The Press Box - Tim Mak on Reporting From Ukraine, Going Solo for Substack, and the Life of a War Correspondent

Episode Date: June 21, 2023

Bryan is joined by journalist Tim Mak in Kyiv to discuss his time reporting from Ukraine. They talk through his time in the country when the invasion began, why he decided to return to Kyiv to continue war coverage, and his unique, journalistic style, which captures an immersive picture of life in Ukraine. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Tim Mak Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Derek Thompson, the host of the podcast, Plain English. We tackle technology, politics, culture, history, everything that's happening in the world and why it matters. New episodes of Plain English drop every Tuesday and Friday on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Press Box's final edition. Brian Curtis in the Ringer here, along with producer Erica Servantes. Our guest today, Tim Mack, reported from Ukraine for National Public Radio from the very beginning. of the Russian invasion.

After leaving NPR in May, he's gone back to Ukraine on his own. He now writes a substack newsletter the counteroffensive, which he calls the first substack dedicated exclusively to war correspondence. He also calls it a bet against cynicism and ignorance and apathy.

He joins us from Kiev where it's Wednesday evening. Tim, welcome to the press box. Hey, thanks so much for having me. Let us start back last February when the Russian invasion began. You were there covering it for NPR. What was the first day of the war like? You can talk to any Ukrainian and they'll tell you that that was the longest day of their

lives, right? That no one will ever forget that day. Everyone has extremely vivid memories of it. I had just landed in Kiev the night before the invasion on one of the last commercial flights into Ukraine before the invasion was about to start. And I had a drink with a friend who had covered 16 wars already. And he said, don't worry about it. It's not going to happen. But as it happened, the next morning he was about to cover a 17th morning. And I remember at 3 o'clock in the morning rolling over, just jet lagged and seeing a phone call from my editor.

And he said, you better get downstairs. Something is happening outside. And I remember very, very clearly that I was in such a state of shock that I hadn't unpacked anything. I was on like the 26th floor. Don't quote me on this. I was on the 26th floor of some hotel. And I remember I just staggered over to the bathroom. I started brushing my teeth and looking at myself and thinking,

what am I doing out of here? What is happening right now? And that's how that first morning started. And what do you do in an instance like that? Do you just go downstairs and walk out the door and look up at the sky? No. I mean, you go downstairs, you make sure you're safe. I remember that morning, a lot of people were hostile to foreign journalists right before the invasion started because they felt that foreign journalists were overhyping the prospect of the war.

And so we went down into the basement and there was a hotel worker there. And he began to lecture us. And he said, what are you guys doing? You guys are so bad for the tourism industry, our industry, this hotel's business, you guys are scaring away everyone because you guys are overhyping this war. And he hadn't realized that the war that he was accusing us of overhyping had started. And I remember we were standing there waiting to try to figure out what we're going to do. And he didn't say anything. He didn't apologize.

He brought us a few chairs kind of wordlessly as a sort of like, okay, you guys, you guys were, you might have been right on this one. Why did you want to cover a war? Well, I didn't sign up to cover a war. You know, I mean, I signed up for what was originally two weeks of eating Georgian food and shaking hands with diplomats. But the war kind of came to me. So, I mean, I have a long history as a journalist, but I also have been an Army combat medic and spent five years in the West Virginia Army National Guard. I've covered national security for most of my career. And what's true is that if you look around at the best national.

security reporters, the people I look up to most, actually on the civilian side and on the military side, they've all had their experiences with war. And I've always wanted to join that category of people who have had that experience. And it wasn't really kind of up to me originally. But now I've started, you know, as you mentioned, a new organization over at counteroffensive. News and obviously our reporting is pretty aligned and dedicated to the war that's happening right now. So this spring you left NPR where you'd worked for more than five years. What happened there? Well, as you know, the NPR had a period of layoffs and they laid off about 100 people.

and while I was not in the initial kind of targeted round of layoffs, I basically, around May or late April, you know, I was affected by, among other things, the layoff of a friend and colleague. And so I decided to take their spot in the layoffs and left as part of those layoffs and try to start something now. You left so that they could stay, essentially? Yeah, I made a separate deal in which this person would be rehired and I would take their spot. Why'd you want to go back to Ukraine?

