Introducing ... The Kiosk, with Scena9
Our first profile in a new series that shines a light on the media landscape beyond the Anglosphere
The Kiosk is a new monthly feature from Translator where we profile a media outlet beyond the Anglosphere and invite them to curate a selection of three stories from their publication. First up is Scena9 – keep reading for the full interview with editor-in-chief Andra Matzal and her story selection, along with other news and updates from the Translator team.
Publication Name: Scena9 (Pron: CHEN-a-NOU-a)
Founded: 2016
Format: Print and online
Country: Romania
Languages: Romanian, English
As featured in: Multiple editions of Translator’s Dispatch including summaries on the country’s cultural workers' rights, political satire scene and first sex magazine, as well as an investigation into Europe’s growing bear population.
“Arts and culture is no longer a safe umbrella.”
So says Andra Matzal, the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Romanian independent publication Scena9, in an interview with Translator from her office in Bucharest. Founded in 2016 to cover arts and culture, Scena9 has also evolved with Romania’s changing media landscape.
“The ethos we started with was a very optimistic mindset not only for us, but for many initiatives in the cultural field of journalism,” she explains of the publication, which means “the ninth scene” and reflects their showcasing of the ninth art – a common European term for comics. “We wanted to fill a gap in the way we speak about arts and culture, which has a very elitist bias in the Romanian landscape, both in mainstream and independent media.”
But then came the global Covid-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the rise of AI and far right populism – and things look different for the publication today.
“[These events] changed a lot how we work and our focus, because we could no longer afford to ignore what’s happening in the world. Our angle became wider, and we came to have a stronger social involvement,” says Matzal.
“In these last years we’ve been dealing with a revival of the far right, and this has brought up terrible tensions within society and within the journalism field,” explains Matzal. “Political publications are on the front line of this, but also all kinds of publications, because journalists have been under attack [...] they’re perceived as representing an ideological enemy.”
While Romania rose six places in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index – up to 49th from 55th in 2025 – press freedom remains poor. According to Reporters Without Borders, which publishes the Index, this is partly due to a lack of transparency surrounding media financing, particularly political parties’ public funds. It adds that editorial decisions are often made in the interests of private owners, fuelling the use of media as a propaganda tool. The 2024 presidential election was also cancelled after it was revealed that Russia was interfering in the political campaign through social media – a story that was widely covered in mainstream English media. Scena9 is transparently funded and governed by BRD Groupe Société Générale, a bank, along with its sister publication Școala9 (New School) and Rezidența BRD (New Residence) – something they make clear across their print and digital publications.
“We were a bit skeptical in the beginning because we were very aware of the pressure that may come with a private sponsorship, so the first thing that we tried to do was to assure editorial freedom, 100% autonomy, and believe it or not, we actually made it,” says Matzal.
But a series of challenges including rising production costs and the cost-of-living crisis is forcing the magazine to reconsider its annual print publication – a stunning, themed almanac featuring contributions from journalists, artists and cultural workers. They are now looking at finding additional sources of income to become sustainable – including reader donations.
Matzal says the funding will help their reporting, including focusing on the decline of women’s rights in Romania – a phenomenon they have covered extensively over the last decade.
“We started very shyly, speaking about the role of women in arts and culture and their absence from the political or institutional canon, but then we started exploring a wider set of contexts regarding to women’s rights,” she says. “We investigated from the very beginning the attack on reproductive rights, how civil society tries to curb down violence against women, and how legislation is poorly adapted or implemented. We have tried to keep a solutions journalism angle in mind in order to provide other approaches that might work for women, institutions and civil society.”
Looking ahead, Matzal says they also want to keep building trust with audiences and train the next generation of Romanian investigative journalists. Last year, they launched their first educational program for young reporters to fill the training gap left by the closure of many daily newspapers – a worldwide trend. The subsequent story by the first reporters to take part in the program, Daria Radu, Șerban Barbu and Maria Angele, was summarized by Translator in a recent edition of Dispatches.
