On March 14, 2024, Russian exploding drones “Shahed” attacked the Lozova amalgamated territorial community in Kharkiv oblast of Ukraine that is just 50 km from the eastern frontline. 120 houses of civilians as well as the premises of local media company “Lozova” were damaged.

Since air explosives destroyed all equipment for signal transmission, the media was forced to stop broadcasting for two weeks for the first time since February 2022 – the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In fact, due to its proximity to the frontline, “Lozova” is under constant risk of shelling. This is because its studio is located in the City Council building, that might be a target of the Russian military, too.

Besides, “Lozova” including a TV channel, radio station, web portal and news production lacks qualified personnel a lot. Before the full-scale war, there were nine employees in the company and now there are only six. However, the newsroom still has to produce four hours of own content daily based on the license terms. The biggest challenge for the team in this regard is to do without professional cameramen as two of them were mobilized into the army. At the same time, “Lozova” is not able to offer competitive salaries to candidates because of the difficult economic situation in the country.

Adding to this, in 2024, “Lozova” started the transformation from municipal media company owned by City Council to a public broadcaster. Such transformation of all municipal media in Ukraine is required by a new law that Ukraine adopted upon the request of the European Commission. The introduction of this law is one of the evaluation criteria to join the European Union. As a result of this reform, “Lozova” will have to increase the share of its own content to 12 hours per day. In this view, the newsroom urgently needs more staff and financial support to produce this much local content for the audience.