NEWSru
former Russian news website
NEWSru.com was a Russian independent online news site based in Moscow that was generally critical of the Russian government. Launched by Russian internet pioneer Anton Nossik in 2000, it closed in 2021 after experiencing difficulties attracting advertisers due to the site's editorial positions. The Israeli sister service Newsru.co.il remains operational
History
NEWSru launched by Russian internet pioneer Anton Nossik on August 28, 2000, with the domain name ntu.ru Yelena Bereznitskaya-Bruni replaced the initial Editor in Chief Igor Barchugov in 2001.
In 2002, the state-run OAO Gazprom Media took over NTV, and NEWSru remained part of the media empire of former NTV owner and oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky. The takeover was seen as a turning point in media freedom in post-Soviet Russia.
In 2009, Russian journalist Maria Yulikova described NEWSru as one of the leading independent news sources in Russia.
The site primarily operated as a news aggregator.
In May 2021, the site announced it would close for "economic reasons" due to a difficulty with attracting advertisers because the site did not follow the editorial line of pro-Kremlin state media. Editor-in-Chief Yelena Bereznitskaya said "In the current situation, we realized that we won’t find funding in the near future for what we love and know how to do — objective news." The site's staff planned to continue to focus on newsru.co.il, its Russian-language Israeli offshoot.
Headquarters and team
NEWSru was based in Moscow, but its editorial team and location were kept secret.
The public source identifies “NEWSru” as former Russian news website. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around NEWSru, former and Russian.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q122544. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2000, 2021, 2001 and 2002.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “NEWSru” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.