A lesson from Ukraine: Newsroom resilience makes press freedom real

By Oksana Brovko.

Around 80% of the print run of a local Ukrainian newspaper was burned in a Russian attack. The newsroom had already been destroyed. Yet the newspaper still had to reach its readers.

Mezhivskyi Meridian serves the Mezhiv community in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovs’k region, about 20 kilometres from the frontline. The community has been scattered by the war. Most people have left. Some remain despite constant attacks. The newspaper’s office was destroyed, but the journalists kept publishing and delivering the paper to people still in Mezhova and to those who had moved elsewhere.

When the attack destroyed most of the latest print run, our association and international partners helped the newspaper print it again. The reprinted copies eventually reached its readers.

I saw a video of people receiving them. They were not simply picking up the news. They were holding something that connected them to home. For many, home no longer exists the way it did before the war. The newspaper carried the names of their neighbours, familiar streets, local stories and the memory of an ordinary life.

For more than two decades, I have worked with independent regional media in Ukraine. Before the full-scale invasion, much of our work was about helping local news organisations grow stronger and more sustainable. The war changed the question. It became: how do we keep them operating at all?

Our role was to connect urgent needs with partners who could respond, and to turn individual acts of support into a functioning network. Ukrainian newsrooms shared equipment, contacts and solutions. International partners provided emergency support, technology and expertise. Together, we helped media organisations continue working when their offices, electricity, communications or income disappeared.

Today, the question is changing again: how do we turn what we have learned into resilience that can be shared?

The international media community stood with Ukrainian newsrooms when we needed it most. That support helped independent media survive and continue serving their communities. But we are not only the recipients of solidarity. We have something to bring to these partnerships too: hard-earned knowledge and experience in keeping journalism running when normal systems fail.

Imagine your newsroom today. What would happen if the electricity suddenly went off? For an hour? For a day? For several days? Would your team know what to do? Would you be able to keep publishing without panic?

We know what this means. We have had to learn.

We have learned how to work through prolonged blackouts, how to keep communication going when infrastructure fails, how to protect data and equipment, how to organise backup systems and how to keep a newsroom functioning when its physical office is no longer safe.

A local newspaper in Odesa published its 1,000th edition during a blackout, without heating, working in darkness. I still keep that newspaper in my library. It reminds me that resilience is not an abstract quality. It is a series of practical decisions made by people who know that their readers are waiting.

No newsroom should have to learn these lessons in such a hard way. And the world should not have to wait for another war to learn how newsrooms can operate through disruption.

What we are learning in Ukraine may not stay in Ukraine.

The important lesson is not simply that newsrooms need to become more resilient. It is that resilience should be a shared capacity, not an individual newsroom’s responsibility.

A small regional newsroom cannot build every security system, backup operation, technical solution or emergency capacity on its own. But a network of news organisations can give individual newsrooms capabilities they could never build alone. A backup printer can matter as much as a grant, a shared security protocol can matter as much as equipment.

This experience has changed how I see the role of media associations and international networks. Their value is not only in distributing resources. It is in connecting people, knowledge and capacity before a crisis makes those connections screamingly urgent.

This is how I have come to understand media solidarity: not as charity, but as a system in which experience, resources and responsibility move in both directions. We received support when we needed it. Now we can share what we have learned.

There is a wider reason to do so. When a local newsroom disappears, a community does not simply lose another media business. It can lose the people who know its streets, its institutions, its problems and its residents. In a crisis, that local knowledge can become as important as the news itself.

This is also a question of press freedom. We often define press freedom as the right to report, publish and speak without interference. But the freedom to publish means little if a newsroom has lost the ability to publish.

In a crisis, press freedom becomes a question of capacity: can journalists keep reporting when their office is destroyed, the electricity is gone, their income collapses or their community is displaced?

That is why newsroom resilience is not separate from press freedom. It is one of the conditions that makes press freedom real.

I also know solidarity in a much more personal way.

In the first days of the full-scale invasion, I was evacuating my children from near Kyiv, where explosions had already begun. We reached Vinnytsia, where a local publisher, Oleksander, fed me and my children a bowl of borscht.

I still remember its taste.

At the time, I was not thinking about media partnerships or resilience. I was thinking about getting my children somewhere safe. Years later, I still think about that bowl of borscht when I think about what solidarity between people – and between news organisations – really means.

We often talk about solidarity in terms of funding, equipment and institutional partnerships. Those things matter. But at its core, solidarity is simple: when someone is in trouble, you make sure they are not left alone.

That is what we received from the international media community. It is what Ukrainian media have given each other. And it is what we can now pass on.

We had to learn these lessons the hard way. Sharing them is one way to make sure others do not have to.

Oksana Brovko, CEO at Association of Independent Regional Press Publishers of Ukraine