Tim Mak is creating a new kind of war correspondence

A new prominent figure in independent journalism talks to Substack’s Clyde Rathbone about the evolution of the industry

Chances are a year ago, you hadn’t heard of

Tim Mak

. But almost a year after launching his newsletter

The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak

, the independent journalist has become a household name for exposing true-life stories from behind the front lines of the Russia-Ukraine War. Last weekend, Tim and his team headquartered in Kiev shared a longform exposé on the battle at Antonov Airfield, a key turning point in the two-year-long war, painstakingly pieced together from eyewitness reports.

Like his own style of war correspondence, Tim’s breakout in journalism doesn’t follow a known model. Born in Canada, he moved from academic institutions there to the forefront of American politics and cut his teeth reporting on the Obama administration and key political movements, including the rise of the Tea Party and two elections. But the intensity of the 2016 campaign season forced him into an unexpected detour, where he joined the U.S. Army as a combat medic, a role he believed at the time would strengthen his resilience to enrich his later journalism. 

Tim launched The Counteroffensive in April 2022, initially as an experiment. I first met Tim in a coffee shop in London, after he had left NPR and was returning to Ukraine as an independent reporter. His aim was to try a brand of journalism that put the narratives of those involved in the story at its center, a way to shed light on the broader societal issues of conflict by zooming in on the human and the personal.

With the anniversary of the Ukraine war and Tim’s reporting going to new depths, it’s safe to say his experiment is working. I wanted to speak to him about this ongoing journey, the complexities of operating without a traditional newsroom infrastructure while enjoying the autonomy of direct storytelling, and, looking back, the hurdles he has faced and successes achieved through his distinctive approach.  

Clyde:
Tim, where did you grow up and how did you end up in journalism?

Tim:
I’m actually a secret Canadian. So I’m a dual Canadian-American. I grew up in Vancouver, Canada, and I went to university in Montreal. And then I immigrated to the States. And I went through that process: got a green card, joined the military, and became a U.S. citizen. So it was a bit of a long route.

I spent most of the last 15 years living in the United States. I started in journalism back in 2009, at the dawn of the Obama era: covered two presidential elections. And then 2016, you know, I was totally obliterated by the work of that campaign. 

And so I thought to myself, well, you know, I think I might leave journalism for the better work-life balance of the U.S. Army. 

I joined the Army to become a medic. It was one of those things where I kind of looked around and I was like, you know, in a zombie apocalypse, no one is ever screaming out, “Where’s the journalist? We need a journalist immediately!”

I just wanted to kind of have some hands-on skills that I could add to my journalism in some way, you know? And I was in the Army for five years as a reservist and was in the Army the whole time that I was working as an NPR correspondent. 

Clyde:
Tell me about being a combat medic. What was the most surprising thing about that process for you?

Tim:
I think the most surprising thing about it was how bad I was at it. I joined the military in really, really good shape and really very confident that it wouldn’t pose too much of a challenge for me. And the military exposed me to new obstacles that I’d never really faced before. 

I don’t think that I’d really ever been hungry, tired, or thirsty before I joined the military, and certainly not in the ways the military challenged me. I was always good with learning things. And so I thought that combat medicine wouldn’t—I thought it would be hard, but I didn’t think that I would have any issues with that. And that was true academically, on all the technical medical knowledge that I needed to learn. I was always good at that. 

But I gotta tell ya, when it came down to working with your hands quickly under stress, when you haven’t had enough sleep, when you haven’t eaten enough, when you’re on a very short timeline to think through what you need to do, I found myself overthinking things and then not doing as well. 

And so even though I thought that I was smart, there were plenty of farm boys from Montana that were a lot smarter than I was when it came down to using their hands and dealing with stress, dealing with exhaustion in ways that I just wasn’t familiar with. 

And it really changed my attitude towards who I am, what I’m good at, what I’m bad at, and a different understanding of how people can be smart in different kinds of ways.

Clyde:
I suppose that in a war zone, the more primal aspects of survival become very relevant, and your academic credentials don’t matter much when you’re under fire.

Tim:
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s why I’ve been very fortunate to have experience in both the kind of more wonky political side of things and also have had a fair amount of exposure on the military side, understanding what it’s like to be an enlisted soldier, because I was one for years. And kind of getting the chance to experience both of those worlds, I think when combined together, this has been pretty useful.

Clyde:
The first time we met to discuss launching a Substack, the thing that struck me was how little I had considered the enormous number of things that go into being able to report from a war zone. What motivated you to want to launch a Substack and what have you learned since then? 

