What’s shipping
Made-in-Ukraine N°08 went to print on Wednesday. The agri-export cover story closed at 7,200 words after a final pass from a Berlin trade journalist who suggested two corrections. Both held. Print quantity: 8,000 (40% subscriber, 60% newsstand).
What’s not
The English-language version of the podcast transcript took longer than expected because we kept catching small errors in the AI-generated draft. New rule for this quarter: every transcript gets read end-to-end by a human before publishing. The savings on autosaved transcripts evaporate the moment one wrong attribution goes out.
One thing I’m thinking about
How much of "quality" in a magazine is the cover photo. We commissioned the N°08 cover from a Lviv-based photographer who I've worked with twice before, and the feedback has been disproportionate to the rest of the issue's content. Maybe ~40% of the perceived quality comes from the first image. We undercommissioned in 2024–25; that was a mistake.