I never planned on becoming a journalist. In fact, it almost happened by coincidence. But it was my lucky day when I was hired by the Kyiv Post.
I was looking for a summer job and didn’t want to go to my hometown for the summer break at the university. I became a trainee at KP Media, which was Kyiv Post’s publishing house at the time, and ended up marketing one of the women’s glossy magazines of the company. But since I was fluent in English, I decided to transfer to the Kyiv Post. Back then, I would have never imagined that just a few years later I would be an M&A correspondent at the London headquarters of a $624 million company.
Maryna Irkliyenko at the Nordic Fundraising Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, on March 4.
Learning to become a Kyiv Post journalist was tough, mostly due to the high editorial standards of reporting and writing, that, now judging from my London experience, are no different from top newsrooms around the world. My editors at the Kyiv Post were local reporters for the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, and some of them were quite the characters. But it couldn’t be a better journalism school for me. Even now I struggle to see how the editors manage to make their copy that brilliant, particularly editorials.
In addition to acquiring journalistic skills, there were hurdles when it came to confronting people with some of their actions that they didn’t wish to be published. I still remember my interview with a senior executive at a bank who, to my question about his bank serving as a shield to the notorious billionaire Dmytro Firtash, began screaming at me, demanding to switch off the recorder. Luckily I was with a photographer and we managed to finish the interview peacefully.
Yet when I was back in the newsroom, another wave of threats and attempts to pull that question and answer from the story, followed. Their main manipulation was that they would stop advertising with the Kyiv Post, knowing how difficult the times for the paper were. Then they went to Kyiv Post’s CEO, arguing that we should preserve our good relations, hence we should take it out. The interview was published untouched, as it were.
Not surprisingly, one ambassador never agreed to have an interview with the Kyiv Post. To be precise, the interview was agreed and the date was being scheduled until their questions about checking and correcting quotes came. When they heard it wasn’t our editorial policy to allow sources to review the material before publication, that embassy went radio silent. It was funny to then bump into the ambassador at a party and asking what had spooked him so much. He felt awkward and pretended he ran out of business cards. We left it at that.
But as I was interviewing more and more ambassadors, I had found that it wasn’t just the country that he or she was representing but the personal element had played the role too. One time, I was about to speak to a newly arrived Swiss ambassador. Given the history between Swiss banking secrecy and Ukrainian oligarchs, with the questions that I had for him, I left the newsroom saying if I won’t come back I’m probably buried under the Swiss Embassy. To my great surprise, the ambassador was very polite and to the point, which seldom happens with ambassadors, in answering my very tough questions.
Yet my favorite was the Finnish ambassador, who not only invited me to her house for the interview, agreed to sit on a couch, which was better for the picture. After the interview was finished, she was genuinely interested in discussing how Ukraine could follow Finland’s example of breaking free the much bigger and powerful Russian empire.
“The Simpsons” animated TV show may have foreshadowed ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s fate with the portrayal of “Viktor from Ukraine” as a gangster.
Yet the cherry on the top of my Kyiv Post work experience was being able to write funky stories of my own. Be that my Victory Day family story, my trip to JLo’s concert, me tripping in a nightclub story or my story on “The Simpsons” animated TV sitcom making fun of President Viktor Yanukovych, my chief editor was delighted.
Indeed, the Kyiv Post embodies freedom of expression in many ways.
As it then happened I was relocating to London and one of my editors who was the Financial Times correspondent for Ukraine, recommended that I apply for a job at Mergermarket, which was part of the Financial Times group at the time. And here I am two and a half years later, thankful for the day I was hired by the Kyiv Post.
