; to Telekritika: Election Activities – November regional media coverage during the early 2014 Parliamentary [email protected] 30, 2014 Elections by means of monitoring national and regional TV channels and distributing reports (in English) about the quality of TV reporting. Ukrainian journalists received an expert advice on the best practices in elections coverage. 5 Regional Press Kateryna Laba, +38- Support for Journalists during September 1 $24,950 RPDI raised the level of expertise of Ukrainian media by Development 050-351-4179; the 2014 Parliamentary Elections –October 31, training journalists, editors and media owners on elections Institute (RPDI) [email protected] in Ukraine 2014 legislation and coverage via numerous pre-publication legal screenings, consultations and webinars; provided an access to the professional and comprehensive legal advice during the Elections campaign and contributed to the increase of the quality of Elections coverage. 6 International public Svitlana Yeremenko, Public discussions in Eastern September 1 $43,413 POID stimulated an informed voting at the early Parliamentary organization “The Svitlana.Yeremenko@gmailand Southern cities to raise – November Elections through identifying biased reporting in pre-elections Page 65 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 Pylyp Orlyk Institute .com, public awareness of the key for 30, 2014 period, and organizing public discussions about political parties for Democracy +38-050-470-1159 Ukraine issues and single-mandate candidates’ manipulations in the regional (POID) print and online media. For this purpose it conducted two waves of regional media monitoring in eight cities of Ukraine. 7 All-Ukrainian Trade Oksana Vynnychuk, Legal Bureau: protection of October 1 – $4,470 IMTUU contributed to the professional development and Union “Independent +38-050-356-5758, journalists’ rights in a post- October 31, increase of the level of safety of journalists and other media Media Trade Union [email protected] Maidan period 2014 actors involved in the Elections coverage. of Ukraine” (IMTUU) .ua

8 Institute of Mass Oksana Romanyuk, Sub-grant to IMI for print and October 1 – $10,000 IMI provided legal support to journalists during 2014 Information (IMI) +38-050-446-3912; internet media monitoring, November Parliamentary Elections through regular monitoring of and [email protected] protection of journalists’ rights 30, 2014 public reporting on 230 violations of journalists’ rights, and a 24- and institutional development hour legal hotline on the Day of Elections. IMI also conducted a public awareness campaign called “Catch the Jeansa!” 9 Suspilne TV Kateryna Maltseva, National Debates October 1 – $58,751 STV conducted a series of National TV Debates live on First Foundation (STV) +38-067-448-3737; November National, and further distributed them via various media [email protected] 30, 2014 channels. The Debates with the total viewership of 1,832,851 m people connected voters to candidates during the pre-election period and contributed to cultivating critical thinking among Ukrainian media consumers as to analyzing political parties’ platforms. They also became a step towards the establishment of Public Service Broadcasting in Ukraine. 10 Independent Kateryna Myasnikova, Institutional Partner Sub- October 1 – $ $ 21,748 IAB produced and broadcast in the regions a series of 6-minute Association of +38-067-405-1109; grant to IAB December 31, video clips to raise voters’ awareness of each party’s policy Broadcasters (IAB) [email protected] 2014 issues and reforms roadmap. It also held inter-regional TV a bridges to facilitate cross-regional communication during the Elections period. 11 Mykolayiv CenterOleg Oganov, Director Establishing Information Web October 1 – $8,100 CIR provided the south of Ukraine (Mykolayiv, Kherson and for Investigative +38-096-408-0567, Portal for the South of Ukraine – December Odesa) with unbiased and timely information about local Reporting (CIR) oganov.oleg@gmail Odesa, Kherson and Mykolaiv 31, 2014 political and economic processes before the Parliamentary .com Elections and on the Elections Day thru its web portal http://nikcenter.org/. 12 Suspilnist Taras Petriv, 067-505- Online Campus for Voters. September 1 $37,110 SF created a coalition of organizations-initiators of “National Foundation (SF) 6960, Campus 3.0 – November Parliamentary Debates 2014” and provided convergent debates [email protected] 30, 2014 (online at http://campus30.org/ and in TV format), involving a Page 66 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 network of leading universities of 23 regions of Ukraine and political leaders. Suspilnist (Society) Taras Frolov, +38-067- Vladometr – an internet portal October 1 – $11,390 SF produced and broadcast short videos containing Foundation (SF) 442-1743, for public monitoring of political December comparative analysis of promises given by the political parties [email protected] promises 31, 2014 in their election platforms.

OPEN DOOR GRANTS Sub-grantee name Contact information Project Title Duration Award Brief Description 1 “Public TV: Svitlana Ostryanyna, “Journalism Guards Peace” May 1 – $4,973.14 ChTV produced of a series of TV programs covering real life-stories of Cherkasy” (ChTV) tel. 093-02-44-836, Content production September internally displaced persons (IDPs) and assistance provided to IDPs email:grushka63@gmail 30, 2015 by local authority and local community. All TV programs broadcast .com were on “Public TV: Cherkasy” site www.hromadske.cherkasy.ua and in social media (Facebook, Vcontacte YouTube).

