What is ‘Russia Insider’ and who is behind it?

What is Russia Insider?  First, it’s a volunteer movement – An alternative news publication, driven by regular folks and citizen journalists from all over the world, leading the fight for honest journalism taming the trillion dollar, co-opted corporate media beast. Like truepublica, it’s also a non-profit organisation.

They now have up to 15 paid staff, still working out of an apartment/office in Moscow. They have now got over 300 volunteers from all over the world, publishing about 20 articles/day with blistering success.

They are standing on the shoulders of people like Glenn Greenwald, Chris Hedges, Robert Parry, Ben Swann, and many others. Same issue, different angle.

And empowered citizens who contributed to making Russia Insider a runaway success have something to cheer about.

From Russia Insider:

We did what we said we would  

About 3,400 people from around the world who are fed up with the appalling, war-mongering, anti-Russian bias of the US and European media trusted us with a relatively modest sum in 2015, amounting to about $130,000, and we created an information sledgehammer which knocked a gaping hole into the Western media narrative.  This might be a world record in cost / benefit.

How did we do it?  Grit, Sweat, and Tears – a lot of people who very much care about this gave their time and passion and worked for free, or subsistence wages, to get the word out.  That is how.

(Current fundraiser here)

We are reaching A LOT of people

About 1 million people visit our site every month.  That is extraordinary, considering that we started as a small blog in Sept 2014 and have done everything on a shoestring.

Our material is widely picked up by other sites, meaning millions more read our articles every month.

We received over 50 million page views in 18 months.

Our Youtube channel received 37 million views last year, and 70 million minutes of watch time. It has 65,000 subscribers.

We have over 130,000 followers on social media.  Our posts and tweets have a reached tens of millions.

We double in size every 8 months or so

We do not see an end to this rapid growth anytime soon.  The Trump / Sanders phenomenon reflect a huge demographic waking up to the reality that they have been misled and poorly served by their media.

We’ve achieved critical mass and have broken out of the media blockade and are reaching a wider and wider audience.

(Current fundraiser here)

We are having a yuuuge impact

It is not just the numbers we are reaching, it is who is reading us.  Top politicians, business leaders, and influential journalists are being influenced..  We are regularly cited across the media.  Our contributors regularly appear on television.  It is making a big difference.

The truth is winning.  This is no time to let up the pressure.

Russia Insider is as good an example of democratic citizen activism having an enormous effect as you are likely to find.

The tide is turning, and we are an important part of this historic process.

This is no time to let up.  On the contrary, we should nurture and support this phenomenon and thereby make the world a better place.

Go to the campaign!

Just because the name ‘Russia’ is there, doesn’t mean the organisation is full of bad guys – on the contrary. And, accessing more than one news source to balance your world view is very important today, more than ever.

Importantly, this isn’t just about Russia , It’s about our media failing us on many subjects. The goal is to scrutinize, identify mistakes, check the facts, to keep them honest. Russia Insider wants to cover a lot more than Russia. In the end, this matters for everyone.

---