For many local journalists, accountability reporting is not something abstract; it is uncomfortably close. It involves people you know, institutions you rely on, and places that are part of your life. That proximity makes investigations both more important and much harder to sustain.

This is not only a Ukrainian media problem. It is a structural condition of local journalism almost everywhere.

Investigative reporting takes time, legal protection, editorial backing, and, frankly, a certain emotional distance. Local newsrooms rarely have any of these in sufficient measure. They are small, overstretched, and deeply embedded in their communities.

When pressure increases — whether political, economic, or, in our case, military — investigations are usually the first thing to disappear.

In Ukraine, during the full-scale war, this became very visible. Public spending grew quickly. Reconstruction started in many regions. The risk of corruption increased precisely when local media were at their weakest.

Newsrooms were dealing with blackouts, displacement, loss of revenue, and constant stress. They continued to report the news every day. But longer, systematic investigations — the kind that actually hold power accountable — became rare.

It would be easy to explain this by lack of resources – lack of funding as well as the lack of staff make investigative work even more challenging. But that explanation never felt sufficient.

The problem is deeper. It is not that journalists are unwilling to investigate. It is that, in most local newsrooms, there is no stable way to do this work.

Investigations are often treated as something extra. A motivated reporter might take one on. A grant might temporarily support it. An editor might try to make space for it between daily deadlines.

But structurally, this work sits outside normal newsroom routines. It depends on personal effort and, very often, personal risk. That model breaks under pressure.

And in Ukraine, it did.

Looking for solutions

At some point, it became clear that the question was not how to support individual investigations but how to change the conditions in which they happen.

In 2025, we at the Association of Independent Regional Press Publishers of Ukraine, together with partners WAN-IFRA and MBL (Norway), began working with 18 local and regional newsrooms across Ukraine to develop investigative journalism not as a content production system, but as an infrastructure.

Rather than funding isolated stories or providing standalone training, we designed and coordinated a shared investigative infrastructure — a central hub and umbrella system that made investigations operational across multiple independent newsrooms while preserving their editorial autonomy.

The idea was practical, but the shift was structural: to move investigations from the margins of newsroom activity into the core of newsroom functioning. This required a set of changes that, on the surface, looked hard but proved decisive. 

Local editorial teams started planning investigations in advance instead of squeezing them in when possible. Time for this work had to be protected, not borrowed from daily coverage.

Risks — legal, ethical, personal — were discussed collectively, rather than left to individual journalists to manage alone. Standards were aligned across newsrooms so people would not have to reinvent the process each time.

Working as a unit

Equally important was coordination. Instead of each newsroom trying to solve the same problems in isolation, we acted as a central coordinating layer — connecting planning, mentoring, expert support, and conditional funding into a single operating framework.

This did not remove pressure, but it made investigative work more predictable, protected, and repeatable.

The shift was gradual, but noticeable. Editors began to choose fewer stories but with more impact. Journalists were less dependent on personal motivation alone to pursue difficult topics. Local investigations did not become easy, but they became possible.

Over seven months, all participating newsrooms consistently produced investigations, resulting in 70+ published stories. (Today, that number has surpassed 120.) A curated selection of 13 investigations demonstrates not just output, but the consistency and depth this model makes possible.

There was also an unexpected moment in one newsroom when, after publishing an anti-corruption investigation, the publisher intervened directly. The entire team decided to leave and start a new independent outlet.

This was not something we planned for, but it showed that when journalists operate within shared standards and have peer backing, they are more likely to act together and to defend those standards.

That, in many ways, is the real change.

A message for all newsrooms

What this experience suggests goes beyond Ukraine. Local newsrooms in many countries face similar constraints: limited resources, political pressure, legal risks, and fragmented audiences. In such conditions, investigative reporting cannot rely on individual effort alone.

If we want accountability journalism to survive, we have to treat it less as a project and more as part of the underlying structure of newsrooms. Not something exceptional — something expected.

Journalism does not survive because conditions are stable. It survives when it is built to function even when they are not.

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