Tag: 2026

By Marcelo Rech.

Around the world and at any period in history, practicing journalism carries a profound sense of mission – a kind of special priesthood driven by the conviction that free and reliable information possesses the power to positively transform society, or at least slow down the processes of civilizational degradation. In Latin America, it has always required a great deal of perseverance, and even dashes of heroism, to confront threats and intimidation. 

Now, massive doses of stubbornness must be added to this blend of challenges to ensure the survival of the press itself as a fundamental institution for democratic societies.

The balances compiled by organizations defending press freedom are always terrifying when they reach the chapter on Latin America. There are dictatorships that rank among the worst in any index of persecution against a free press, such as Cuba and Nicaragua. There are recurring murders of journalists, such as in Mexico, where seven media professionals had been killed this year up to August 15th. And there are also the constant intimidations from far-right and left-wing governments. Such regimes, which have multiplied across the region in the wake of polarization, often single out the press as an enemy as a way to try to eliminate the messenger of bad news and scrutiny over their administrations.

The world, indeed, has never been easy for journalists in Latin America. But now, only stubbornness – translated into resilience within this priesthood – proves capable of resisting the devastating wave of algorithmic changes and the unauthorized appropriation of journalistic content, so painstakingly produced, and which is used to feed Artificial Intelligence models with almost no recognition. Everyone defends press freedom, but beyond free, the press itself also needs to be robust, economically healthy and long term viable.

The gradual annihilation of the journalistic ecosystem benefits authoritarian regimes, corrupt governments and politicians, and everyone who views the professional press not as an ally against barbarism, but as an enemy to be destroyed. 

However, such destruction would not benefit Big Tech and AI models. Verified, balanced, and pluralistic information is an increasingly scarce commodity in this world bewildered by manipulation and deepfakes. It should, therefore, be treated as a precious asset by billionaire AI platforms, who spend fortunes on talent, software, chips, energy, and data centers, yet refuse to properly compensate the suppliers of their most critical input: the precise and reliable information still produced by newsrooms.

Without professional journalism, a vast layer of data on AI platforms will become an immense quagmire where hallucinations and disinformative aberrations will reign supreme. 

Anyone wishing to get an idea of what this new universe would look like should recall what occurred in Ceuta last July. More than 70,000 Moroccans, mostly young people, threw themselves into the sea because they firmly believed a piece of disinformation spread at high speed via social networks and messaging groups, which claimed that merely reaching Ceuta by sea would put Europe at their feet. 

Now, according to the latest research by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, 52% of young people between 18 and 24 get their news primarily from social media. The result of this trend? A deceived mass and more than 80 bodies pulled from the sea.

This sobering vision of an informational hell is a preview of what could happen if the erosion of the journalistic ecosystem continues. Without investigative reporting, the corrupt, the environmental destroyers, the human rights exterminators, despots, and a vast legion of wrongdoers – often beyond the reach of the law – will have a free hand to act. Without plurality, society will lose its sense of checks and balances, which are essential to decision-making processes in democracies, and will become increasingly held hostage by extremisms and polarization. Without reliable journalism, our societies will regress through centuries of civilization.

An extraordinary Brazilian film, I’m Still Here (Ainda Estou Aqui), received two Oscar nominations in 2025 and won Best International Feature Film. It narrates the moral, ethical, and emotional resistance of a family faced with the brazenness of the military dictatorship following the disappearance of their father – a federal deputy of moderate leanings, yet still viewed as an enemy to be eliminated. Journalism in Latin America is experiencing a similar situation. It suffers from violence, persecution, and injustices, and now faces the existential threat of destruction by artificial intelligence. But we are still here. And it never hurts to remember what a Brazilian oral tradition inspired by indigenous resistance proclaims: as long as there is bamboo, there will be arrows. 

Marcelo Rech, Journalist and Executive President of the Brazilian Newspaper Association (ANJ)

By Branko Brkic and Tina Brown.

There is a curious thing about journalism: Everyone seeking power calls us dead but still wants to control it.

Authoritarians attack it, oligarchs try to buy it, propagandists mimic it. Powerful tech platforms filter the news you read to build their $-billion empires, simultaneously making journalism look insignificant and small. 

Not to be left behind, governments intimidate, sue, sometimes jail, spy on the people trying to bring you the facts. They also shut publishers and their publications down.

If journalism and independent truth were so truly irrelevant, so very much dead, why would so much money, political energy and fury be spent trying to bury it? It is an important question. 

The rich were always more powerful than the poor. Governments abused their authority. Businesses bought influence over institutions; courts failed to protect the unprotected.  Even the Fourth Estate was balancing its act. Journalism was never as pure as journalists sometimes like to remember it. But the system was at least recognisable. 

