This story is part of the Transition Accelerator 2024 cohort series.
Meet Novaya Gazeta Baltia, a Russian-language media outlet serving the Russian-speaking communities of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Their mission is to highlight underreported stories and provide a significant, yet chronically underserved Russian-speaking audience in the Baltic states with verified information in their own language.
IPI’s Media Innovation team interviewed Novaya Gazeta Baltia’s editor-in-chief Yana Liashkovich, editor and project manager Konstantin Poleshkov, and UX/UI designer Serafim Romanov, to learn more about how the Transition Accelerator helped them turn an internal bot into a product that other newsrooms could benefit from.
An internal tool turns into a product for regional teams
Before joining the Transition Accelerator, Novaya Gazeta Baltia was struggling to keep track of fast-moving information in multiple languages across the Baltic states.
“We didn’t have enough staff”, Yana recalls. “By the time we saw a piece of news, 10 organizations had already published it.
The solution came through developing a Telegram bot that allowed them to spot “hot topics”, translate them quickly into Russian, and decide if they wanted to go deeper. The impact was immediate – faster coverage, and regional media republishing Novaya Gazeta Baltia’s stories more frequently.
Building on this momentum, their Accelerator project originally focused on integrating the bot into their CMS and adding translation features. Their coach pushed them to go even further, and think of the tool as a full-fledged product that could also support other newsrooms. The result is Konsky.Media.
Konsky allows journalists to find, track, and organize signals, story leads, and potential news content, all in one workspace. It offers web crawling, real-time tracking of Telegram, VK (ВКонтакте), Facebook, and websites, high-engagement post detection with customizable filters, AI-powered translation and summarization into a newsroom’s preferred language, automated keyword monitoring from all-over the VK platform, proxy access to blocked Russian government sites, and more.
Konsky.media features
Much of the product design came directly from user interviews. “Most of our users are small or exiled newsrooms, so you’ll find that none of them use monitoring tools regularly, and when they do, they use marketing platforms that require expensive subscriptions and include lots of features they don’t need”, says Konstantin. “Our mission was to give them what they actually need.”
One such example? “An editorial team told us that tracking hot topics on Telegram is cool,” says Serafim Romanov, UX/UI designer and journalist, “but sometimes the most important post comes from a channel that only publishes once a month, and you can easily miss it. So we added a zero sensitivity mode that lets users follow all posts from specific channels.”
Currently, 32 newsrooms have access to Konsky, with 11 using it actively and providing feedback that inspires new features. According to Konstantin, 98% of the teams using Konsky said it helped them work faster. In addition, they’re following more sources, which they couldn’t have tracked manually.
The impact on Novaya Gazeta Baltia’s reach has also been staggering. Within a quarter from implementation, their most engaged and loyal audience on Facebook grew from 24,000 to over 27,000 followers, and the views jumped from 800,000 to 4 million.
Beyond numbers and results, the team is thoughtful about how their technology is used and the ethical implications of AI.
“We integrate AI to support, not replace, journalists,” says Serafim. “We’re mindful of ethical concerns in our field, and final decisions always stay in human hands.”
Broadening the vision for long-term sustainability
As Konsky continues to evolve, the team is now shifting its focus towards building a sustainable future for the platform. “I think we’re reaching the end of the active development phase,” says Konstantin. “It’s great that many newsrooms come to us with new ideas and feature requests, but the volume of tasks keeps growing, and our team is small.” At this stage, additional resources are becoming essential.
The newsrooms that the team works with are small, often exiled, and under political pressure. “They shouldn’t be the ones carrying the financial burden of keeping this platform going,” Konstantin adds. That’s why the team is now exploring partnerships – with other startups, tech platforms, and funders.
Serafim highlights some of the steps they’ve already taken with the help of their accelerator coach: creating a landing page, translating it into English, and planning on sharing it with more groups to explore new use cases. The team thinks Konsky could be valuable not only for journalists, but also for researchers and NGOs. They also envision a potential to monetize the platform through a freemium model. No matter how the model transforms, however, one principle remains:
“For us, success means getting good feedback from the media that use Konsky”, says Konstantin.
The Transition Accelerator is part of the Media Innovation Europe programme (MIE), made possible with the support of the European Union.
