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When The Atlas, a digital newspaper, launched earlier this year, it billed itself as “the new samizdat.” The term recalls the dissident networks that distributed forbidden news and literature in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and ’60s, evading the censors. According to The Atlas, today’s samizdat—which roughly translates as “self-publishing”—must evade a different threat: big tech platforms, which wield their own form of imperious control over the flow of information. “For me, the parallel seemed very obvious,” Natalia Antelava, who was born in then-Soviet Georgia and cofounded The Atlas, says.
The Atlas is published monthly via PDF—“the least sexy technological application imaginable,” as Simon Allison, fellow cofounder of The Atlas, admits—and distributed over Signal. “That lets us bypass digital censorship, of both the authoritarian and algorithmic varieties,” the paper explains in its latest edition. Aiming to provide a truly global perspective, the project grew out of a collaboration between Antelava’s Coda Story, a nonprofit news organization established in 2016, and Allison’s The Continent, an Africa-wide digital newspaper that publishes stories via PDF “for Africans and by Africans.”
In this episode of Journalism 2050, recorded live at Zeg, a storytelling festival held this past June in Tbilisi, Antelava and Allison discuss what inspired The Atlas with cohosts Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin. “Right now, we’re all making bets on the future of journalism. No one knows exactly where we’re going,” Allison says. “But any bet that is predicated on a big tech company’s platform is going to fail.”
Credits:
Producer: Sarah Myles
Research: Samuel Earle
Production assistant: Hana Joy
Art: Katie Kosma
Music: Henry Crooks
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