On April 11, 2024, the journalist of a hyperlocal Ukrainian media company “Lan” started the morning show with informing the audience – the residents of a small town Stryi in western Ukraine – about a massive missile attack that had shaken the entire town just a few hours before.

Stryi is one of the main and largest transportation hubs in Lviv region (80 km away from the border with Poland) with the population of around 60,000 people. Since the Russian army intends to destroy the critical infrastructure facilities in the town, it has been systematically suffering from heavy air shelling for several months.

Another challenge for “Lan” consisting of a TV channel and two radio stations is a very slow recovery of the local advertising market. According to the All-Ukrainian Advertising Coalition, if to compare the size of advertising market in USD in 2021 and in 2023, it has recovered by only around 52%.

The situation gets more difficult due to a massive mobilization of men into the army. “What affects us the most is that there is simply a catastrophic lack of specialists in the company because our cameraman has joined the army, and radio presenter went missing at war”, says Olha Novak, journalist and editor-in-chief at “Lan.” Currently, the newsroom has only two employees – a journalist and a cameraman. It cannot offer proper salaries to more staff members.

Certainly, poor funding and lack of specialists affected the content production. Now, it is mainly informational because the genre variety requires more employees, time and equipment. Moreover, “Lan” looks for support from local volunteers. They shoot important events and send the videos to the newsroom to be used in reports. This cooperation between the “Lan” journalist and the audience demonstrates that the demand of local community for the latest breaking news about both progress of the war and local events is only increasing. Therefore, the newsroom seeks for more support to be able to provide the community with the information it needs.