Tag: 2026

By Garry Pierre-Pierre.

Last July, news that Haitian businessman and politician Reginald Boulos had been arrested began circulating widely across social media.

The posts moved quickly. But they offered little beyond the bare claim. No details. No confirmation. Just enough information to create more questions than answers.

At The Haitian Times, the newsroom confirmed the arrest, gathered the facts and published a detailed account of what had happened.

When I shared the story on social media, one response stopped me:

“Thanks for the update. We’ve been waiting to hear from The Haitian Times for validation on this news.”

The reader already had the information. What she did not know was whether to believe it.

That distinction is worth considering on World News Day, when news organizations around the globe come together to call attention to the importance of fact-based journalism. At a moment when information is more abundant than at any time in human history, journalism faces a peculiar challenge: 

Our job is no longer simply to tell people what happened. Increasingly, it is to help them determine what is real, what matters and what can actually be known.

For most of modern journalism’s history, information was scarce. Newspapers gathered it, organized it, printed it and delivered it. Radio and television expanded the reach, but the basic proposition remained the same: journalists had access to information that most people did not.

That world has disappeared, never to return. Today, information is everywhere. A witness can livestream an event before a reporter arrives. A politician can communicate directly with millions of followers. Governments, corporations, activists, propagandists and ordinary citizens all possess the means to publish instantly.

Artificial intelligence has accelerated this transformation. We can now produce convincing text, photographs, audio and video at extraordinary speed and scale. We have more information at our fingertips than any generation in human history. And yet knowing what is actually happening can feel harder than ever. That is the paradox confronting journalism.

Our challenge is no longer simply getting information to people. It is helping them determine what information means, where it came from, what is missing and whether it corresponds to reality. That requires something technology alone cannot provide: judgment.

Journalists decide which questions need to be asked. They seek evidence. They challenge assertions. They provide context. They distinguish what is known from what is suspected and, sometimes most importantly, acknowledge what cannot yet be known. These may sound like ordinary acts of reporting. Increasingly, they are acts of resistance against an information culture that rewards speed, certainty and outrage.

Around the world, governments and political movements have learned that controlling information no longer necessarily requires suppressing it. Sometimes the more effective strategy is to overwhelm people with competing claims until they become exhausted by the effort required to determine what is true.

The result is not always belief in propaganda. Sometimes it is something more dangerous: resignation. People stop trying to know. That is why journalism matters so profoundly at this moment.

Not because journalists possess some monopoly on truth. We do not. Journalists make mistakes. News organizations have blind spots. Institutions must continually demonstrate credibility through the quality of their work.

But journalism at its best offers something increasingly rare: a method.

Verify before publishing. Seek multiple sources. Demand evidence. Provide context. Correct mistakes. Remain skeptical of claims, especially convenient ones. Keep asking questions.

Those principles matter whether a journalist is documenting a war, investigating corruption, covering an election or sitting through a school board meeting that almost nobody else attends.

That is what World News Day should remind us to defend. We are entering a world in which producing information will become almost effortless. Determining what deserves to be believed will not. That may be journalism’s great challenge in the years ahead.

And its greatest reason for being.

Garry Pierre-Pierre is a Pulitzer-prize winning, multimedia and entrepreneurial journalist. He is cofounder of the Haitian Times, a New York-based English-language publication serving the Haitian Diaspora and director of partnerships at URL Media.

By Charles M. Sennott.

What would happen if the same attack occurred today amid the crisis in local news?

Twenty-five years ago, on the morning of September 11th, 2001, I was unpacking a moving truck in London. I had just finished a five-year  posting  as the Middle East bureau chief for The Boston Globe amid the violence of the intifada and particularly the bus bombings which were hitting closer and closer to home. And I had arrived in London to take on a new position as Europe bureau chief for the Globe.

On that fateful morning, we had not had time to set up the television or a cable package or any internet connection, but I had my trusted  Sony World Band Shortwave Radio crackling in the background as I was unpacking. I was listening to the BBC and it was just after 1:46 pm Greenwich Mean Time when regular programming on Radio 4 was interrupted for breaking news. The first plane had just struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Seventeen minutes later the second hijacked plane hit. And in that moment, the world had changed. America was under attack and would soon be at war. 

Eight years earlier I was a street reporter at the New York Daily News and was covering the first attack on the World Trade Center, a failed attempt to topple the towers with a truck bomb but which offered a crude blueprint for 9-11. My reporting at the Daily News was how I landed the job covering the Middle East for the Boston Globe. 

As the news broke on 9-11, I  worked my cell phone and started reaching contacts across the Middle East, confirming what was growing increasingly apparent: The outrageous and apocalyptic vision set out by Osama bin Laden’s 1998 declaration of holy war against America was undeniably underway. 

