Vechernyaya Moskva
How the 100-year-old newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva chose Pachca. A newsroom's move from Discord to a team chat app
About the company
Hi, I'm Sergey, managing editor of "Vechernyaya Moskva", a Moscow city newspaper with a 100-year history. Today "Vecherka" is three publications with a weekly print run of nearly 2,000,000 copies, plus a website, online TV and a whole bunch of channels on every social network.
Life before Pachca
We started using a team chat app long before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the events of spring 2020 left us no choice: for the first time, we tried putting out a newspaper remotely.
Our first team chat app was Slack. Everyone was happy with it, even though it had more features than we needed. The problems started in 2022. It became clear that we'd soon lose access to our workspace because of the political situation.
The search for an alternative began. The gamers in our newsroom immediately pointed us to Discord. It only looks unsuited to work as a team chat app at first glance. In practice, it turned out to be quite convenient. We recreated the exact setup we had in Slack (there was no way to port it over) and didn't have a care in the world until history repeated itself: Discord stopped working in Russia.
That's when we went through a ton of options, and none of them looked like the obvious choice. Pachca came to us as a friendly tip: check out this one too. We did, and our whole newsroom has been working in it for a year now.
The moment we knew Pachca was the one
Pachca was the last app we tested. We quickly realized that compared to the other services, it was a great fit for us, and we decided to stay. We said right away: "Starting Monday, we all talk here."
How Pachca changed the way we communicate
Honestly, not much changed for us, and that's exactly what we're happy about.
We're a newsroom, after all, so what matters most to us in a team chat app is sharing files and images quickly and being able to view every document right in the chat. People need to share articles, sign off on edits fast and send stories to publication.
That's why complex use cases aren't relevant to us. We were looking for a service that makes simple communication easy. Slack and Discord were those apps for us, and then Pachca became one.
One new thing we noticed: people use Pachca not only for work but also to chat with each other personally. That's probably the best sign of quality for any service.
Tips for making the switch
My advice comes from experience: when choosing a service, check whether you can move your old chats over. We dropped the ball at first. It turns out we could have moved everything from Slack into Pachca, but we didn't find out in time.
