(NEW YORK)— As authoritarian regimes worldwide escalate their assault on independent media, PEN America and Bard College today announced the launch of Kronika, a new digital platform designed to safeguard journalism globally and ensure that the historical record cannot be obliterated by censorship.
The initiative is an expansion of the Russian Independent Media Archive (RIMA), which PEN America and Bard College launched in 2022 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. After three years of focusing primarily on Russian-language media, the project is now providing its expertise and technical solutions for the preservation of media in any language.
“What began as a response to escalating censorship in one country is evolving into a global institution to protect independent media everywhere,” said Ilia Venyavkin, Kronika’s director of programs. “With Kronika, we’re opening our tools and partnerships beyond Russia—to any newsroom or civic initiative confronting erasure—so facts remain verifiable, stories remain findable, and history remains public.”
Building the Digital Infrastructure for Press Freedom
The project began when independent Russian outlets were shut down or forced into exile, leaving virtually no independent media operating inside the country.
Since 2022, the RIMA project team has built an end-to-end digital preservation pipeline that ingests, processes, and makes materials searchable in both Russian and English, enabling rapid discovery and reuse by journalists, researchers, and the public. It has preserved a total of 149 independent media archives to date.
As RIMA began receiving requests from journalists eager to protect archives in other countries, the project expanded, and was renamed Kronika, meaning “chronicle” in Russian, honoring the ground-breaking periodical The Chronicle of Current Events, which documented Soviet human rights abuses from 1968 to 1983 despite immense risks.
Protecting Central American Journalism Under Threat
Kronika has also secured the archive of Radio Europe/Radio Liberty’s Russian Service and preserved Guatemala’s elPeriodicо and ten other independent outlets across Central America with the Central American Independent Media Archive (CAIMA) which went live at the beginning of this year through RIMA.
In 2023, elPeriódico—a cornerstone of Guatemalan journalism known for its fearless investigative work—was forced to close after nearly three decades. This shutdown occurred amid intense political persecution and the arrest of its founder, José Rubén Zamora. Its closure wiped out decades of reporting, cutting off access to insights vital to historians, policymakers, and the public; CAIMA was created to confront this erasure and to safeguard the investigative record in countries including Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Panama, that underpins our understanding of democracy and authoritarianism in Central America.
“Autocratic attacks on the media aim to destroy the historical record,” said M. Gessen, RIMA cofounder and a New York Times opinion columnist and distinguished professor at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism of the City University of New York. “Autocracies end, and to rebuild societies after them, preserving the record is essential. That’s what Kronika is designed to do.”
Tools and Training for Newsrooms At-Risk
At the heart of the new platform is Newsloom, a simple multilanguage toolkit that helps threatened newsrooms quickly create websites, even with minimal staff. In cooperation with founding partner Bard College, Kronika also works to incorporate the archive into teaching and research and trains students and journalists in essential skills like archiving, press freedom, and preserving historical memory.
“Authoritarians close newsrooms and try to erase history,” said José Zamora, regional director for the Americas of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a board member of the Newmark J-School foundation.
Zamora, who is the son of Jose Rubén Zamora, explained: “With CAIMA, our partnership with Kronika secures Central America’s independent reporting—from El Periódico and across ten other outlets—so evidence stays intact, accessible, and usable in courtrooms, classrooms, and communities. Preserving these archives isn’t nostalgia; it’s the infrastructure a region needs to rebuild public trust after censorship and fear.”
Defending the Right to Read and Write
Liesl Gerntholtz, managing director at the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Center, highlighted the broader mission: “PEN America’s fight for imprisoned writers is inseparable from defending the public’s right to read. Kronika embodies this principle: there is no freedom to write if readers cannot access the truth. By preserving independent reporting that authoritarian regimes seek to erase, Kronika strengthens the global ecosystem on which both writers and readers depend.”
Kronika will mark its launch with “We’ve Seen This Before: Lessons from Exile on Recognizing Authoritarianism” on December 10 at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY (New York). The conversation with Masha Gessen, András Petho (Direkt36, Hungary), Ramón Zamora (El Periódico/CAIMA, Guatemala), and Sevgi Akarçeşme (Turkey, in exile in New York) will focus on how to recognize the earliest signs of authoritarian drift, how information is deleted and erased, and how autocracy encroaches on independent media—the very problems Kronika is built to counter.
About PEN America
PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Our mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible. Learn more at pen.org.
About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year, residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,200 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in more than 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 13 programs; nine early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 165 year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.
Contact: Malka Margolies, [email protected], 929-383-1856