Power had physical addresses. Governments existed inside (mostly) recognised borders. Newspapers had editors. Companies had owners. Laws could, at least theoretically, be enforced within jurisdictions.

Then Big Tech happened. The balance changed faster than our institutions could adapt. A new uber-class with galactic wealth and power, some of them greater than  the overwhelming majority of governments on earth,  run the show. They shape communication between billions of people, determine which information will travel and which information will disappear into the void. A true operating system of our modern world, they built infrastructure that underpins politics, commerce, culture, knowledge and pretty much everything else. If they stop, our modern world stops.

We should not be surprised by the collision of power happening right now. These systems, old and new, were created in different centuries, according to profoundly different rules. 

These indeed are extraordinarily chaotic times – and the news media appear to be the prize trophy every power badly wants. 

This friction is only starting and will likely cause huge conflicts and suffering. The battlefield on which much of this struggle is being fought is the information environment itself.

The very people declaring journalism dead/irrelevant understand something that parts of our own industry often forget: Information is the most powerful technology ever invented by our human race. 

The battle for humanity’s future is quickly recognised as a battle over perceived reality. Control what people know and you influence what they believe. Influence what they believe and you shape what they fear, whom they trust, how they vote, what they buy, whom they hate and ultimately what kind of power they will accept as legitimate. 

This is why repeated declarations that the news media are dead should make journalists ready for the fight of our lifetime. The trust crisis is real and wasn’t just inflicted on journalism. Although we, journalists/ editors/ publishers were/are subject of an extraordinarily broad and powerful attack, there is no running away from the fact that our own industry helped create the crisis. 

Long before Big Tech captured the advertising market, too many news outlets forgot about the essence of public service. Readers were treated like metrics, coverage was turned into content, and outrage became the business model.

It was our own mistakes that allowed Big Tech to exploit them.

Our future depends on our ability to explain to our communities that a modern information society needs reliable journalism in much the same way it needs functioning courts, schools, electricity grids and clean water systems. You notice infrastructure most clearly when it stops working. And we are already beginning to discover what happens when the information infrastructure fails.

 Our self-evident truths remain:

Truthful, verified information in the public interest cannot be negotiable. Independence from political and commercial power cannot be a slogan used only when convenient. Our relationship with the communities we exist to serve must sit at the foundation of everything we do.

We must strive to become radically better at explaining how we know what we know. We must find inner strength to acknowledge errors, show evidence where possible, to listen more and to listen very carefully.

Trust is not something we are entitled to inherit from previous generations of journalists. Every generation must keep renewing it.

Technology itself is not our enemy. That would be both foolish and hypocritical – we use it every hour of every day of our modern lives. Technology has allowed journalism to reach audiences we could never have imagined. AI will transform reporting, analysis, translation, investigation and distribution in ways we have only begun to understand.

The question is not whether technology will shape journalism – of course it will. The question is whether the power created by technology will remain contestable, and whether we, the media, can rise to that challenge of keeping this power in check, for the benefit of everyone.

We may have to change our form, the way we function and the way we reach audiences but we cannot abandon our purpose.

It is not about us, the news media, possessing an unchecked power, quite the opposite. The purpose of our existence is to ensure that nobody does.

News platforms will come and go. Business models will come and go. But will there still be someone whose job it is to find out what is true – and tell everybody else, regardless of who would rather they didn’t – that is the question on which so much of our reality depends.

On World News Day, amid all the anxiety about our future, perhaps that is the promise journalism needs to make again.

Not that we are always right, not that we deserve to survive because we have existed for a long time, and not that people should simply trust us.

We believe it is much more demanding of us:

We will stand with the communities we serve rather than above them. We will do the work. We will show how we did it. We will correct ourselves when we fail. 

And, above all, we will strive to keep the light of shared reality on.

Branko Brkic is the founder of Project Kontinuum  and
Tina Brown is the editor, author and founder of Truth Tellers, the Sir Harry Evans global  journalism summit

By Anna Mae Lamentillo.

As I conduct a language audit of Metro Manila, I am struck by a paradox. This metropolis is home to at least 217 languages, a figure that grows with every new community I encounter. Yet some of the Philippines’ Indigenous and regional languages are fading before our eyes.

As a member of the Karay-a ethnolinguistic group, I know what disappears when a language weakens. We lose words, along with songs, rituals, humor, ecological knowledge, family histories, and ways of seeing the world. When a language falls silent, an archive burns without smoke.

This is not only a cultural emergency. It is a democratic one.