“Independent media often don’t have headquarters where they can receive people to work directly with, so it’s a complicated time for young journalists to learn how to do the work concretely.”
Looking ahead at the future and the role of publications like Scena9, Matza says she feels a mixture of optimism and despair.
“The future is no longer something that excites me, unfortunately. It rather fuels my anxiety. But I’m trying to remind myself that hope is a choice. The one thing that I think hasn’t lost its power is the freedom to create the kind of journalism we consider meaningful, even when the times are changing. When we still have this privilege to build the space for in-depth reflection, to come up with new ways of connecting the people we report on with the people who read our stories ... it’s a mix of freedom and idealism, which our team has shared from the very beginning, and which keeps me going.”
We asked Matzal to curate a selection of stories from Scena9:
‘Omul de pe fața ascunsă a Lunii’ (‘The Man on the Dark Side of the Moon’) by Vlad Odobescu with illustrations by Mircea Drăgoi
The Transylvanian Hermann Oberth was one of the fathers of spaceflight, but also one of the researchers recruited to develop ballistic missiles for Adolf Hitler’s army. The life and work of Hermann Oberth overlap almost perfectly with the last century, in which curiosity and the appetite for destruction led humanity, along intersecting paths, both to the Moon and to the Nazi camps. Today, Romania honors Oberth through busts, street names, exhibitions, and a memorial house. Several educational institutions also bear his name. But how do we choose which parts of a public figure’s biography to place on display and which ones we prefer to sweep under the rug? Ultimately, what does that choice say about us?
Matzal on the selection: It is an invitation to question how the memory of public space is built and to rediscover a famous character outside official discourse.
‘A Populist’s Guide to Museums’ by Oana Filip with illustrations by Oana Barbonie. Translated into English by Claudia and Andrew Davidson-Novosivschei for Eurozine
In March 2025, Donald Trump accused the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum complex, of negatively portraying the nation’s history. The US president called on several museums to revise their exhibitions and present a history of America that would make citizens proud rather than divide them with ‘woke ideology’. Authoritarian governments have long been at war with museums and the knowledge they hold. In this war, they try to obfuscate anything that does not contribute to the image of a glorious past, to which they promise the country can return if the people trust them. Reporter Oana Filip discusses the politics of memory within museums when populist parties come to power: from the US, to Poland and Romania.
Matzal on the selection: This in-depth analysis shows how politics shape in real time the cultural narratives we create about ourselves.
‘The Fake Nobel that Duped the Romanian Academy’ by Andra Matzal, Ioana Pelehatăi, Ionuț Sociu and Luiza Vasiliu. Translated into English by Ioana Pelehatăi
In 2019, Scena9 published an investigation about a French researcher who had made up the “Nobel Medal for Philology”, as well as the institution that awarded it to the Frenchman himself, Noam Chomsky and other international scholars. When our national media rejoiced that the president of the Romanian Academy would finally get “a Nobel”, we wanted to find out more about the “International Society of Philology”. We ended up spiraling down a rabbit hole of lies, false information, and distortions. Seven years later, in early 2026, the case finally reached the attention of French authorities, who are now investigating the French academic for intellectual fraud. The Scena9 article, which Le Monde calls “a small masterpiece of investigative journalism”, is the first public account of this fabulous fraud, which has also recently reached The Guardian.
Matzal on the selection: This was definitely the funnest investigation I ever worked on and its late plot twist – the French investigation – speaks both about the impact of journalism, but also about its delay when you are a small Romanian media.
More from Translator
Today is the last day to complete our survey to shape the future of Translator – in thanks for your feedback, we’ll enter you into a draw to win a free magazine and tote bag for you and a friend!
Join us on 17 June at Ibraaz in London for the next installment of our event series, The World Overheard. In this edition, we’ll be
Thanks for reading! Find us in your inbox again next week.
– The Translator team
