Roman Badanin

Guest Author

Roman Badanin (@RBadanin) is the founder and editor-in-chief of Proekt (The Project) and Agentstvo (The Agency), media organizations that have been targeted by the Russian government for their investigative reporting into the most powerful forces in their country. He started Agentstvo in the summer of 2021 after Russian authorities outlawed Proekt, the nonprofit investigative news organization he founded in 2018 during his 2018 JSK Fellowship at Stanford University. The site was modeled after the U.S. nonprofit investigative news outlet, ProPublica. It was Russia’s first nonprofit news organization.

A current JSK Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Badanin has been working as a journalist in leading independent Russian news organizations for 20 years. He previously was deputy editor-in-chief at Gazeta.Ru, editor-in-chief at Forbes Digital (Russia), RBC News Agency, and editor-in-chief of Dozhd (TV Rain), an independent Russian TV channel. He has also been affiliated with the Gorbachev Foundation and the Russian Academy of Sciences as a researcher, and studied history at Moscow State University.