Democracy depends on citizens understanding what is being done in their name. Journalism helps people evaluate leaders, follow public spending, prepare for disasters, defend their rights, and join debate. But information is not genuinely public when it is available only in languages many citizens do not fully command.

The Philippines, with roughly 117 million people, is home to around 175 living Indigenous languages, dozens of which are endangered. Yet Filipino and English dominate education, government, and mass media. From classrooms to courtrooms, these languages often determine who can participate confidently and who must struggle through unfamiliar vocabulary.

The imbalance sends a clear message: local languages belong at home, while the languages of power belong in public life.

That message has consequences. 

A farmer may hear about a new agricultural policy without understanding its technical terms. An Indigenous community may receive news about mining or land disputes in a language that fails to express its relationship with the land. During typhoons, health emergencies, or elections, unclear information can become dangerous. People may turn instead to rumours or misleading social media posts that speak more directly to them.

Journalism in local languages helps close this democratic gap. It does more than translate reports produced in Manila word for word. It allows journalists to ask different questions, recognize local priorities, and explain national events through community experience. Reports in Cebuano, Hiligaynon, Bikol, Waray, Ilocano, Kapampangan, or Kinaray-a can carry meanings and concerns that disappear in a standardized national version.

This conviction is why I founded Paraluman News. I wanted to help build journalism that does not require communities to abandon their language, identity, or experience before entering the public conversation. Paraluman News rests on a simple belief: access to information should not depend on whether someone speaks the language of institutions, elites, or major newsrooms. Journalism must enter communities, listen carefully, and communicate in ways people recognize as their own.

This is also a question of who will shape the future of Philippine media. Young Filipinos are often treated only as audiences or users of technology. But they can become reporters, translators, editors, community historians, and media innovators. They already move across languages, platforms, and cultural spaces. They know how a story can travel from a barangay conversation to a group chat, a podcast, or a national debate.

With training, trust, and resources, young people can lead the revival of local language journalism. They can record the stories of elders, produce news videos in regional languages, build digital archives, and explain public policy in forms their communities can use. They can show that a mother tongue is not a barrier to modernity, but a source of authority, creativity, and connection.

Metro Manila reveals the promise and peril of multilingual life. In markets, schools, and online spaces, Kapampangan, Pangasinan, Chavacano, Hokkien, Taglish, and many other languages meet and evolve. But migration creates pressure to abandon the mother tongue. Regional accents are mocked as provincial, and speakers learn to flatten the musical contours of home in order to sound acceptable.

Newsrooms can reinforce this hierarchy or challenge it. They should invest in reporters, editors, broadcasters, and community correspondents who work in local and Indigenous languages. This work should be part of daily public interest journalism, not an occasional heritage feature. Community radio, regional newspapers, podcasts, and digital channels deserve sustained support. Universities should also train multilingual journalists.

Supporting local language journalism is not simply a cultural project. It is an investment in informed citizenship, public trust, and equal participation. A democracy cannot claim to include everyone while requiring millions of people to leave their strongest language at the door.

On World News Day, we should remember that the right to know includes the right to understand. Journalism fulfills its democratic purpose only when people can hear the truth, question power, and imagine their future in a language that feels like their own.

Anna Mae Lamentillo, Founder: Paraluman News, The Philippines

By Ritu Kapur.

As India marked eighty years of independence this August, I found myself grappling with the very idea of “press freedom”. Because who exactly is the “press” anymore?

Is it an accredited journalist? The creator livestreaming a police crackdown? The village student demanding her right to education on a mobile phone? Press freedom and the citizen’s freedom to speak have begun to bleed into each other.

And for a few extraordinary weeks this summer, in the heart of my own city, I watched a generation test just how much freedom India accords either.

In May, the Chief Justice of India referred to unemployed “youngsters” as being like “cockroaches”. “Some of them become media, some of them become social media… and they start attacking everyone.” He later said his remarks were directed only at people using bogus degrees.

The clarification didn’t matter. The “cockroach” had escaped its context and landed on a generation that quickly went from frustrated to fearless.

In Boston, Indian student Abhijeet Dipke created the Cockroach Janta Party, a satirical meme for the “unemployed, lazy and chronically online”, playing on the name of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The page soon had over 22 million followers. 

But the meme became a movement because the anger was already there.

A leaked medical entrance exam paper had driven at least 17 students to suicide, while irregularities in school board-exam revaluation left thousands more in limbo. This grief and anger filled Jantar Mantar in Delhi for seven weeks. Students went on hunger strike. The internet was cut. Food and water supplies were choked. On July 20, protesters demanding the Education Minister’s resignation tried to march towards Parliament. Police fired tear gas shells and pellets. Batons struck heads. But bloodied faces kept shouting slogans.

A match had been lit.