It's funny because I told myself last fall, I would never come back to Ukraine. And here I am living here. There's this allure, right? There's this, when you're telling stories here, it's, you feel like you're mixed up in this wild jumble of emotions. I like to compare it to having a cup. And when you're walking around, most of the people you're talking to, they're having the worst day of their lives or remembering the worst day of their lives. And you have a little cup, and they pour a little bit of their sadness and their grief and their anger into it.

And kind of walk around collecting these stories. But in a lot of ways, you're kind of also any feeling empathetic person also kind of takes on some of those things. And so last fall, I kind of felt like I had had enough of that. And kind of told myself, you know, I think I'm good. But then I left for a while and I started thinking about it. And it was just true to me that the most, the work, some of the most important work that I've ever done has been here. And the kind of human interest-driven narrative work that I'm doing now, that the war,

kind of calls to you, it beckons to you, because that's where some of the, some of the stories with the most kind of human impact reside. You told Slate of your work at the counteroffensive. My concept of this is to do war correspondence in its historic form, writing letters back home. What do you want those dispatches to read like? I kind of have a theory that one of the reasons for so-called Ukraine fatigue is that people just don't want to read about the booms and the bangs. They don't want to know this village you've never heard of has been liberated or that village has been what have you. And that the statistics can be mind-numbing, even statistics about death and injury and war crimes.

So the idea of the counteroffensive is to create a much more human personal perspective of the war. We don't write about explosions in Kiev. We go and find, as we did a few weeks ago, a sketch artist who works at the Kyiv Zoo. And he was sitting close to where, or he was sitting close to where the night before, a ballistic missile got shot down and the shrap and sliced through a tree at the zoo. And we learned not only about his experiences of those explosions, but we learn about what's it like being a sketch artist during the war, his shame for doing sketches in a zoo when he feels like he has such a high level of art education.

We learn about the human, and in the process, we are kind of almost incidentally, accidentally, learning about the facts of the war itself. So it differs greatly from an Associated Press or Reuters story, which would just say at the very top, well, there were 13 Shaheed attacks and 12 of them were shut down by air defense, as an example. we want to experience the war through human eyes. And so when I talk about these dispatches, I think of them, like you were saying, in its oldest form, war correspondence as writing a letter home,

writing back to an audience that is really interested in seeing this war on ground level. I love that piece you mentioned about the sketch artists and about the shame he was feeling for having to sit there in a zoo and do pencil sketches for customers. He told you, I was in the drawing academy. Portraits are not seen as prestigious in our circles. It's like a musician playing in an underground bar or like a prostitute on the side of the road. And then he's sitting there sort of drawing for people who were visiting the zoo that,

incidentally, as you say, a piece of shrapnel had landed in the day before. Yeah. And we try to do that sort of journalism for all sorts of news events. You know, when the Kakofka dam was breached, we went to Depriasia and we watched as the water level dropped. And we talked to the fishermen who were watching as their livelihoods were slowly disappearing. You know, we looked at the flooding in Her Son from the perspective of a teacher who recalls all sorts of drills that they used to do for children in case there was ever a dam breach. You know, we did, we profiled a nuclear engineer who was working at the Zaporasian nuclear power plant when the Russians occupied that area and he worked for quite some time. And he told, together we went to the Chernobyl Museum in Kiev.

We talked about nuclear safety and this crisis that's emerging. So that's kind of our concept, is that we try to tell the news a single or two. to human individuals and you learn about who they are and their central place in some of the news stories of the day. You laid out some of the things you need to report on the site, body armor, medical kits, car rentals, recording equipment, emergency supplies, plus paying your interpreter and co-reporter. How much does all that cost each month?

