DAILY BEAST: The team of Russian journalists at Meduza, a newly created Internet news portal, no longer live in fear of the authorities shutting down their project. Finally, nobody is trying to fire their editor-in-chief, Galina Timchenko, for posting a story about Ukraine on their website. The Kremlin is far away—almost 1,000 kilometers away, in fact.
In order “to feel free and independent,” the Meduza team members tell The Daily Beast, they left their home country and chose a European city, the Latvian capital of Riga, to be their new base of operations…
Last March, the owners of the Moscow-based news site Lenta—one of the most popular news websites in the Russian blogosphere—fired Timchenko, then the site’s editor-in-chief. The official reason? Extremism. Under Timchenko’s leadership, Lenta had published a link to an interview with the Ukrainian ultranationalist leader Dmitro Yarosh, whose Far Right Sector had played a critical role in the Euromaidan revolution… (more)
EDITOR: A similar situation has occurred in Hungary. The Lancaster based publisher of both NewsLanc and the Budapest Beacon created a Hungarian language web site and engaged staff driven out of previously objective web sites.