Large legacy broadcasters and publishers, thriving on government revenue and increasingly becoming megaphones for the ruling party’s propaganda, hot-iron branded the protesters as stone-pelting goondas.  Young influencers and reporters from small independent newsrooms strode into the protests with phones and cameras, recording, questioning, livestreaming. Legacy-media journalists crawled back into their tone-deaf echo chambers as protesters pushed back: 

“Godi Media waapis jao.” (Get lost, lapdog media.)

The ruling party’s image built over years and crores of rupees was punctured by irreverent memes, rhymes and ditties. Schoolchildren across towns and villages became pretend reporters, holding bottles as “mics”, demanding schools and teachers where there were none. Stand-up comics who had spent years walking on eggshells rediscovered their punchlines.

What happens when the press stops holding power to account and others have to do its job? And did this historic movement claw back the press freedom India has lost?

Not yet.

Within days, posts and reels from the protests, or those critical of the government, started vanishing from social-media platforms. Section 69A of India’s Information Technology Act gives the government sweeping powers to order platforms to take down content on grounds as elastic as “sovereignty” and “national security”, with the process shielded from public scrutiny by confidentiality rules. The Indian Express reported that from March to July 2026, the Indian government sent one blocking order every minute to social-media platforms.

But takedowns are only one weapon.

First Information Reports. Criminal prosecution. Income-tax and money-laundering investigations. Phone and laptop seizure. Years in courtrooms. A legal system that allows the process itself to become the punishment. 

Press freedom isn’t only the freedom to publish information. It is the freedom to get it. The Right to Information Act has been weakened. Access to government records has narrowed.

And then there’s surveillance. A journalist isn’t free merely because she can publish. She needs sources who believe they can speak without their calls or messages being watched. You don’t have to censor a story if you can make it impossible to report.  

And who will be left to report?

I visit universities where students studying journalism increasingly tell me they don’t want to become journalists. They haven’t lost the desire to tell stories or question authority. They are doing that furiously on Instagram, YouTube and elsewhere. They have lost faith in journalism as a profession in which they can build a life.

It is not press freedom until a twenty-three-year-old can choose journalism as a career and expect it to pay her rent.

It is not press freedom until readers understand that independent newsrooms survive on their subscriptions and their attention, not on government goodwill.

It is not press freedom when a handful of social-media platforms remain the only distribution network a story has and the state retains the power to take that story down.

It is not press freedom while local journalists are killed for the stories they insist on telling.

It is not press freedom while crony capital owns newsrooms.

The Cockroach Janata Party proved something real this summer: fear has a shelf life. A citizen with a phone can document an injustice. A comedian can puncture propaganda. Students can force power to listen. But they cannot, and should not have to, replace the infrastructure of journalism. 

A viral summer of dissent does not make a free press. A free press is built from the boring, expensive, unglamorous work of newsrooms that can survive without flattering power, and journalists who can afford to make reporting their life’s work.

The cockroach may be famous for surviving almost anything. Journalism shouldn’t have to.

Ritu Kapur is an Indian media leader. She is the co-founder, managing director, and CEO of Quint Digital Limited, the parent company of The Quint

By Stig Ørskov.

2026 was destined to be a big year for football headlines. So far it has certainly lived up to expectation, with the men’s World Cup providing both glory and controversy, sometimes in equal measure. But front and back pages have also been dominated by off the field concerns, and in particular the deeds of those entrusted with governing the global game. Without professional journalism, we wouldn’t have known until it was too late.

It was thanks to journalists, initially from The Times and Financial Times, that FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s proposal to sell off the World Cup was revealed. Valued at US$20 billion, the FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE) subsidiary envisaged managing commercial and operational rights for all FIFA competitions. Aiming to raise 20% of the company’s value (US$4.2 billion) from investors, the plan would have effectively handed over the beautiful game to private interests.

Only a small inner circle knew about the idea; FIFA had made no public announcement and even some of the organisation’s top officials only learned of it through media coverage. Within days of it becoming public, and with mounting pressure from all corners of the footballing world (including many of FIFA’s own member associations), the plan was scrapped. 

But the story is not going away. 

Scrapped is not the same as gone — and neither have the governance failures that made such a damaging attempt possible. 

Given the wider criticism of Infantino’s proximity to the US Administration — in the build up to the World Cup (see the December 2025 FIFA Peace Prize), during the tournament (the US president personally called Infantino to rescind a US player’s red card), and after (one of the leading figures in the FFE scheme was Joshua Kushner, brother of the US president’s son-in-law) — scrutiny will surely continue.

Journalists don’t give up easily. They will keep probing the secrecy around FIFA’s affairs because it is the public’s right to know how, and in whose interest, football’s future is being designed and where the game’s US$ billions in revenue are ending up. 