I just started writing everything I knew through eight years of reporting that had preceded this moment, the local story of the 1993 bombing had become the global story of the attack on America. I realized that of the four hijacked planes, two of them had left from my hometown of Boston. So for The Boston Globe, 9-11 was also very clearly a local story. I knew quite a few of the passengers on those planes.  

By September 19th, I was landing in Tajikistan and within a day was on my way into Afghanistan, where the Taliban was still in power and Al Qaeda was operating openly. We flew into the country on an old cargo plane owned by the Northern Alliance, the faction of fighters who were aligned  with the US in toppling the Taliban. I would cover the story for the Globe for the next five years.

A quarter century on from 9-11, I am reflecting on the international news coverage by American news organizations then and now. It is safe to say that the commitment that the Boston Globe made to our coverage seems extraordinary today, and it feels safe to say there are not many papers the size of the Globe offering readers that kind of in-depth coverage of the world. The Globe still does some of the best investigative reporting in America, but it no longer has an international desk.

The New York Daily News in 1993 focused our police reporting on the suspects and the militant mosques out of which they emerged in New Jersey and Brooklyn. But City Editor Bill Boyle dispatched me to cover where the bombing suspects originated from, reporting that took me to Egypt, Sudan, the West Bank and Pakistan to explore the origins of the animosity in the nascent islamist movement that would later be known as Al Qaeda. Today, the Daily News is owned by a venture capital firm that has squeezed every dollar out of it and left it hanging by a thread with far fewer reporters and hardly enough resources to staff the outer boroughs, never mind a series of in-depth reports out of the Middle East. The Daily News series in 1993 was titled “Seeds of Terror,” a prescient framing. 

That kind of in-depth reporting just doesn’t happen as much today. There are major American news organizations still carrying out and funding ambitious on-the- ground reporting, such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, AP and CNN and NPR. There are also international news organizations such as the BBC, the Guardian and many others where courageous journalists still travel to countries at war such as Ukraine and Iran.

But the idea of a more local news operation covering a global story is virtually non-existent. Why is that?  Never has trusted information been more valuable to readers. We need eyes and ears on the ground, yet we have fewer and fewer reporters who are there on the front lines covering the big  stories and finding local angles for their audiences back home.

Why would it matter? I believe drawing readers and viewers into the story through angles that speak directly to their concerns can make us all not just  better informed and but more connected to the world. 

That’s why I am writing this essay as part of World News Day which officially falls on September 28th.  More than 1,000 newsrooms from over 100 countries will mark it together and GroundTruth is proud to be counted among them. It falls on that day for a reason: September 28 is also  UNESCO’s International Day for Universal Access to Information. And that’s not a coincidence, as the organizers point out. They believe our right to know is only real if someone is doing the work of making information accessible, fact-checked and true. 

It is a mission  that only succeeds with  a robust landscape for local news. As local news grows more and more barren across America with one news desert sprouting up after another, we should all be concerned. And this downturn in local news is a global phenomenon that is eroding democracies around the world, and eroding the very idea of the truth.

We have much work to do to find a way to restore the idea of truth, and the work begins close to home. It begins with restoring local news. 

Charles Sennott is an award-winning correspondent, best-selling author, and editor. He founded The GroundTruth Project and now focuses on his own reporting and thought leadership through his GroundTruth newsletter on Substack.

By Caroline Vuillemin.

When communities are cut off by conflict, displaced by violence, or trying to survive a humanitarian crisis, reliable information becomes even more of a practical necessity. Local journalists and public interest media outlets are often the only actors capable of reaching those communities in their own languages and through trusted channels, with the information they need to make decisions, access assistance and hold power to account.

Humanitarian organisations recognise this: they depend on local media to reach affected populations in ways that few other actors can replicate. And yet, these are precisely the media organisations least likely to survive without sustained, long-term external support. 

Committed media support networks, such as the Global Forum for Media Development and IFPIM, are working hard to convince policy makers and donors of the evidence that without a robust media and information infrastructure, there is no resilient society.

Operating in fragile and conflict-affected settings means constantly navigating insecurity, mis- and disinformation, displacement, political harassment and economic precarity. Fondation Hirondelle, a media development actor with more than 30 years of experience in such contexts, knows the difficulty of creating and sustaining public-interest media despite all odds. 

Short-term, project-based funding – still the dominant model – does not build resilient newsrooms. It builds precarious ones. It forces editorial teams to chase grant cycles rather than serve audiences. It rewards visibility over depth, and activity over long-term impact.