It fluctuates based on travel, but it's extremely expensive. gas, for example, is extremely expensive because we're in a war zone. On the other hand, rent is, the rent prices are deeply depressed because people don't want to, people don't want to really live in Ukraine, or I don't want to say Ukraine, but there are certain areas, like the one I reside in, that are less, let's say, where there's a, a, a, less of a market than there used to be because of the situations of the war. So it fluctuates pretty deeply. And I'll just say that we're in our first, you know, month and a half of operation. So it's hard for me to give you firm numbers. We've had a lot of like launch costs, you know,

getting everything off the ground. I hope to have a better kind of long-term figure for you later. I mentioned your interpreter and co-reporter's names Ross Pellick. What's his contribution to your reporting like. He's critical. I mean, Ross is a really fascinating guy. He's into Stoic philosophy. He self-taught himself English when he moved to London. He's a former boxer and he's a big guy. Sometimes people think that he's in the Azov Battalion or something like that. He's a very kind of, he's one of those people who will forget like a very pedestrian term in English, but he'll remember a philosophical term from Marcus Aurelius or something like that. He is just, I could not do my work without him. And our partnership has been really important. It's the sort of partnership that

pretty much any international or any international correspondent realizes they need when they show up in a place and they realize they're a stranger there and they don't understand not only the language but the customs, the history, the people. And they need a little guide because they and we are kind of traveling blind. I've been learning a little Ukrainian. I've been traveling throughout the country. I've been learning about the culture and the language and the food, which are all things that we like to cover at the counteroffensive. But I'm still obviously a real newbie to all of these, all of these things. How have you found it reporting without an editor?

I have a copy editor. I have a freelance copy editor. I realize from the very beginning that, just like a doctor is their own large patient, right? Like, you can't, you can't edit your own stuff. And the freelance copy editor has more than proven their worth to me. and pointing out, you know, not only simple typos, but also this doesn't make any sense. It made sense in your head, but it doesn't make sense than anyone else's head.

In general, with great power comes great responsibility. I think I have been very risk-averse in the first month and a half or so of running this. I realize that there can be this instinct to say, oh, the same thing. safety rules that we had at a big news organization. They're all cast off. We can do whatever we want. I am really hoping to report safely with my team in Ukraine for a long time. And what that means is making sure that we have the right gear,

making sure that we have the right procedures. And so we're building that, and it's taking time. But we're building that. We're growing our team. We're making sure that we have the equipment that we need to report. But I'm not ready to rush to the front line just yet. Because I think that, you know, I think about all the really amazing editors I've had over time and what they would do. Some might actually run to the front line now that I think of it.

But most of the leaders that I have think, most of the great leaders that I've had, the privilege of working under, they put their team before themselves. And I really look up to that philosophy and I'm hoping to apply it best I can. Let me ask a little bit about your day-to-day operations there. How did you get back into the country most recently? I went to Warsaw. I hitched a ride across the border, and I took a train from Lviv to Kiev. And crossing the border into Ukraine is a difficult experience, easy experience? You know, right now not a lot of people are trying to get back into Ukraine.

Leaving has traditionally been a little bit more difficult. It really depends on the – it's like the border crossing between Canada and the United States, right, between Poland and Ukraine. It really depends on the time, whether it's a special weekend, what day at the week it is, and so on and so forth. And I managed to get through with no problems. It's not my first time, so I had a good sense of what to expect. And journalists are generally given wide berth. You said on Twitter about life in Kiev that you can buy a Big Mac. There are open-air terraces, and yet there is also this sense of terror.

So help us understand back home what is living in Kiev like day-to-day. It's really, like, I was trying to convey a sort of, Kiev is a beautiful, majestic European city. It is, the sun is setting right now, and I can see outside my window, this kind of orange color falling along the buildings here in central Kiev. And there are moments like this where you look around and you think, my gosh, this is beautiful.

And then you can go down the street and you can get sushi or you can get, you know, an espresso or something like that. And then everyone goes home before the curfew and around three or two o'clock in the morning or four o'clock in the morning, there'll be an air alarm. And on many, many nights, there'll be an explosion. And you don't know whether, you know, if you're just jumping out of bed, you don't know if that's a hit. or if that's air defense intercepting something, that there's a sense of kind of some of the finer things in Europe, but also at the same time, there's death and destruction and fear.

