You're reading: Jed Sunden looks back on 10 years with Kyiv Post and KP Publications

A decade at the forefront of an independent media in Ukraine

Each week we’ve been highlighting members of the local business community who have played leading roles over the years. This week, we talk to Kyiv Post publisher and KP Publi-cations founder Jed Sunden.

“I was in school from 1988 to 1992, when the walls were coming down. So I got interested in Soviet and Eastern European history,” says Jed Sunden, president of KP Publications, when asked about what brought him to Ukraine.

After majoring in history at Macalester College in Minnesota, Sunden ended up working, “sort of by chance,” on a privately funded research project that involved compiling a register of Jewish cemeteries in Ukraine, for preservation purposes. He came to Kyiv in 1993.

Speaking of those early days here, Sunden, 35, remembers being struck by the Lenin statues on the street, one of which of course still stands at the base of Shevchenko. “It’s a disgusting sight,” he says. “Ukraine should be ashamed of it.”

After setting up the research project and spending some time here, Sunden decided to start a newspaper.

Go English

“I was just a poor kid from Brooklyn with a dime and a dream,” he says of himself at the time. Knowing nothing about the publishing business and having a limited knowledge of journalism, Sunden charged ahead anyway.

“It’s a good business that makes money,” he says with a smile when asked why he went for it. “There were very similar papers throughout Eastern Europe – Moscow, Prague, Warsaw – and there was nothing here. So we tried to put it up.”

The first crew of what was then called the Kiev Post consisted of a half dozen people working in a two-room apartment in the Tatarka neighborhood in September, 1995. In mid-October they put out the Post’s first issue.

“We started with six or seven thousand bucks, so we didn’t have much time to mess around,” Sunden says. The money, he adds, was his personal savings. Later he added money he fronted on his credit card, before the paper actually started making a profit from advertising. After a couple of months, big advertisers like Beeper and Utel bought contracts, and the business unfolded.

Many now well-established expat businesses started up around at the same time, and were among the Post’s first advertisers.

“Of course, we got lucky, and you can see lots of advertisers who’ve been with us from those first issues: those real estate services that are still on the front page of the newspaper where they’ve been for ten years, Arizona, Uncle Sam’s group, Jones East 8.”

Six months after the Post launched, the Kyiv Business Directory, a comprehensive guide to the capital’s enterprises, appeared as an appendix to the newspaper. It soon grew into a separate project.

“We just felt there was a need for a Yellow Pages, and there was nothing there. We needed one to do business, so we took a database we were using for contacting advertising clients, reworked and reformatted it and sold it as a product. It went well.”

At the same time, he says, the Kyiv Post started significantly rising in popularity, in particular, due to editor in chief Igor Greenwald. Greenwald “set up a good base of bringing people in, of bringing in young Ukrainian journalists, and building that tradition.” Sunden says the institutional imperative to bring up young people through the ranks “was very helpful” for future projects. “Look at Korrespondent,” he says, referring to the Russian-language weekly news magazine that KP launched in 2002. “The core team there consists of young journalists we brought on from Kyiv Post.”

One of the reasons Sunden’s projects took off right away was the size of Kyiv’s foreign community. There were simply more foreigners here than there are now.

“USAID was a lot bigger,” he remembers, “and foreign companies had a lot more foreigners working for them. Coca-Cola and Phillip Morris had whole crews.”

The Post adjusted by taking local Anglophones into its readership.

“Because of problems with a free press in Ukraine, Kyiv Post has played a bigger role throughout the Ukrainian community than English-language newspapers in Prague, Warsaw, or Budapest did,” Sunden says. The Gongadze murder “was one of those cases where we were out front of the Ukrainian newspapers – in how we reported it, in how we called for President Leonid Kuchma’s resignation. That tradition continues to this day. Korrespondent continues that tradition in Russian-language press.”

Going broader

The financial crash of 1998 was an obvious survival test for the publishing company.

“The crash was a very tough one. We managed to maintain the Kyiv Post without reducing staff. We had some Russian-language publications that we had some big problems with.” Edinstvennaya, a women’s magazine, was one of those projects. Its staff was cut down and it was eventually sold out.

Sunden remembers that 1999 and 2000 were no easier, but for other reasons. The Kuchma government cracked down on press freedom, which was bound to particularly impact a company publishing a product like the Kyiv Post. Tax police launched harassing inspections on a weekly basis, and at one point in 2000 Sunden returned to Ukraine from Turkey to find that he had been declared persona non grata. Only after some diplomatic wrangling was he allowed back into Ukraine. He considered leaving Ukraine back then. “You know, when you’re sitting in the Boryspil airport and you’re not allowed back into the country, it sort of comes to you: Maybe I shouldn’t be here.”

“Since then the business environment has gotten a lot better, free press conditions have gotten a lot better,” he says, adding that KP Publications was fortunate not to face any harassment from graft-seeking bureaucrats or organized crime, as other businesses have.

In 2000, Sunden launched Bigmir.net, an Internet portal that grew into the largest informational portal on the Ukrainian Web. That project was followed in 2001 by Afisha, a glossy nightlife and entertainment guide that Sunden says “was a huge hit that captured the emerging middle class in Ukraine.”

Korrespondent hit the streets in 2002. Since then KP has released the consumer magazines Pink, for women; Idei Vashego Doma (Ideas For Your House); and Interior Magazin (Interior Shop). The latter two are useful home design publications, and were a result of cooperation with the Russian publishing house Formax Publications. Two more titles in the home design category will be coming out within the next six months. The Ukrainian version of the tech magazine Stuff is also published by KP Publications. Projects launched earlier are expanding as well. The Kyiv Business Directory has recently started publishing in Odessa and will soon be starting up in other cities, and Afisha is also on the way towards being issued regionally in the next couple of months.

“In every area we’ve been working on, we established ourselves as market leaders,” Sunden underlines. “Last year the company grew 40 per cent in revenues and even more in profits. This year we expect it this year to grow 40-50 per cent.”

Bigger, better

“Hopefully, running a much bigger company,” Sunden says with a smile when asked where he’ll be in another 10 years. Sunden believes that despite recent political complications, the Orange Revolution helped to improve the business environment in the country.

“The advertising market grew this year. Companies from Europe that didn’t consider Ukraine before because of free press problems are now very interested in entering this market.”

He’s particularly proud of KP Publications’ activities during the Revolution. The company printed out of 50,000 copies of a daily newspaper called Korrespondent Extra and distributed it free among protestors on Independence Square, while also shipping copies out to regions suffering from information blackouts. KP also set up its own tent on Bankova and worked around the clock to provide up to date news on the Korrespondent.net and Kyiv Post Web sites.

“I love Kyiv, I love my company,” Sunden says.

He says that from time to time he gets offers from people who want to use Kyiv Post or Korrespondent as a political tool, but his constant reply is this: “We stay out of politics.”“It’s obviously a good business, and I take it very personally. One of the things I like about Kyiv Post and Korrespondent also is that from time to time I can write articles and express my opinion. That’s something I like doing. A lot.”