Name: Taras Prokopyshyn
Age: 27
Education: Master’s degree in sociology from the National University of Lviv, master’s degree in innovations and entrepreneurship from Lviv Business School of the Ukrainian Catholic University
Profession: co-founder and head of The Ukrainians
Did you know? Prokopyshyn says he spends 150 percent of his time working on The Ukrainians. It should be easier now that it’s a family business, since Prokopyshyn married the co-founder and editor Inna Bereznitska.
Helping his fellow citizens be more proactive and responsible is what Taras Prokopyshyn tries to do with his online magazine The Ukrainians. Behind it, there is also an ambitious dream to build a quality media conglomerate — to which Prokopyshyn advances one step at a time.
It all started with some of Prokopyshyn’s own proactivity and that of his two friends right after the EuroMaidan Revolution, which ousted Kremlin-backed President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 22, 2014. Three friends pitched in their student scholarships to create a media in Lviv, a blog really, to tell stories of successful Ukrainians.
“We were actually constructing specific models of new Ukrainians,” Prokopyshyn says. “We didn’t like the discourse of Ukrainians as victims and sufferers. We wanted to talk about them in a positive way.”
The Ukrainians started publishing a big interview with a successful citizen every week — from Yaroslav Azhnyuk, a technology star, to Lyubomyr Huzar, the former supreme archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Prokopyshyn says it was a second job for the team of three, and it didn’t bring any profit.
“We now laugh at ourselves for that youthful exuberance. We saw it as a social project that can’t make money. But over time you realize that to grow and create a quality product, it has to pay for itself.”
After 18 months working as non-profit group, The Ukrainians took a break to run a fundraising campaign and sell two books of interviews. Both efforts succeeded by bringing them Hr 127,930 ($4,600) and more money in royalties from over 17,000 book copies sold.
In 2016 The Ukrainians relaunched as a proper online magazine, keeping the interviews, but adding special projects sponsored by brands that share the magazine’s values.
The Ukrainians also started to create literary reportage stories. These are not necessarily about successful Ukrainians — they often tell stories of people with disabilities, sex workers, immigrants, war veterans.
These stories rarely work for the sponsors who would like to see their logos next to stories of success. That’s why in their third relaunch next year, The Ukrainians will partition into several domains, like Reportage and Creatives — professional interviews with creative people. The Ukrainians website will remain the main umbrella platform with interviews and special projects.
“We are also incorporating Radio Skovoroda (a radio station in Lviv). And just like we said that we want to build a media holding of European quality — with our media ecosystem we are moving in that direction,” Prokopyshyn says.
