About Mikroskop Media

Mikroskop Media

Mikroskop Media is an Azerbaijani-language explanatory-journalism outlet founded in Latvia in 2018 by journalists Fatima Karimova and Javid Abdullayev, who had emigrated from Azerbaijan for political reasons. It is catalogued here under Azerbaijan, its audience country, and it is important to state its position honestly at the outset: Mikroskop Media has no office in Azerbaijan and is an exile-based outlet. It works with anonymous Baku-based freelancers and specialises in infographics, explanatory articles and fact-checking on Azerbaijani politics, the economy and human rights. In a media system where independent reporting inside Azerbaijan has been progressively closed down, Mikroskop Media represents a different model of Azerbaijani journalism, produced outside the country's borders, in Azerbaijani, for readers inside it.

Founding in exile in Latvia in 2018

The founding facts of Mikroskop Media are recorded in two independent media directories, the Project Oasis Europe media directory and the European Journalism Centre's Media Landscapes guide, and they are unusually clear for an exile outlet. The outlet was founded in Latvia in 2018 by Fatima Karimova and Javid Abdullayev. Both founders had emigrated for political reasons. Latvia, a European Union member state on the Baltic, has been one of several European bases used by journalists from Azerbaijan and other post-Soviet countries who can no longer work safely at home, offering legal residence, EU press protections and distance from the authorities whose actions their reporting examines. The choice of an exile base was not a branding decision but a condition of existence: an outlet intending to publish independent explanatory journalism and fact-checking about Azerbaijani politics and human rights could not register and operate openly inside Azerbaijan's media system.

The founding date of 2018 also places Mikroskop Media in a specific moment. Azerbaijan had blocked access to the websites of independent and opposition outlets inside the country from 2017, in decisions that courts upheld without effective independent review, according to reporting by Azerbaijan Internet Watch and the European Human Rights Advocacy Centre. Journalists who left in that period faced a choice between leaving journalism and rebuilding it abroad. Mikroskop Media was one of the rebuilds, and its format, digital-first, visual and explanatory, was designed for an audience that would reach it online and through social media rather than through any distribution system inside Azerbaijan.

How an exile newsroom works

Mikroskop Media has no office in Azerbaijan and works with anonymous Baku-based freelancers. That single documented fact explains both its method and its constraints. Its named journalists work from exile, where they can publish under their own names, while contributors inside Azerbaijan, who would face dismissal, prosecution or worse if identified, contribute anonymously. The model is now common to Azerbaijani independent media as a whole: since late 2023, in a crackdown that international monitors describe as the most comprehensive since independence in 1991, outlets including Meydan TV, Toplum TV, Abzas Media and Kanal 13 have come to operate entirely from exile, and Azerbaijan's last independent news agency, Turan, closed in February 2025. Mikroskop Media adopted the exile structure earlier than most, in 2018, and its history therefore anticipated the direction of the whole independent sector.

Anonymity for in-country contributors is a protection, but it also shapes verification. Readers cannot check the byline of an anonymous freelancer, so the outlet's credibility rests on its named founders, its editorial method and its track record of accuracy, including its fact-checking work. Fatima Karimova's wider professional activity is part of that public record: she has contributed reporting to collaborative investigations including the Forbidden Stories Baku Connection project, alongside journalists from multiple outlets, and has reported for international projects on the human costs of Europe's growing gas relationship with Azerbaijan. That visible work by a named founder is one of the ways an exile outlet demonstrates accountability that its anonymous contributors cannot provide themselves.

Explanatory journalism, infographics and fact-checking

Mikroskop Media specialises in infographics, explanatory articles and fact-checking on Azerbaijani politics, the economy and human rights. The choice of explanatory journalism is significant. Azerbaijani readers have no shortage of fast news; the large Baku portals publish continuously. What independent outlets can add is explanation: taking a budget decision, a law, a statistic or a public claim and showing, step by step and visually, what it means and whether it is true. Infographics suit that mission because a single well-built chart can travel on social media, be understood quickly and carry data that official sources do not present clearly. Project Oasis, which mapped more than 500 independent digital-native media organisations across Europe, recorded society and human rights among the most common coverage areas for such outlets, and Mikroskop Media's documented focus on politics, the economy and human rights fits that European exile and independent media pattern.

Fact-checking belongs to the same method. In an information environment where state-aligned media dominate domestic broadcasting and the largest portals, claims by officials may circulate without domestic contradiction. An exile outlet that checks claims against documents and data performs a function that no longer exists at scale inside the country. Mikroskop Media's explanatory and fact-checking work is therefore best understood not as a stylistic preference but as an editorial strategy for a specific media system: publish less breaking news than the big portals, and publish more of the verification and context that the big portals do not provide.