Yet almost none of that persistence made the headlines. The reporting that brought the plan to light, much like the work that will keep the story alive, goes almost entirely unnoticed. 

News organisations are very good at telling other people’s stories, yet we have not been even remotely as good at telling our own. That is one reason why, on 28 September each year, news organisations across the globe come together to mark World News Day — to make visible the work that is poured into every story. 

The FIFA investigation is a case in point. Having spent most of my life in journalism, I know how much effort goes into such a story, and how rarely audiences get to see behind the curtain. 

Someone had to notice, investigate, verify and then publish the facts. Journalists have been doing this kind of diligent work on FIFA for years, one investigation building on the last. It’s what makes a level of scrutiny like this possible. 

And while football may offer a rather vivid example that interests billions of people, the need for verified information now reaches into literally every challenge society faces. 

This is a time of polycrisis where wars, climate change, pressure on democracy and technological disruption overlap, reinforce and energise one another. People need more than an endless supply of information. They need facts they can trust, context that helps them understand what is happening and journalism that holds power to account — whether that power sits in government or the offices of a sports federation.

The growth of artificial intelligence makes that task ever more urgent. AI does not produce trusted information, it inherits it. Behind every reliable AI-generated answer, someone first had to discover, verify and take personal and legal responsibility for the information. The FIFA story is a clear example: no algorithm broke that story, because there was nothing yet to summarise. No pundit, content creator or influencer either. Someone had to go looking before anyone had confirmed there was even a story there at all. No machine, no commentator can do that for us — that is the job of a journalist.

I will not pretend our industry has always deserved the public’s trust, or that we have earned it equally everywhere. We get things wrong. We are sometimes slow to correct ourselves. But nobody else was going to tell you about FIFA’s plan, and I suggest that is worth remembering the next time you weigh up whether journalism deserves your confidence and support.

Of course, good journalism also extends far beyond the world of sport. And a family deciding what to do in the face of a devastating wildfire is relying on the same basic element football fans relied on before the FIFA story broke: that someone, somewhere, checked before publishing. That difference, between a fact someone verified and one that nobody did, shapes what we believe and often how we act — about a warning to evacuate, an announcement of a ceasefire, the calling of an election, or a vaccine to counter the spread of a new pandemic, etc.

World News Day exists because that difference is worth explaining plainly and out loud, not to ask for your loyalty, but to show you the work behind the headlines that usually stays invisible. The action on the pitch was there for everyone to see, but journalists opened doors behind which the real decisions were being made, far from the public interest. It’s why I ask you to think about this now, before the next crisis arrives and you feel there is nowhere to turn. Journalism exists to give you the facts that shape what matters. To better understand the world, Choose Trusted Journalism.

Stig Ørskov, CEO, World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA)

By Phil Chetwynd.

The obituaries of news agencies have been written on many occasions over the past two decades.

First we were told we were slower than Twitter and that our global network of salaried journalists was redundant because every citizen was a journalist now.

Who needs to pay for ethically-produced fact-checked content when information from the source is flowing directly into our phones in real time?

We all remember the euphoria of the Twitter Revolution in Iran in 2009 and the Facebook follow-up Arab Spring (2010-2012). It was intoxicating to see the free flow of information on social networks from citizens on the front line.

But we also all remember the brutal comedown. What happens when the autocrats shut down the internet or throw your citizens in jail? Who continues to document the story in Iran or Egypt or Syria for the outside world?  

It turned out social media algorithms were not driven by a need to search for the truth.

Silicon Valley worked out it would make more money promoting anger and outrage. It also turned out bad actors could manipulate these algorithms to promote lies. Not surprisingly, untrained citizens were not equipped to help society navigate the pollution of our information ecosystem.

Wind forward another decade and we are here again as we are presented with another ‘news agency killer’, the utopian future of Artificial Intelligence.

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Grok can scan the world’s journalism output in seconds and spit out five juicy paragraphs to tell you about anything that’s going on in the world.

This is the so-called AI Overview – it is causing traffic to trusted journalism sites across the globe to crash and it rarely pays for the expensively-produced professional journalism it hoovers up.

And so again we are asked: why pay for your professional journalism when information is being delivered free in real time? Why waste money employing journalists to gather information that can be aggregated by our new chatbot friends?

Part of the answer lies in the little chatbot disclaimer which says the information in your AI overview may actually be wrong. Would you like your news with or without hallucinations ?

Getting to the facts costs money, time, expertise and effort.

When a huge glacial collapse in late August triggered devastating flash floods along the Nepal-Tibet border leaving more than 1,300 people dead, AFP deployed a team of 11 journalists on the ground in remote parts of Nepal and India.