It's hard for me to explain that. There's this big controversy in the last few weeks about a video that was posted on Twitter. The video showed a McDonald's in Kiev. And there were young people ordering, you know, know, obviously, McDonald's foods, your Big Macs and your McNuggets. And the big question that some people raised from that was, well, how can this be a war zone when there's such a nice McDonald's there?

I find it hard to describe to people that there's death and there's a McDouble here. He was actually attacked yesterday morning by two dozen Russian drones, most of which were reportedly shot down. but that set off the air raid sirens too. One thing I thought was so interesting about some of your writing is you'll often have a sound clip posted in the middle of an article in one case and one of these midnight time attacks you talked about. The idea there is what for readers? Honestly, I'm just experimenting.

I'm doing this new thing. I'm trying to see if people like this sort of journalism I'm doing, this narrative, kind of immersive feeling, right? I you know one good example of this is the story we did on on Bachmoot as it fell we we did it from the perspective of an American fighter who had been there just a few days ago and we have this point of view video feed where he's running through the ruins of that town and you can hear the explosions and you can see the destruction all around you could see him kind of scurrying to and from to avoid becoming a target It's in that kind of spirit that I post that audio. I didn't take the audio actually thinking that I was just kind of was taking a video and I was thinking, what is going on here?

And then this big explosion happened that shook the building and shook the windows and kind of vibrated in my chest. And I thought, I should probably post that somewhere. And one of the big challenges is, right, if you take a video and you post it on, online, people know where you live because it shows the skyline. So I ended up just taking the audio from that and posting the audio only. You wrote a story I really enjoyed too about a Ukrainian drone pilot that you met in a hospital. And he had this quote. He said, the length of the war goes on and on and people are starting to think it is normal.

It is not normal. How have you seen Ukrainians grapple with that idea of a new normal? It really fits in with this idea of the McDonald's thing that we talked about, right? Like if I were to walk out of my building now and walk into an area of Central Kiev, you would see that on this kind of early summer night, there are people outside enjoying a cocktail and having dinner. There's no air raid alert right now. There's no air raid alert right now.

And so people are out enjoying their lives. And when soldiers see this, on the one hand, they're very conflicted, right? On the one hand, this is the sort of normalcy that they're fighting for. They want Ukrainians to be able to do this. On the other hand, they're worried that there's a growing disconnect between the people who are fighting and dying and those who are civilians. And look, there are a lot of Ukrainians working in civilian capacities to help the Ukrainian war effort. But there's also a substantial group that is maybe as a coping. mechanism even trying to tune it out best they can i had this conversation this week with a

couple folks who were in kiv and we were we were arguing about you know the economic front and someone said that having dinner in kiev was an act of resistance against the russians kind of like a like a middle finger to the russians because it's you know it's like uh because the russians are trying to end this sort of normalcy and there was a bit a really spirited debate ensued, but whether that was sufficient to qualify as resistance or whether eating a meal, as we do every day, is a necessary part of life and therefore not enough to count as your contribution to the war effort. Obviously, the economy needs to go on, but this is the sort of debate that's happening in here. What do you need to do if you want to venture outside the city

to report a story? Grab the body armor, grab the first aid kit. get a rental car and make sure that the area you're going to is an area where you can travel into safely and is an area which you're permitted to report. Now, the Ukrainian government has created this zone system in which certain places near the front lines are not accessible to journalists. And so that's caused some friction, as you can imagine. But you know, you do your safety checks, you get your safety gear, and hopefully you have a good story in mind. I was going to ask you about the government, because Semaphore had an interesting story recently about the press office, vetting journalists, and then also allowing them or not allowing them

to travel to certain areas. What's your experience been like with that office? I haven't run into them very much. I'll tell you a couple things. Firstly, I know that a lot of reporters have had issues with this zone system. But in general, My interactions with the Ukrainian government in terms of press are non-existent. I don't run into them in the field when I'm reporting or interviewing people. And so maybe it's a sign of how I need to push a few more buttons. But so far, I haven't crossed anyone in the Ukrainian government. You said on Twitter this week, we're gearing up for our next reporting rotation.

