Kyiv Post staff writer Anna Yakutenko has won a 2018 fellowship from Alfred Friendly Press Partners. For six months, from March through September, she will work at a U.S. newspaper and study at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.
The program selected Yakutenko from among four Kyiv Post applicants to become the newspaper’s fifth fellow in as many years.
Yakutenko, a 22-year-old journalist from Kyiv who has yet to be assigned a host newspaper, says that she wants to focus on video production and motion design “to make greater stories devoted to human rights issues and social injustice.”
Yakutenko, a graduate of Kyiv’s Institute of Journalism of Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University, came to the Kyiv Post as an intern in 2014. Within a year, she was a website editor and then became a lifestyle reporter in 2016. Yakutenko has been one of the leading journalists in the Kyiv Post Journalism of Tolerance project that highlights challenges faced by sexual, ethnic and other minorities in Ukraine, as well as people with disabilities and those living in poverty.
Alfred Friendly (1911-1983) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. (presspartners.org)
Yakutenko has been also producing weekly audio podcasts that feature interviews with staff writers and editors of the Kyiv Post about the most important stories of the week. She also made a series of video interviews with successful young Ukrainians within the Kyiv Post’s Top 30 Under 30 award.
“I would like to bring to the Kyiv Post another great format — short documentary movies devoted to some problem or significant person. To be able to make such movies — that would be my assignment for the fellowship,” Yakutenko says.
This year, the Kyiv Post was required to raise at least $15,000 — or 60 percent of the estimated $25,000 in costs. In the past, the program has covered most of the expenses.
The fundraising campaign got a big boost with a $10,000 donation by Ukrainian entrepreneur and philanthropist Vasyl Khmelnytsky’s K. Fund.
Khmelnytsky, whose wife Zoya Lytvyn is a Kyiv Mohyla Academy journalism school graduate and former Kyiv Post intern, said he saw the donation as a worthy opportunity to support lifelong learning.
“My team and I travel around the world a lot, looking for new innovative solutions. I know how important it is to learn from successful leaders, and then implement the breakthrough ideas in your business back in Ukraine,” Khmelnytsky said. “Only this way leads to changes for the better.
I supported this program because it’s built on this practical model, and it supports the development of professional and independent journalism, which is vital for Ukraine’s development.”
Kyiv entrepreneur and philanthropist Vasyl Khmelnytsky donated $10,000 to cover 40 percent of the cost of a six-month fellowship won by Kyiv Post staff writer Anna Yakutenko. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Additionally, the Kyiv Post has raised $5,710 in a GoFundMe crowdfunding campaign, receiving most of the 22 donations within two days of launching the request.
David Reed, program director of the Alfred Friendly Press Partners and one of the campaign contributors, said he was “happy to invest in Anna, which is also an investment in the Kyiv Post, because the fellows have proven to have a positive impact when they return home.”
The program was started by Alfred Friendly (1911–1983), a Pulitzer-Prize winning Washington Post journalist who was the newspaper’s managing editor from 1955 to 1965.
The Kyiv Post’s four previous fellows were: Yuliana Romanyshyn in 2017; Olena Goncharova in 2016, Oksana Grytsenko in 2015 and Anastasia Forina in 2014. Goncharova and Grytsenko worked at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, while Romanyshyn and Forina worked for the Chicago Tribune.
Kyiv Post chief editor Brian Bonner expressed gratitude to Khmelnytsky and all contributors to the GoFundMe campaign, particularly the two largest donors — Kyiv Post publisher Mohammad Zahoor, who gave $1,500, and Alex Matey, a Ukrainian native who is a Google site reliability director in the San Francisco Bay area. He gave $1,700. Both have also given in previous years.
“We’re blessed to have such support for independent Ukrainian journalists,” Bonner, an American who worked for more than 20 years at the St. Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota. “The Kyiv Post is a stronger newspaper because of the skills that the fellows learned in America and brought back home to the newspaper. And they’ve each been good ambassadors of Ukraine, bringing a greater understanding of the nation and its challenges, particularly in journalism, to my homeland.”
