Digital platform aims to preserve journalism from outlets closed or threatened

NEW YORK (AP) — A new digital platform designed to combat censorship is being established to preserve the archives of news outlets that have been shut down or are facing extinction in authoritarian countries.

The platform is called Kronika, Russian for “chronicle,” in honor of The Chronicle of Current Events, which kept track of human rights abuses in the former Soviet Union from 1968 to 1983.

A joint project of PEN America and Bard College, it’s an expansion of a three-year-old program devoted strictly to outlets shut down in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Past work is kept online and has been made available to researchers in Russian and English languages.

“There was no public record, except the public record of propaganda,” said M. Gessen, a professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

Kronika has recently secured the archive of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Russian service, with the organization fighting for survival because of Trump administration budget cuts. It has also preserved the work of Guatemalan investigative publication elPeriodico, which was forced to close in 2022, and 10 other outlets in Central America, organizers said.

The $1.2 million project is funded through private donors, with the largest gift coming from Peter Barbey, a former publisher of New York’s late Village Voice.