Hello, World!This the very first post in this blog and also the very first article created and served using standalone Newsroom Toolkit.
This is a very important day for me personally and a milestone for the platform I was building for 5 years – Newsroom Toolkit.
Newsroom Toolkit – is my pet project, which I started building back in 2019 using spare time and weekends, right after the RFE/RL internal CMS team seized and froze KAFKA. Steve Blank does a great job of explaining why some people sabotage internal innovation.
I launched it February 2, 2020 as a fully standalone project, and since that time it was used to create more than 1000 interactive long-reads by my former RFE/RL colleagues. Like this award-winning project about Vladimir's Putin political ascent in St. Petersburg in the early 90s.
And all these stories were delivered on various platforms to millions of readers across Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and my beloved home – the Kyrgyz Republic.
Remarkable Stories Powered by Newsroom Toolkit
Here is a short list of the most remarkable stories and investigations created using the platform:
- The story of a Kazakh immigrant family whose boat sank en route to the US coast (Russian)
- Eight years of life of Maryinka – a frontline town in Donetsk region (Russian)
- How Kyrgyzstani authorities put pressure on activists and restrict freedom of speech (Kyrgyz)
- Plunder And Patronage In The Heart Of Central Asia (English)
- The Uzbek President’s Secret Mountain Hideaway (Russian)
At the end of last year, I left RFE/RL and can now finally focus on my own projects. And one of the key projects in the portfolio is Newsroom Toolkit.
Today, five years after its official release, I am excited to launch the first standalone website fully powered by the platform – joeface.com!
What is Newsroom Toolkit?
Newsroom Toolkit is a platform that empowers newsrooms with modern publishing, media streaming, and censorship circumvention solutions. You can easily curate beautiful stories or stream your media with a confident that it will be available everywhere on the web (even in Russia).
Newsroom Toolkit enables journalists and editors to simplify news gathering, transcription, and translation tasks using AI-powered technology.
Newsroom Toolkit – is here for you, my fellow publishers.
Stay tuned!
All things AI, censorship circumvention, content delivery and publishing platforms. The very first standalone blog powered by Newsroom Toolkit
© 2025 Mikhail Ageev