Tim:
The Counteroffensive was an experiment. It was one of those things where I wanted to throw everything against the wall and see what would happen. I came back to Ukraine as an independent reporter, after having worked for a really large news organization doing war coverage.

I was thinking I’d do freelance work for a number of major publications, and I’d also do this Substack experiment and just see where it went. The reason why even I was skeptical of the long-term sustainability of it is because of the extreme costs and effort necessary to operate in a conflict area.

Reporting in D.C. is when you're in a relatively safe environment. But in Ukraine you have to think about transportation, security planning, insurance, and stress in ways that you wouldn’t need to in Western Europe or the United States. 

And all of those kind of come together as totally new challenges, especially when you’re operating on your own.

Tim Mak went from reporting for NPR to being an independent reporter on the ground in Ukraine

Clyde:
Do you see this model as the natural evolution of journalistic practice, and have you approached it differently? 

Tim:
It was never going to be enough for us to start a Substack that did the same thing that other journalists in Ukraine are doing.

Putting aside the logistical challenge that we’ve just discussed, there was also the editorial challenge that if we didn’t differentiate ourselves in some way or create a different kind of journalism that we would do, we weren’t going to succeed. There are still some questions about whether we will succeed, but our survival to date has been based on being able to create a different kind of war correspondence.

My previous journalism had really connected with people by not telling the news of the day, but instead getting immersive and deep with individual characters who are experiencing the news.

And so what The Counteroffensive really tries to do is to find these compelling first-person stories that illustrate how the news is actually occurring rather than just the news itself. 

So as an example, you’ll never find a Counteroffensive story that tells you matter-of-factly that there were some drone attacks overnight. The story will start with what it feels like inside the apartment building where the drones exploded, it will go right into an in-depth profile of a woman who was right there experiencing it—and try to put the reader as much as possible in the shoes of that person.

The philosophy of The Counteroffensive as a news organization is to make these stories feel more intimate and more real and more centered on the person who’s going through it.

So we’re focused on reporting on Ukraine as more than merely a place where violence is occurring. 

Clyde:
How has your approach evolved since you left mainstream journalism? 

Tim:
If you work for a major news organization, like the New York Times or the Washington Post, one of your first responsibilities is just going to be able to tell them what happened in Ukraine today. And that’s time that you could have spent on human-interest stories or compelling narratives or investigations, but you’re not, because you have to keep people up to date. That’s one of the primary jobs. 

Working at The Counteroffensive, being able to run my own kind of editorial strategy, I’m able to make different decisions. Now, mainstream outlets, of course, they’ll do narrative journalism and human-interest stories and do the things that I’ve described, but they are not generally able to exclusively do those kinds of stories like we are.

People read The Counteroffensive to hear stories about people on the fight on the front lines of democracy. So while we are headquartered in Kyiv, we’ve also reported recently from the Turkish-Syrian border and Taiwan as well. 

Now, there’s a flip side to this too, which is that because we’re kind of a startup business, all the things you took for granted when working at a large news organization are suddenly your personal problem. 

Security concerns are your problem. Logistical concerns, how you’re getting from place A to B, they’re your problem. Marketing is your problem. Legal is your problem. Accounting and taxes, they’re your problem. Managing a team—that’s all your problem. 

So there are pros and cons, right? So you can be free in some ways, but you’re also being pulled in all sorts of different directions. I certainly say that I enjoyed the process, but it’s been a lot harder than I expected when I started this. 

Read more: The Worst Morning Ever: On the second anniversary of the invasion

Clyde:
In our first meeting, you expressed concerns about inexperienced people wading into war zones with the intention of reporting from them. How do you think about the risks involved? 

Tim:
Look, I came to this with something of an advantage and something of a different background, which is that I have military experience, medical training, and 15 years in journalism covering national security. 

I also didn’t just show up in Ukraine by myself. I had already worked for a news organization in Ukraine for almost a year and a half before I started a Substack here. So if I had shown up on day one of the full-scale invasion in Ukraine without that experience, it would have been pretty dangerous and pretty dumb and likely to fail. 

And so my concern is just that folks try to have a clear mind and try to take into account all of the potential risks and dangers that are involved.

You know, I think that there’s a general tendency to think of foreign correspondence or war journalism as glamorous. There are a lot of war movies and war books where people get the wrong idea about what the process involves. A lot of people will watch Black Hawk Down and think, I want that; I want that level of excitement. But they don’t see the sacrifice necessary to go through a dangerous situation and a situation which involves a lot of mental trauma.

