The “Russia – Conflicts in the Media” website is the continuation of the Impunity Project started by an international partnership of journalists’ unions and media organizations in 2007.
The two phases have involved the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ, Brussels), its member organization the Russian Union of Journalists (Moscow), and Russia’s media monitors – the Glasnost Defence Foundation and the Centre for Journalism in Extreme Situations.
The new database “Conflicts in the Media” and the other resources 
assembled on this website (articles by monitors, overview of legislation, annual survey of media freedom and violations) complement the earlier database “Deaths and Disappearances of Journalists in Russia since 1993”. The latter was launched in June 2009 together with the Partial Justice report. Today that database contains the names of 340 journalists and media workers who have gone missing or died violent, premature or unexplained deaths in Russia over the past twenty years.
The pioneering work on the first database was carried out by John Crowfoot (IFJ) and programmer Tim Almond. Damian Counsell helped to refine that version and, with John Crowfoot and Boris Timoshenko (GDF), created a first draft of the new database. The webmaster for the project is Yevgeny Balychev.
The purpose of the “Deaths and Disappearances” database was to pinpoint the targeted killing of journalists in Russia since 1993, and monitor the level of impunity for such violence. The new database, which now documents over 1,780 incidents,
has a 
wider and more pro-active role. By recording instances of assault, criminal prosecution, threats, dismissal, censorship and arrest, the “Conflicts in the Media” database offers a broad picture of the changing situation in different parts of the Russian Federation. More specifically, it provides an early warning of the emergence of particular threats, whether directed against the media of a region or against an individual journalist.
We are indebted to the Open Society Institute (London) which, through the IFJ, funded both these stages of the ongoing Impunity Project and has taken an active interest in its creation and further development. We also wish to thank the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media for enabling us to add past years’ records to this database.
18/04/2012
Contacts for this project
John Crowfoot, IFJ analyst (London) – crowfoot@uwclub.net
Boris Timoshenko, GDF head of monitoring (Moscow) – boris@gdf.ru