Moscow:
Among the five TV journalists interviewing Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, the odd one out was easy to spot.
Mikhail Zygar's questions were sharper than those of the others, who headed back to spacious television studios while Zygar broadcast his piece from a Moscow living room.
The Dozhd news channel, whose editor-in-chief Zygar was given a Committee to Protect Journalists award last month, rose to prominence in 2011 with its coverage of the mass protests against President Vladimir Putin which state-owned television largely ignored.
As other Russian television channels have grown increasingly subservient this year, providing propaganda backing for the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and Russia's aggressive policy toward Ukraine, Dozhd didn't follow the lead and is now paying for it.
Putin's government has been careful not to order the channel to shut down, but a Kremlin-instigated smear campaign has driven this rare independent broadcaster to the brink of demise.
Past strollers and bicycles in the hall, a Soviet-era apartment in central Moscow now houses the studio of Dozhd, whose combined online and TV audience is about 12 million. Anchorman Pavel Lobkov sits on a chair in what was once a spacious living room.
The 47-year-old Lobkov shrugs off the challenges, recalling his early days in television during the Soviet
Union's perestroika era.
"Things were probably even tougher then: We had no Internet, no Skype, no cellphones. I went live from war zones, so these comfortable surroundings of an apartment can hardly unsettle me," he said.
Lobkov spent most of his television career on NTV, a legendary channel taken over by state-controlled gas company Gazprom in 2001, a move that forced independent journalists to flee.
NTV, owned by oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky, was a leading TV channel that offered a view different from the Kremlin. The government effectively wrested the channel from Gusinsky's control and entrusted it to Gazprom to run in Putin's first major crackdown on independent media.
Now at Dozhd, Lobkov says he's reliving the same pressure and harassment campaign he experienced at NTV when "all tools of the government were used."
Pressure on independent media intensified this year as the Kremlin sought to unify the country behind the annexation of Crimea and Russia's involvement in eastern Ukraine.
