The news site that wasn’t

Lëtzebuerger Journal: Mr. Kirikov, in the article published on January 31., our main question was: "What is the goal of this site?" You approached us to answer this question.

Daniil Kirikov: Correct. Luxtoday is a part of Relotech, which has the goal to onboard expats in Luxembourg. The news segment of the page is only a small part of the larger idea, which is not yet fully ready to be accessible to the public. What you see right now is about 10 per cent of what is to come. The short translations of the local news started as a simple idea to help me, as a newcomer to Luxembourg, stay up to date on news and events. I asked my assistant to translate articles from various newspapers and send them to me via Telegram so I wouldn't have to check multiple websites every day, for most of which the language I did not speak. I then started sharing this news digest with my friends and it quickly spread, which lead to us to expanding the service, since I saw the potential to turn the project into a solution for expats facing the same problem. The idea came to me when there was a lot of refugees, among others from Ukraine, in Luxembourg and the government was struggling to deal with the influx of people. As we started to invest in its development and build our own platform, it started to work and grow. But it still is only quotes, so there was never any investigative work done by the staff. It was more like a newsfeed with selected articles.

The goal of Luxtoday was never to be a news site, but to be a platform for adaptive guides for people who are moving here, and later on for businesses as well. Because some parts of this arrival process can be rather obtuse. The language of the documents is difficult, and some processes are hard to understand, if you are not used to this administrative language. They are not formulated in a way people normally talk. This is why we are creating guides that will be fully customisable and will guide the users through all the necessary steps, like making a tax declaration, requesting all the legal documents, receive a Blue Card – navigate all the steps involved. The idea is to help people understand the rules and customs of their new country. When I moved to Luxembourg, I knew nothing about the local regulations and taxes, and we want to help make that transition easier for other expats.

Do you plan on extending the news segment of the page in the future?

We will most likely go back to the digest, which is just a short summary of the news, while focusing on the other aspects of the project, like the guides and short articles written by expats, that talk about their experience in Luxembourg. But we found the idea of sharing this digest on the site – which always contain the sources – to be quite fitting with the service we intend to provide. So, we started translating them into English as well. However, the Russian-speaking community remains our largest group among our users. According to our data, around half the Russian-speaking population in Luxembourg accesses our digest.