Within an hour of police confirmation of the first major flooding three of our journalists based in Kathmandu were on the road.

Prakash Mathema, Anup Ojha and Prabin Ranabhat are all Nepalese. They know the language, the terrain and the people. They carried expensive cameras and drone equipment.

One of our photographers made a 13-hour journey by motorbike and truck to reach the main disaster zone. He was then able to use his contacts to take an aid helicopter further into the disaster zone. His stunning drone images of destroyed villages were seen across the world.

In a catastrophe in remote areas of the planet, often there is no Internet. It requires journalists to be on the ground, sometimes putting themselves in considerable personal danger, to bear witness to events.

It also requires journalists who know the country and can turn to a reliable source network. While part of our Nepal team headed to the mountains, the rest remained in Kathmandu to sift fact from rumour as stories of dead and missing emerged.

Many of the first reliable words and pictures published by the global media came from agencies such as AFP and our colleagues at Reuters and AP.

Our clients use the content without hesitation because they know it has been gathered in an ethically correct way according to the transparent charters and trust principles which guide the work of all our journalists.

They know that we have employed professional journalists to gather information and that we invest resources in training and expertise to ensure the people we send into harm’s way are well prepared.

Clients pay for the product because they understand quality newsgathering is not cheap. They also understand we work to the same ethical guidelines from every dateline on the planet. It makes no difference whether the content comes from Nepal or New York or Gaza, it bears the same stamp of quality.

On the other hand, making stuff up costs nothing. Side by side with real journalistic images from the Nepal disaster zone were reams of deep fake images showing artificially generated destroyed villages and bodies lined up for burial.

The tools that have given us AI Overviews have also given every human on the planet the capacity to create confusing and damaging false images that clog up our news feeds and often go viral on social media.

At AFP we employ over 100 journalists exclusively working to debunk and fact check this growing fake tide. Pushing back on lies and manipulation has become an essential journalistic complement to searching for the truth.

Defending truth and facts costs money and requires values. The international agencies’ global networks remain an essential part of the fabric of the global information system. They should be cherished, and defended.

Phil Chetwynd, Global News Director, AFP

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

By Natalia Antelava.

I recently reread my father’s diaries from the 1960s: pages of hurried scribbles of an ambitious twenty-something, furious about the hypocrisies and injustices around him.

For years, I read his journals as the record of a frustrated man trying to practice a profession the system has stripped of its purpose. He was a journalist in a country where reality was pre-written: the Soviet Union.

This time, I read them as a stark warning: good reporting can exist without a free press.

In an age of AI and resurgent authoritarianism, we risk rebuilding the same trap in a different form: individual reporting can still matter while journalism as a whole becomes irrelevant to society’s ability to understand itself.

The comparison may sound absurd. The Soviet system censored what people could know while flooding them with one official story. Today’s information environment works almost in reverse: not one official story but endless ones, not scarcity but excess.

Algorithms and the companies behind them rank, filter and increasingly synthesize more information than any of us can process. Facts can travel widely without ever forming a coherent picture. Fragment truth, personalize it, drown it in abundance, and suppression becomes less necessary. Noise does the censorship’s work.

That matters because we still understand press freedom mainly through censorship: can journalists publish what power wants hidden, and can they survive doing it? When they are jailed or murdered, the assault is obvious. Harder to recognize is a press that remains free in form while becoming hollow in function.

My father’s diaries show the caricatured version. He began his career inside the vast Soviet network of worker and peasant correspondents, created in part to expose local failures. Reporters like him could uncover corruption, document abuse, sometimes even get an official fired. What they could not do was follow the story upward, from the failing official to sustained scrutiny of the system itself. 

Softer versions of that pattern appear today in India and Turkey: journalists still expose corruption and abuse, even as legal, political and economic pressure makes it harder to follow those stories upward into the systems that produce them.

In the United States, where extraordinary reporting remains abundant, institutions with the reach to connect the dots are under growing political and regulatory pressure. Disney is suing the FCC over early reviews of ABC station licenses that it says are retaliatory; the FCC denies that claim. Paramount paid $16 million to settle the president’s lawsuit against CBS while its $8.4 billion merger with Skydance was awaiting FCC approval. The merger was approved weeks later. Nobody has banned a story. But the institutions capable of assembling the larger picture are becoming more vulnerable to power. 

The geography of authoritarianism has changed too. For my father, however dangerous it was to cross, there was a world beyond the Berlin wall. He took an enormous personal risk when he started reporting secretly for Radio Liberty, U.S.-funded broadcaster that carried uncensored news into the Soviet Union. 