2 Center for Research Kateryna Kinchyk, Developing IDP Information May 1 – $5,000.00 CRDSP developed a new section for IDPs at “OstroV” on Donbas Social Executive Director, Section at “OstroV” Portal October 31, information and analytical web-site, http://www.ostro.org/, to Perspectives +38-099-540-6740; 2015 promptly supply IDPs with the most urgent IDPs-related (CRDSP) [email protected] information. Project’s target audience: citizens of Donets’k and Luhans’k regions, IDPs, governmental agencies in charge of solving the problems of IDPs, and Ukrainian citizens on the occupied territories. 3 Matsuka Oleksiy, TV program “People of Donbas May 1 – $4,835.70 DII produced a cycle of TV programs about people that have Donetsk Institute of Director Region” August 31, moved from Donbas to other regions of Ukraine. The project Information(DII) [email protected] 2015 aimed at telling the stories of IDPs who successfully integrated

m, 066-016-1764 into the society, and also cultivated the IDPs’ positive image in media. The programs were broadcast on Hromadske Donbasa (Youtube Channel, 9,000 subscribers), Hromadske TV, Espresso TV and Donetsk Regional State TV and Radio Company for the occupied territories. 4 Hromadske Radio Iryna Sedova, Project Radio Program “We are May 1 – $4,940.00 HR was focused on the production of IDPs-related radio (HR) Director different. We are together” October 31, content. The content was published at [email protected]; 2015 www.hromadskeradio.org and social networks: Twitter, +38-098-88-55-238 Facebook, SoundCloud and VKontakte and broadcast on FM radio station “Radio 24” as part of the program “Donbas Chronicles” and on the Ukrainian Radio (UR1), as part of Page 67 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 “Hromadska Khvylya” program. 5 Lustration Media Ownership Transparency April 1 – $4,970.00 LACD conducted investigations to track media owners and Olena Garaguts, Head, Anticorruption in Dnipropetrovsk Region September distributed information about their influence on editorial policies mob. +38-050-484-29- Council of 30, 2015 in Dnipropetrovsk region to be published in “Litsa” newspaper, 92, email: Dnipropetrovsk as well as on the website www.litsa.com.ua. As a follow-up, [email protected]. Region (LACD) media products for raising media literacy level were produced.

6 Magnolia-TV. “From war to mother” May 1 – July $4,893.93 Magnolia-TV” produced video stories and publications that Yuliya Savytska, Video stories 31, 2015 promoted national unity, and reported the positive examples of manager of social families from central and western Ukraine who adopted orphans projects, mob. +38-098- from Donetsk and Lugansk regions. The stories were 946-19-98, email: distributed through a multimedia platform combining TV channel [email protected]. “ЧП.інфо» (covers conflict area), www.magnolia-tv.com web-

portal, Youtube channel, Facebook and a portal of national adoption www.sirotstvy.net. 7 Content Production: Stories of May 1 – $4,875.00 TRC Rivne-1 produced a cycle of TV programs under the TRC Rivne-1 Vlasyuk Oksana, Internally Displaced People in September working title “East: Internally Displaced People”. The project Project director, e-mail: Rivne Oblast 31, 2015 collected stories of people forced to leave their homes and start [email protected], Tel: new lives. The weekly 1-hour talk show aimed at telling real 067-159-2005 stories, each on a particular topic, i.e. employment issues, apartment rent, social benefits and support from the local authorities, psychological support, integration and adaptation, etc. Rivne-1 also created a special IDPs-related website section. 8 TV-7 TV-Radio Tetiana Uralova, Editor- “Mariupol. City of Peace” April 1 – $4,755.77 TV-7 produced and broadcast 12 TV programs covering live Company (TV-7) in-Chief, tel. +380-629- TV content production September stories of soldiers and volunteers who protected Mariupol city – 34-94-53; : 30, 2015 the multinational eastern outpost of Ukraine – under the [email protected] conditions of Russian occupation of Donbas to foster trust and grateful attitude of Mariupol citizens towards Ukrainian military and voluntary groups. The programs were widely promoted via diverse media channels. 9 Uzhhorod Press Iryna Breza, Deputy Informational and Educational May 1 – $4,563.00 UPC is implementing a project to overcome the Trans- Club (UPC) Chairman of the Board, Campaign “Internally Displaced October 31, Carpathian people’s negative attitude and prejudice to their Uzhhorod Press Club Persons (IDPs): Life without 2015 compatriots from the Crimea and eastern Ukraine settled in the (UPC); Stereotypes” region, to promote tolerance towards IDPs and establish a Tel. +38-0312-61-60-07 dialogue between them, local citizens, and governments. The Page 68 Ukraine Media Project USAID Cooperative Agreement No. AID-121-A-11-00002 Annual Report October 1, 2014 – September 30, 2015 tools used: high-quality reporting pieces, topical TV programs, round-table discussions and photo exhibitions to produce the high- quality content and disseminate it via diverse information channels. 10 Radio station May 1 – $4,734.00 VL produced 20 IDPs-related radio programs aimed at setting Yakiv Brynza, manager, “We Have a Future” “Velykyi Luh” September up a dialogue between IDPs, local authorities and Zaporizhzhia 097-9111258, email: Radio content production 30, 2015 community. The main tasks were: assistance in integration of [email protected] IDPs in Zaporizhzhia community; promotion of social mobilization, and consolidation of regional community. All programs were broadcast on the Radio “Velykyi Luh” (Zaporizhzhia – 101,8 FM, Dniprorudne – 103,4 FM, Tokmak – 103,9 FM) that covers 85% of Zaporizhzhya region; and via Internet radio “Velykyi Luh” and “Rock FM”.

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