Counting the women killed by family members

The most widely cited piece of work in Mikroskop Media's record is its pioneering count of violence against women in Azerbaijan. The seed record for this profile states that in 2019 Mikroskop Media was the first outlet to publish statistics on women killed by family members in Azerbaijan. A detailed account in Global Voices, drawing on the outlet's published data collection, explains the work behind that statement: because Azerbaijan had no unified database tracking violence and abuse, Mikroskop Media collected the figures itself from crime-related news coverage, and published data showing that 184 women were subjected to violence in 2019, of whom 54 were killed by family members and 130 suffered various injuries. The two accounts are consistent in substance: the outlet assembled and published, for the first time, a systematic count covering 2019, in work published as that data was compiled.

The importance of the count goes beyond the numbers themselves. Azerbaijan is not a signatory to the Istanbul Convention on preventing violence against women, activists and lawyers report that police often dismiss complaints of domestic abuse, and feminist researchers in Azerbaijan have relied on media-compiled figures precisely because official statistics are incomplete. By counting cases from news reports, Mikroskop Media created a public baseline that activists, international organisations and other journalists could cite, and Global Voices' account of Azerbaijan's feminist movement treats the dataset as a reference point for that reason. It is a clear example of the outlet's explanatory method applied to human rights: gather scattered verified reports, structure them as data, and publish an infographic-ready finding that changes what can be said in public debate.

Coverage of politics, the economy and human rights

Beyond that landmark dataset, Mikroskop Media's documented coverage areas are Azerbaijani politics, the economy and human rights. Its website publishes long-form explanatory and investigative pieces in Azerbaijani and, for some major stories, in English and German. One documented example is its investigation into Azerbaijani asylum seekers deported from Germany who were then imprisoned in Azerbaijan, reported through interviews with deportees and their families, migration lawyers and the journalists who followed their cases. That story illustrates the advantages of an exile base in Europe: the reporters could interview sources in Germany openly, obtain legal assessments there, and still report the consequences in Azerbaijan, a combination that journalists working in only one of those countries could not easily achieve.

Human rights coverage by Azerbaijani exile media operates in a documented context of escalating repression. Reporters Without Borders ranked Azerbaijan 167th out of 180 countries in its 2025 World Press Freedom Index, citing a new wave of fierce repression against the country's last remaining journalists, and Freedom House records that between November 2023 and May 2025 the authorities imprisoned 25 journalists, the vast majority working for online outlets. Mikroskop Media is one of the eight Azerbaijani outlets that have jointly defended independent journalism under pressure from coordinated online complaints and blocks against their social media pages. Its survival as a publishing outlet, from outside the country, is itself part of the story of where Azerbaijani independent journalism now physically takes place.

Place among Azerbaijan's exile media

Mikroskop Media belongs to a generation of Azerbaijani outlets that includes Meydan TV, based in Berlin, and the newer exile operations of Abzas Media, Toplum TV and Kanal 13. It differs from most of them in emphasis. Meydan TV built a large video and social media audience; Mikroskop Media built a reputation for text explainers, data and infographics. It is also smaller and more explicitly journalistic in the explanatory sense, closer to the European digital-native outlets mapped by Project Oasis than to a television-style operation. Its inclusion in the Project Oasis Europe directory, a research project led by SembraMedia that studies the sustainability and impact of independent digital media, places it in that European frame formally as well as geographically: a Latvian-founded outlet, staffed by Azerbaijani journalists, studied as part of Europe's independent media ecosystem while serving an Azerbaijani audience.

For directory purposes, that dual identity is the reason for its Baku placement in this catalogue, under the audience-country precedent applied to exile and foreign-service outlets throughout this rollout. The placement records where its readers are and what country its journalism is about. It does not claim a physical presence the outlet does not have, and this profile states the exile basis plainly, as the verified record requires.

What is not publicly verified

The limits of the record for Mikroskop Media are different from those of a domestic portal. Its founding, founders, base and specialisms are well documented by Project Oasis and Media Landscapes. What is not publicly available, for understandable security reasons, is the identity of its Baku-based freelancers, and this profile neither seeks nor speculates about them. Detailed audience figures, budgets and full staffing are likewise unpublished, as is normal for small exile outlets that depend on grants and donations they do not itemise publicly. The precise publication sequence of the violence-against-women dataset is recorded slightly differently in summary sources, as the first publication of such statistics in relation to 2019, and in Global Voices' fuller account as data for 2019 collected from news coverage; this profile reports both formulations rather than overstating the precision of either.

Mikroskop Media today

Mikroskop Media continues as an Azerbaijani-language explanatory outlet founded in Latvia in 2018 by Fatima Karimova and Javid Abdullayev, with no office in Azerbaijan and anonymous contributors inside the country. Its documented contributions are a fact-checking and infographic-led model of independent Azerbaijani journalism and the first systematic published count of women killed by family members in Azerbaijan. In a period when independent journalism inside Azerbaijan has been largely extinguished and its practitioners imprisoned or exiled, Mikroskop Media's importance is out of proportion to its size: it is evidence that Azerbaijani explanatory journalism survived by moving, and that from Riga its journalists could still count, check and explain the realities of the country they had been forced to leave.