Koduj24.pl

» see koduj24.pl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The Komitet Obrony Demokracji, the Committee for the Defense of Democracy, was the mass street movement that formed in Poland at the end of 2015 against the new government's handling of the constitutional court. It could fill a square. By mid-2016 it had concluded that filling a square was not enough, because the account of what happened in the square was being written by other people.

So in June 2016 it launched Koduj24.pl. It was founded by Magdalena Jethon with Anna Krakowska and Krzysztof Łuszczewski, Jethon in charge. Her credential was the point of her: she had directed Trójka, one of Polish Radio's national stations, which gave the project a professional spine rather than the usual activist blog energy.

The editorial line was stated upfront and it was an unfashionable one. No breaking news. Jethon said they were betting on commentary that explained social and political phenomena, which in practice meant one or two long pieces a day and no attempt to compete on speed with anybody. The byline list did the rest of the work: Agnieszka Kublik and Wojciech Maziarski from Gazeta Wyborcza, the novelist Krystyna Kofta, the ethicist Magdalena Środa, the satirist Michał Ogórek, the actor Wojciech Pszoniak.

Poland in 2016 and Turkey in 2016 were different stories and I will leave them that way. The sequence was still legible from here without translation: a civic movement decides it needs its own masthead, because it has stopped believing the existing ones will carry it accurately. I did not have to look that part up.

~ the record ~

~ the names on the masthead ~

A roster like that is the whole asset and also the whole problem. Columnists of that rank do not usually write for a movement portal, and the fact that they did is a measure of how urgent 2016 felt in Warsaw. It is also expensive, or it is free and therefore unreliable, and over five years a site cannot run on either one indefinitely.

The traffic was never the story. Wirtualne Media covered the launch week under a headline calling it a weak start and describing the output as a political bulletin.

~ the money ~

Within days of launching, KOD was asking readers to pay for it. The appeal went out in June 2016: money to expand operations and to stand up an internet radio station alongside the site, with a newsroom to be set up that same week in rented space and staff from public media expected to come across.

Evidence that the radio station ever materialized is hard to find. The newsroom the fundraiser was meant to build is the thing that eventually could not be paid for. Polish Wikipedia records the cause of death in two words, problemy finansowe, and nobody has added anything to that line since.

~ the parking page ~

It closed on 29 September 2021, five years and three months after it launched, having outlasted the peak of the movement that paid for it.

The domain is now a parking page on Aftermarket.eu, the Polish domain marketplace, refreshing itself every thirty seconds toward a sales listing. The archive still has the September 2021 front page, 31 kilobytes of it, the author photographs from 2016 still loading out of the same WordPress uploads folder they were put in five years earlier. A movement built a newspaper to make sure its version got written down, and the version that got written down is a WordPress backup.

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