Today, authoritarianism is no longer neatly contained within borders. The Iron Curtain has splintered into thousands of digital partitions running through neighborhoods, even families. This fragmentation creates the conditions authoritarian movements know how to exploit: a weakened shared reality and uncertainty about what anything means.

Much of this fragmented information system is built by a handful of powerful men in Silicon Valley whose technologies shape what we see and how we understand it. That puts America at the center of a striking reversal: once a defender of the free press, it is now helping weaken the shared reality a free press depends on. And this is arguably bigger than Trump. He simply exploits a fragmented information system that was built before him and will outlast him.

Some of the fragmentation is on us, the journalists. Conspiracy theories succeed because they offer what audiences are looking for: a coherent explanation of how the world works. Journalism can build that picture without inventing reality, but doing so takes time and money. The 24-hour news cycle pushes the other way, trapping newsrooms in beats, updates and fragments.

We do not lack good reporting; what we are missing is enough journalism that connects it. People do not live in beats, and yet most newsrooms cover school-board fights, elections, technology, food prices, wars and trade routes as separate stories. Rebuilding local news has rightly become a central democratic project in the United States. But illuminating every dot is not the same as drawing the map. If the dots never connect, a press can remain busy, prolific and technically free, and still tell us nothing about how power really works.

In the United States now, I sometimes feel the world of my father’s diaries coming back into view. He would have recognized the danger: plenty of truth, but a system that keeps it from adding up. Soviet dissidents understood that when truth is trapped, you have to build routes that carry it somewhere where it can connect and matter.

Long before the Berlin Wall fell, tunnels ran underneath it. Samizdat, foreign broadcasts, voices from the other side: together they created routes around the Soviet system, linking people inside it with people beyond.

Today we live among countless fragments of reality, each circulating behind its own invisible walls. Journalism cannot bring those walls down. But it can dig underneath them. The Panama Papers showed what happens when hundreds of reporters across borders work the same material together: fragments become a picture of how power works.

We need more tunnels — and they cannot stop at newsroom walls. They need to cross disciplines and borders, connect the local to the global, and bridge the widening distance between journalists and the people they are trying to reach. A free press now needs alliances not only against censorship, but against fragmentation. Without them, press freedom risks becoming little more than the freedom to publish into the void.

Natalia Antelava is a journalist, co-founder of ZEG Network and co-founder and publisher of Coda Story and The Atlas, a new global publication connecting local stories to larger systems of power.

By Meera Selva.

This is the year the world caught fire.  Often literally – wildfires across Europe and America stopped even the most vocal of climate change skeptics. But also figuratively. We are reminded again how global supply chains are vulnerable to geopolitical shocks, how endless wars force whole communities into spaces they do not want to be and are not welcome.  

And online, a torrent of AI-generated and distributed content pretends to try to make sense of it all but actually confuses and imperils us.

Thank goodness then for the storytellers. The journalists, the ones who probe, question, irritate the powerful. The ones who sit and listen with the grieving and try to understand those who are furious.

Technology turns up the volume of public discourse but rarely gives us the information we need at the moment we need it. Journalists do. They turn people deluged with information into informed citizens, able to advocate for themselves and to push for change.

And they are everywhere. In every community, village, town and region there are natural journalists: people who observe, record, analyse, remember and challenge.

They are the eyes and ears of our local media outfits, often in places where there’s no market significant enough to support the “classical” news operations.

They are the ones holding a camera and trying to stop their hands shaking as they film a glacier breaking away and sweeping away whole streets in Nepal. They are the ones who spot diggers rolling into a remote Kazakh town and wonder if the ramshackle gold mine that suddenly appeared is legal.

The journalists are also the ones who listen, who allow the voiceless to have a voice and help people tell the story of their lives.

And there are also the journalists who keep at that work long after the rest of the world has looked away. They are also the ones who stay to ask what happens next. How will homes be rebuilt after a catastrophe? Why are the glaciers melting? Who is behind the mining operations that are destroying a local landscape and why are regional authorities allowing them to operate without permits?

These storytellers and journalists need recognition and they need protection to keep doing their job. They need legal covers from the powerful who try to stop them from asking the difficult questions and uncovering the answers. They need a back up when fighting technology companies that profit from their work without paying for it.

Most importantly they need audiences, readers and communities that recognize and value the importance of what they do.

Our information ecosystems – the digital, audio visual and written messages we receive in our everyday lives – still need journalists to function properly. And crucially they need a plurality of journalists – the small, independent outlets to harness the energy of the streets, and the large, well established newsrooms willing to take on the big fights.

This is a challenge for generations. Across the world young people are picking up cameras and phones to record their own stories and walk into public life with demands, questions and ideas.