What's that going to involve? Well, so it's really interesting because thinking about what I said about, you know, hitting my limit last fall and one of my kind of personal hopes in reporting is to do six weeks on, two weeks off schedule. And to take a break. So I haven't had a day off in quite some time. And so my former Daily Beast colleague, Chris Albright, was going to come in for two weeks and take over. take the reins over. I'll still be editing and working on the project. But that will be a really interesting rotation. He sent me a list of very, very cool ideas. And Chris Albrunton, if you will remember, he was the person who kind of pioneered the sort of journalism that I'm

doing now, the crowdfunded war correspondents. He launched back to Iraq in 2003, 2004 time period. And he was the first independent, crowdfunded journalist. And so I'm very pleased that kind of help him continue that tradition a little bit and have him do some guest writing and guest reporting for the counteroffensive. And for your two weeks off, where do you go? Unfortunately, I still have plenty of work to do. I'll go to Warsaw, I'll go to London, and I'll take other kinds of meetings and try to keep pushing things forward. But I'm, you know, the thing is that there's this low level stress in Ukraine, kind of like you never really, you're always anticipating that something bad will happen.

And when you step out, there's a noticeable kind of shift in feeling, I think. And so just even if I'm working relatively hard in Poland or in the UK, it'll be less, it'll be less stressful. last question for you tim from reading way too many books and more to the point watching way too many movies i have a vision of the classic war correspondent bar which is full of ambitious hot dogging journalists who are swapping stories and comparing notes does that exist in keve there's a bar not far from me it's called the journalist but it is sadly but sadly it is closed and has not been open for the period of time in kev that i've been um You know, it's interesting, right? Because when you talk to people who worked in the Baghdad press corps during the invasion of Iraq or in Kabul, there was a real kind of press, like a natural foreign press corps. This country is so big and the stories are so diverse that everyone is kind of running around the country. And there hasn't, unless I'm not invited to the party, there hasn't been kind of a, there hasn't been kind of a, you. as far as I can tell, a unified kind of press core type bar.

But if there is one out there and someone's just not told me about it, you know where to find me. Consider this the invitation. You can read Tim Max Dispatches at the Counteroffensive on Substack, Tim. Be safe. And thanks for coming on the press box. Thank you so much. All right, that's the press box. I'm Brian Curtis, production magic.

as always by Erica Servantes. I said on Monday, this is the beginning of the press box's summer vacation, or actually my summer vacation. It's my family and I's first. Big, big trip

since before the pandemic. I'm going to go to the UK for a few weeks. But fear not, there are going to be new pods here every Monday for the next three weeks. We're going to start

this next Monday, June 26th, with a little media movies chat. You know, I love me. media movies. I've got the director of one of the best recent movies about the media, one that was on the list that Sean Financy and I compiled. He's going to be on the podcast. I went to the Paramount Lot here in L.A. I felt very Hollywood in doing that and recorded the interview before

the writer's strike. I think you're going to love that podcast. And then on Monday, July 3rd, we are going to have the third volume in our one perfect story series. If you remember this, This is where we take a magazine story or just a good story from the past. We talked to the author about how they wrote it, about what all went into reporting it and editing it. We see it as a moment in that author's life and as a moment in journalism time. This time, we are going to feature a story from the high period of Esquire magazine. That's July 3rd. And then finally, July 10th, a major cable news anchor whose name comes up on this podcast,

All the Time is on this podcast talking about career stuff, talking about, let us say, the state of cable news. Fascinating conversation there. That is Monday, July 10th. In the meantime, I don't say this enough. We appreciate all of you for listening to this podcast. I cannot tell you how much that means to me that you come back week after week. Thank you, thank you. We will meet back here next Monday for more lukewarm takes about the media, or in this case, media movies.

Have a fantastic summer.