Or they’ll read War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by

Chris Hedges

, who is another Substacker. The book is one of the seminal modern works about war correspondence. But some get the totally wrong message from Chris Hedges’s book. Chris Hedges’s book is trying to explain how horrific war can be and how these deep traumas will linger inside people for generations as a result of violence that’s conducted when people turn on each other and inflict violence on each other. 

But strangely enough, I hear from young people all the time saying, “This is what I want to see.” And I’m sure that wasn’t exactly Chris’s point in writing it. 

And what I would say is, I’m not really in a position to discourage people and say, no, you shouldn’t do it. I’m doing it. I just want people to be clear-eyed about the costs, which are extreme, and the risks, which can be extreme, particularly if you don’t think it through appropriately.

Clyde:
I noticed that a lot of the content on The Counteroffensive involves bringing on other voices and guest authors. What has this taught you, and why have you leaned so heavily into this approach?

Tim:
The great thing about being a journalist is you don’t personally have to be smart or knowledgeable about anything. You just have to ask people the right questions and then rely on other really smart people—lean on their smarts and their intelligence. It’s one of the great things about journalism.

And so, you know, it’s just been a natural extension of that idea to reach out to people like

Ryan McBeth

, who’s been a really smart person on military hardware and technical capabilities in warfare. Or

Alexander Vindman

, who’s super-knowledgeable about what’s happening at a political and bureaucratic level, both in the United States and in Ukraine. 

One of the Substacks I’ve relied on for understanding Taiwan, where we’re hoping to tell more stories next year, is called

A Broad and Ample Road

, by two Americans who are based in Taiwan right now. I’m a frequent reader of Claire Berlinski’s excellent

The Cosmopolitan Globalist

. 

Clyde:
As we cross the two-year mark of the war in Ukraine, what is the day-to-day experience for someone on the ground in Kiev? And what do you think we can expect from the region through 2024? 

Tim:
I’ve always hesitated to make predictions, and I kind of promised that I would never make a prediction again after Election Day in 2016. That day, I predicted very confidently on the radio that Donald Trump would not be president. I kind of gave up predictions after that. 

But I can tell you the mood in Ukraine is pretty dark. I mean, I think that there are a lot of expectations and hopes for military action in the spring and summer of this year. And they just—as Zelensky has acknowledged—they just haven’t played out to expectations. 

And so what does that mean next? It means that Ukraine faces an environment in which they may now be on the defensive and have to fight back against Russia pushing forward again. 

They’re also facing an environment where the world is less supportive, or at least tired of hearing about Ukraine as much as it has in the past. So it is struggling and will struggle with getting the same level of military and humanitarian aid as it has in prior years. 

And so the real challenge that Ukraine faces is rallying—both domestically and externally—people to believe that they can continue to make progress on the battlefield and that it can achieve all of its strategic military goals that it wants to achieve.

One of the major goals that we’ve had is to try to fight this notion of “Ukraine fatigue” by telling human stories that would be interesting whether they were set in Ukraine or not. And we hope that in the process of learning about these stories about interesting people going through interesting things, you learn about the war in Ukraine and you learn about what’s happening in this war.

Clyde:
I know you mentioned Taiwan, but where would you like to go in 2024? 

Tim:
I mean, it’s a real challenge, because sustainability is always an issue. One of the challenges is that people care about foreign events in waves. And so there could be big ebbs and flows when it comes to interest in events overseas.

So kind of getting to a point where we can feel comfortable with the medium-term sustainability of The Counteroffensive is something that’s on my mind all the time: How can we get to a place where I can feel confident that we’ll be here next year this time?

Part of this is building a team in Kyiv that has a lot of growth potential and produces a lot of great work. And part of that is trying to diversify our coverage areas so that we are drawing as much of the audience that’s interested in foreign affairs as possible.

And those are things that we’re on the way to achieving.

Subscribe to The Counteroffensive on Substack.

More voices covering global conflict on Substack:

Andy McNab

’s

Andy McNab - The Battlespace

,

Michael McFaul

in

McFaul's World

,

Mick Ryan

in

Futura Doctrina

, and

Ryan McBeth

in

The official Ryan McBeth Substack

. 

Are there any conflict reporters you’d love to see on Substack or who didn’t get a mention here? Drop their name in the comments!