In the first four parts of our series on the history of Ukrainian media, we discussed the development of television, online and regional media, and investigative journalism. In this edition, we turn to business journalism, a field that grew alongside independent Ukraine and the market economy that emerged here.
Telling us about it is Dmytro Koshovyi, veteran of economic journalism and winner of the “Best Business Editor of Ukraine” award at the Ukrainian Presszvanie competition in 2013. He has worked in the field for more than 30 years.
It is important to explain to readers from the outset that, until 1989, a market economy was effectively prohibited in Ukraine. Small-scale business, such as selling flowers or berries from one’s own yard near bus stops, was officially labelled “speculation” in the Soviet Union. Private property was prohibited, while currency exchange and possession of foreign currency were punishable by execution.
This was not merely a deterrent on paper: several “currency dealers” were executed in the 1960s. An underground black market existed throughout the Soviet period, including self-employed people who sewed clothes or made furniture at home, as well as those who rented out housing, usually rooms in their own apartments. But it remained underground. Organized business, especially chain-based or large-scale business, was simply out of the question.
When everything changed in 1989, a business culture had to emerge from scratch. It developed spontaneously and, in the collapsing Soviet state, which would cease to exist two years later, became associated with innovation, workarounds and, inevitably, crime. In the 1990s, when the institutions of the young Ukrainian state were still weak, criminal groups often replaced courts and police in disputes between businesspeople.
During these turbulent years, business journalism moved with the same current, producing its first reports, bold analyses, investigations, information leaks and more. It was not constrained by established standards, regulations or laws – only by the risk of an unofficial response from particular businesses or their criminal associates.
Over the years of independence, business journalism has evolved alongside business itself: from a spontaneous and unrestrained field into a serious, analytical profession whose work is followed by foreign colleagues and major international companies, just as they follow Ukraine and Ukrainian business more broadly.
How did it all begin? Dmytro Koshovyi explains.
In the 2000s, Koshovyi headed the economic news department at Interfax-Ukraine and was later appointed deputy director of the agency. Since 2024, he has led Interfax-Ukraine, one of Ukraine’s largest news agencies and one of the country’s leading business media outlets.
Koshovyi began his career in the 1990s at Finansova Ukraina, one of Ukraine’s first business publications.
“Finansova Ukraina and Biznes were based in Kyiv, while another well-known business publication, Halytski Kontrakty, was based in Lviv. But there were other publications as well, as far as I remember, including a strong publication in Kharkiv. It was a real boom. The Soviet Union collapsed, and business became very active. Small business, in particular, was developing rapidly, so these publications focused specifically on small business and were undisputed leaders in that segment. Of course, a Kyiv-based publication, precisely because of its location, was not so much obliged as simply positioned to be national in scope. So they followed government finances and politics and focused more on social and political issues, while small business was not their main topic,” the journalist says.
He says that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, entrepreneurial spirit and entrepreneurship itself finally began to revive in the country, and the emergence of business media was a direct response to that process. Readers and users appeared, and that was exactly why business media emerged.
“When I arrived, the movement toward new forms had already begun, at a time when people had accumulated some initial capital and were thinking about where to invest it. Personally, I worked with the stock market and privatization. Voucher privatization appeared, creating opportunities for the accumulation of substantial capital.
“So at Finansova Ukraina, we wrote a great deal about privatization. Because the publication was issued under a Financial Times license, it was still somewhat more focused on big business. We wrote about the creation of the first large private companies, and we wrote extensively about exports and imports because, at that time, there was still a lot of barter within Ukraine,” the journalist says.
It was during this period that the first business interviews and investigations emerged. At the time, they served as a training ground for developing journalistic skills; today, they are also artefacts and monuments to the journalism of that era.
“I am not a professional journalist. I graduated from a polytechnic institute, where my specialty was technical cybernetics. I ended up at a financial publication, and my main advantage was that I was good with calculations. I created stock-market indices there. In general, when economic journalism was first emerging in Ukraine, many people came into it from technical fields.
“Something happened to me once. There was some stock-market trading, and someone told me how one side had cheated the other out of money. I wrote about it, but then it turned out that they had resolved the conflict among themselves, and the person who had given me the information withdrew what he had said. That is how the media were used because, again, we did not yet have much experience. I often retold this story to young colleagues who later came to work with me,” Koshovyi says.
According to Koshovyi, business journalism reached its peak after the Orange Revolution, from 2005 to 2010, during the period of Ukraine’s strongest economic growth since 1991.
“It was strongly connected with the development of the stock market. There is, in principle, a kind of rule – I don’t know whether it is written down anywhere – that if a country has a stock market, then it has daily business publications. At its peak, Ukraine had, as I said, three daily business newspapers.
“When the stock market collapsed after the 2008 crisis, journalism began to ‘deflate.’ And I think the move online was, above all, an attempt to save money,” Koshovyi says.
The biggest challenge was the transition to online media. Soon after, many business outlets stopped publishing print editions.
“Unfortunately, as it turned out, this business model was killed in a very short period by major technology companies. And this is not only the case in Ukraine. I once attended a newspaper conference in Vienna and was very surprised when the first speaker, the head of the local journalists’ association, demanded that the prime minister, who was present, ban Google and Facebook. Yes, because they had stolen [many of the readers]. I think many journalists, and many people entering journalism, consider this one of the main reasons. It is not only that salaries are low now, but rather that the future itself is no longer visible.
“I hope that once the war ends and the market recovers, especially the capital market, the business journalism market will gain a new lease of life. Of course, it will take a new format, and of course it will be online. There will certainly be many elements involving artificial intelligence. But one way or another, responsibility for published material, the ability to communicate with sources of information, and the ability to find those sources will remain the prerogative of a human journalist,” Koshovyi says.