When Jed Sunden, 50, founded the Kyiv Post, he had a mere $8,000, three computers and seven staffers working from a small flat in Kyiv. He couldn’t predict that the newly-formed weekly would eventually win prestigious awards and draw global media attention.
It was in 1995, and back then, Ukraine lacked free press, its authorities weren’t used to criticism and few people read in English. The advertising market was struggling to the extent that some advertisements had to be bartered.
But by 1999, the Kyiv Post became solidly profitable. Sunden wrote many op-ed columns for the Kyiv Post. In them, he conveyed his libertarian and anti-communist views. As a publisher, he wasn’t perfect — he faced criticism for allowing paid “massage” ads from women engaging in prostitution — and he had a high turnover of chief editors.
But overall, his success was indisputable. He used the Kyiv Post to launch what at one time was one of the largest publishing houses in Ukraine, KP Media, with many magazine titles in its portfolio before he eventually sold the business, cashing out as a multi-millionaire.
During his 14 years of owning the Kyiv Post, he always protected the editorial independence on the news and opinion pages.
Standing up for editorial independence was not only the right thing to do, Sunden said in an interview with the Kyiv Post in 2009, it was good business. He said that without trust from the readers, the newspaper would have withered and advertisers wouldn’t have been interested.
“The Kyiv Post has done great reporting and built a strong legacy,” Sunden said. “There is still such a lack of news in English about Ukraine. Having an audience for this news — and the trust of this audience — is a tremendous asset.”
The financial crisis in 2008, however, devastated the advertising market.
American Jed Sunden holds the Kyiv Post newspaper on Feb. 7, 2010, in Kyiv. Sunden started the newspaper on Oct. 18, 1995, and sold it to Mohammad Zahoor on July 21, 2019, for $1.1 million. (Courtesy)
The Kyiv Post had always dominated its niche, but needed support nonetheless.
Fighting with the consequences of the crisis, the newspaper got a new owner in 2009 — Mohammad Zahoor, 65, who purchased it for $1.1 million from Sunden.
“I bought the Kyiv Post when it was under the financial crisis and previous owners were not sure what to do with (the newspaper),” Zahoor, who made his fortune in the Donetsk steel business, says.
Upon the purchase, Zahoor wanted to “give this piece of journalistic diamond a new lifeline” and even invested in running Russian and Ukrainian versions of the media — the investment that went sour because Ukrainians were “used to reading juicier stories rather than bare facts,” Zahoor now thinks.
Besides heavily investing in the publication, the publisher had also defended the newspaper’s independence many times, making the occasional misstep.
In 2011, ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s agriculture minister, Mykola Prysazhnyuk, tried to force Zahoor to stop publication of an interview that implicated the now-fugitive Prysazhnyuk in corrupt grain-exporting schemes. Chief editor Brian Bonner published the story and Zahoor fired him immediately.
Kyiv Post journalists went on strike before, five days later, Zahoor reversed the decision and reinstated Bonner as part of a four-member team of editors to ensure the paper stays independent.
Earlier that same year, oligarch Dmytro Firtash — now in exile fighting U.S. corruption charges — lost a libel lawsuit against the Kyiv Post in the U.K after a 2010 story about corruption in Ukraine’s natural gas sector. Zahoor supported the newspaper against the legal attack, spending $63,000 in pre-trial fees and hiring noted U.K. media lawyer Mark Stephens. The London court decisively dismissed Firtash’s claim, and Ukraine’s oligarchs stopped using the U.K. as a “libel tourism” hot spot because of changes in British law.
“My memories are also full of unsatisfied calls, sometimes hidden threats to my other businesses, demanding to back off with (stories), and attempts by ruling parties to buy the newspaper with the ultimate intention to either close it down or degrade it to a pocket newspaper,” Zahoor says.
Zahoor fired Bonner a second time in April 2013. But this time, it wasn’t related to the uncompromising editorial policy of the newspaper. Bonner had sharp disagreements with then-CEO Michael Willard over financial issues, and Zahoor initially sided with Willard. Four months later, he changed his mind — reinstated Bonner and let Willard go.
But aside from the 2011 incident, Zahoor never meddled into the editorial policy during his tenure as a publisher, and heavily invested to help the paper through two recessions — in 2008–2009 and 2013–2014. Meanwhile, the newspaper kept its immense trust among its readers.
Zahoor recalls that former U. S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Tefft, during a private dinner, went on to say that when he worked on the Ukrainian desk in Washington, he didn’t wait for communications from the embassy in Kyiv and composed his notes to his superiors based on reports from the Kyiv Post.
Tefft “knew that this newspaper never lies,” Zahoor says.
“For the quality of journalism, the Kyiv Post has always stood tall among its local colleagues and competitors, who were owned by the oligarchs and to whom independent journalism was alien,” he says. “The Kyiv Post has for years been acting as the savior of independent journalism in Ukraine.”
In 2014, the newspaper received the prestigious medal of honor from Missouri Journalism School “for superior journalism throughout the publication’s history.”
American Jed Sunden holds the Kyiv Post newspaper on Feb. 7, 2010, in Kyiv. Sunden started the newspaper on Oct. 18, 1995, and sold it to Mohammad Zahoor on July 21, 2019, for $1.1 million. (Oleg Petrasiuk)
With this legacy, after publishing the Kyiv Post for nine years, Zahoor sold the newspaper in 2018 to Syrian construction magnate Adnan Kivan, 58, for “much higher than” $3.5 million.
Kivan said he paid big money for a small newspaper, but supporting the Kyiv Post’s mission was worth the price. Kivan primarily sees independent journalism as “the No. 1 square” to building a democratic society.
“Without independent journalism, you cannot get democracy. This is why I tell you and I am telling myself openly: Investing in decent media resources, this is investments with God,” he said in an interview with the Kyiv Post shortly after he bought the media.
Kivan doesn’t have specific plans for the Kyiv Post, but hopes the investments he made will improve its commercial viability. After the takeover, neither staff nor advertisers, nor readers noticed any differences on news and opinion pages.
Still, changes in coverage inevitably reflect an owner’s interests.
The Kyiv Post has ramped up its coverage of the conflict in Syria, where people are seeking the overthrow of dictator Bashar al-Assad. In 2018, the newspaper even held a one-day conference titled “Bringing Peace to Syria & Ukraine.”
The Kyiv Post also pays closer attention to news in Odesa, the Black Sea port city of 1 million people nearly 500 kilometers south of Kyiv.
Editorial independence remained intact throughout the presidential and parliament elections in 2019 as well as coverage of the impeachment trial of U. S. President Donald J. Trump and the run-up to it.
When building the paper’s reputation in its starting years, first owner Sunden said he was aiming to create for Ukraine something the United States has in the New York Times or the Washington Post.
Twenty-five years later, the Kyiv Post isn’t quite there yet, but it remains one of the few Ukrainian media outlets that aren’t owned by an oligarch and thus remain independent.
If Kivan ever sells it, he vows to make sure the new buyer is committed to keeping its independence.
“I’m sure that Kyiv Post, the most independent media in Ukraine, will always be,” Kivan says. “I am grateful to God that I can sincerely support democracy, justice and independent media.”