This is a huge opportunity for the new mobile-first outlets that carry their stories across social media but it is also the chance for larger, more established newsrooms to win the trust of the younger audiences they have been searching for.

It matters to all of us. There can be no meaningful civil participation without facts, context and questions. Anyone who wants to sow confusion and misery takes away information, silences those who ask questions and denies people the right to know about the world around them. There is an easy way to fight back. Read the news, tell your story, be informed. Be heard.

Meera Selva, CEO: Informed

By Lionel Barber.

In a radio address in December 1940, one year before the US entered World War II, Franklin D Roosevelt described America as “the arsenal of democracy”. Today, the guns are falling silent across the western front. Independent journalism, the lifeblood of an informed democracy, faces existential challenges, particularly in the US.

The threats are economic and technological, but they are also legal and political in nature. The second Trump administration is targeting news organisations aggressively, filing multi-billion law suits, hunting down sources through subpoenas, and waging a campaign of vilification against any reporter or editor who fails to toe the line.

There is scant precedent for this abuse of executive power. Not even Richard Nixon at the height of the Watergate scandal comes close. The assault on independent journalism is being mounted – in plain sight – using the awesome power of the Federal government. The courts, the last line of defence, have so far stood firm; but no one can be sure where the US Supreme Court, with its in-built long-term conservative majority, will come down in the final instance, should things head that way.

The bedrock Supreme Court decision defending freedom of the press in the US is New York Times Co v Sullivan (1964) which established that public officials cannot sue for defamation unless they prove “actual malice” – that is to say, the publisher knew the information was false or acted with reckless disregard.  

A second foundational case is New York Times Co v United States (1971) – the so-called Pentagon Papers case in which the Court heavily restricted the government’s ability to exercise prior restraint or block the publication of classified defence information.

In both cases, the Supreme Court rulings set a high bar for the government to muzzle the media. But these enlightened rulings are relics of a bygone era. The Sixties and Seventies were marked by a profound distrust of the Federal government, exacerbated by the Vietnam War. The media’s exposure of the government’s lies used to justify the prosecution of that war lent newspapers, radio and television a new legitimacy.

Half a century on, public cynicism has spread to the media itself. Journalists rank below lawyers and estate agents, according to some surveys. Some of the mistrust may have been earned as a result of missteps and overreach; but that is the price of a free press. Today, when social media algorithms prioritize engagement which in turn rewards conflict and outrage, established news organisations find themselves branded as biased and disreputable. The Trump administration has been the most aggressive proponent and litigant in this media intimidation campaign.

In 2024, the Walt Disney Co agreed to pay $15m to the Trump presidential library and pay $1m in legal fees to settle a defamation suit brought against Disney’s ABC News subsidiary. Disney settled 

after its star anchor – former Clinton administration communications director George Stephanopoulos – said Trump had been found “liable for rape”. (A New York judge had ruled that Trump was liable for “sexual assault”).

In 2025, Paramount agreed to pay the Trump presidential library $16m to settle a legal dispute over the editing of a CBS news programme featuring an interview with then Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump claimed the edit “tipped the scales” against him in the 2024 presidential campaign – despite the fact that he ended up a clear winner against Democratic candidate Harris. 

Though Paramount admitted no guilt, it preferred to settle at a time when it needed the Federal government’s blessing for its planned multi-billion dollar merger with Skydance Media. Similarly, Walt Disney calculated that it was not worth testing a reasonable defence in court highlighting the fact that Trump’s notoriety made him a libel-proof plaintiff. In short, corporate interest has taken precedence over the constitutional principle of the freedom of the press.

There are noble exceptions. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the BBC have declined to settle multi-billion dollar lawsuits filed by President Trump.  Indeed, the New York Times is suing the Pentagon over its decision to restrict access to reporters. The BBC is also contesting a $10bn defamation claim over a documentary on the January 6th riots. The case is due to be heard in a Florida court next year.

It is tempting to dismiss these fears as the product of a fevered liberal imagination.  But I have been visiting the US regularly for the past 50 years. I was stationed as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times for a decade, first in Washington and later in New York. I know the country (47 states and counting) and I consider dozens of American journalists to be personal friends. The threats to news organisations, large and small, constitute a clear and present danger.

America is the land of the First Amendment which guarantees freedom of religion, speech, the press, peaceful assembly and the right to petition the government. What happens in Washington does not stay in Washington.  If America falls short in upholding the constitutional principle of a free press, others will act with greater impunity. The world will be a far darker place. Ends

Lionel Barber is an English journalist and former editor of the Financial Times. Until recently he was the co-host of the podcast Media Confidential.