Mission
REFORM.NEWS (formerly REFORM.BY) is a team of journalists who have been professionally reporting on events in Belarus and around the world 24/7 for over five years. We see our mission as preserving the high standards of Belarusian journalism.
History
In 2016, the project “Reformation” (rfrm.io) was launched — a platform for exchanging opinions about the necessary reforms in Belarus. Over several years, it published hundreds of longreads about the changes our country needed. We cooperated with leading Belarusian think tanks and explained in simple terms the ideas that could help Belarus become a modern European state.
In 2018, the project moved to the Reform.by domain and evolved into a full-fledged media outlet with a news desk, reporters, and an investigations department. We continued our conversations with leading experts from Central and Eastern Europe about the future of the region and Belarus as an integral part of the European community. Our newsroom conducted dozens of important and high-profile investigations — into Russia’s hybrid influence, the migration crisis at the EU borders, the activities of secret services within the Belarusian diaspora, and the circumvention of sanctions by Belarusian authorities.
By August 2020, Reform.by had become one of the most popular socio-political media outlets in Belarus. Hundreds of thousands of Belarusians visited the site daily when the newsroom found itself at the epicenter of the events that unfolded after the falsified presidential election. Our journalists were detained and sent to detention centers.
In the summer of 2021, under the threat of criminal prosecution, the newsroom left Belarus. In August 2021, the Reform.by website was blocked in Belarus, and in February 2022, it was blocked or downranked on all major Russian services popular among Belarusians. The site’s daily audience dropped more than tenfold. We are now compensating for this decline by developing the project on alternative platforms.
On April 15, 2024, the OAC seized the Reform.by domain from the newsroom. The project continued its work under a new address — Reform.news.
Editorial Team
We managed to quickly restore operations, and not a single Reform.news employee went to prison. Since 2021, the team has been working from Warsaw as a newsroom in exile. Reform.news has a staff of just 10 people — managers, editors, and journalists. Our core audience remains with us — thank you!
Our compact team allows us to keep updating a detailed, unique, and timely news feed, produce in-depth analyses for stakeholders, conduct interviews and investigations, cover cultural events, and even create several original products for YouTube and TikTok. We release special projects on gender equality, civil society, Belarusian political history, and visions of democratic transformation in Belarus.
Reform.by regularly ranks high in the Media IQ monitoring for compliance with the standards of information journalism. Our editorial policy is based on facts and analysis.
In June 2023, the Reform.news newsroom became one of the laureates of the Free Media Awards 2023 for “reporting on the situation in Belarus under particularly difficult conditions.”
In 2024, the editor-in-chief of Reform.news received the Krzysztof Michalski Award for Belarusian journalists in exile.
At the end of 2024, Reform.news editor-in-chief Fyodar Pauluchenka was named “Journalist of the Year 2024” by the Belarusian Human Rights Community Award.
In September 2025, the Reform.news newsroom received two awards at the “Volnae Slova” competition.
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