On this 2026 World News Day, we are reminded of the importance of showing what goes into journalism that matters. This is backed up by evidence and academic research such as the global call from leading economists urging action to protect public interest media for economic prosperity and human progress.

Recognising the value of independent journalism, however, also means asking what allows it to continue.

If we are serious about independent journalism as a pillar of democracy and stability, we need funding frameworks that reflect that commitment.

This question is particularly urgent today. International funding for media and development is under increasing pressure, while the need for reliable, independent information is growing. At the same time, major donors are making decisions that will shape their priorities for years to come.

The European Union’s negotiations over its next Multiannual Financial Framework are one important example. The decisions now taking shape will define EU external action from 2028 onwards. At the heart of that framework is the Global Europe instrument, through which the EU supports democracy, human rights, resilience, development and humanitarian action in partner countries.

The choices made about the ways these resources are allocated will have direct consequences for the already limited share of international assistance that supports public interest media – including in fragile and conflict-affected contexts where that support is most needed.

Without explicit recognition of independent journalism as critical democratic infrastructure, and without flexible, long-term funding mechanisms to match, there is a risk of replicating the same structural failures that have left public interest media consistently underfunded.

This is not simply a question of protecting media organisations. When an independent newsroom disappears, communities lose more than a source of news. They lose access to verified information, a space for public debate and, often, a channel through which their concerns can reach decision-makers.

This is why funding for independent media should not be treated as an optional addition to democracy, development or humanitarian programmes. Reliable information is part of the infrastructure that allows these efforts to succeed.

2026 World News Day is an opportunity to demonstrate what journalism contributes to societies around the world – particularly in places where producing reliable information is difficult, dangerous and economically fragile.

Journalists and media organisations will continue to do this work because they believe in its value. But commitment alone cannot sustain independent journalism. If we want public interest media to remain present when communities need them most, they need predictable, flexible and long-term support.

By Caroline Vuillemin, Director General of Fondation Hirondelle

By Carlos Fernando Chamorro.

For Confidencial, reinventing journalism in exile is not a matter of aesthetic change; it is a strategy for resistance and survival to defeat censorship.

On July 19, 2026, dictator Daniel Ortega proclaimed that “there will never be elections in Nicaragua again.” The announcement sparked international outrage, although in reality, democratic elections in which political power could genuinely be contested had already been eliminated in practice more than a decade ago. 

In 2021, for example, Ortega and his wife, “co-president” Rosario Murillo, secured another term without political competition, after outlawing political parties and imprisoning all seven opposition presidential hopefuls. What is new now is that Ortega is formalizing a one-party regime by enshrining the prohibition of democratic elections in the Constitution. This is merely the latest nail intended to seal the coffin of a nation and consolidate a totalitarian dynastic dictatorship.

Since 2018, after the police and paramilitary forces massacred demonstrators in nationwide protests demanding justice, democracy and free elections, leaving hundreds dead, a police state has been imposed that has eliminated all democratic freedoms. Without formally declaring a state of emergency, the dictatorship abolished freedom of assembly and movement, freedom of the press and freedom of expression, as well as electoral freedom; it imprisoned thousands of people. 

After 2021, it unleashed a fierce campaign of persecution against civil society, including the Catholic Church, and shut down more than 5,500 civil society organizations, among them private universities, think tanks, medical associations, business organizations, and even the Missionaries of Charity, founded by Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

According to Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index, in 2026 Nicaragua ranks last in Latin America and 168th out of 180 countries worldwide for press freedom, compared with Cuba at 160th, Venezuela at 159th, and El Salvador at 143rd. More than 200 journalists, along with entire newsrooms, have been forced into permanent exile in order to preserve their freedom and continue practicing journalism. The good news is that, despite the political persecution of the press, independent journalism in exile is overcoming censorship in Nicaragua.

Despite internet blockages and the criminalization of freedom of expression, Confidencial and other Nicaraguan digital media outlets operating from Costa Rica, the United States, Spain, and other countries continue to reach 50% of our audience inside Nicaragua.

However, practicing journalism in exile requires us to overcome three major challenges: first, protecting our sources and collaborators through secure communication channels; second, undertaking extraordinary verification efforts to provide reliable information without having journalists on the ground; and third, and no less importantly, ensuring the financial sustainability of our newsrooms under the most adverse and challenging conditions.

Over these last five years in exile, Confidencial has investigated dozens of emblematic cases of public corruption, state capture, human rights violations and the dismantling of democracy:

• “The Ortega-Murillo Family’s Network of Private Businesses Under State Protection,” “The Front Man Behind the Purchase of Disnorte and Dissur,” “Credicoop: The Regime’s Slush Fund,” and “The Dictators’ Grandson’s Parcel Delivery Business.”
•  “The Machinery of Exile, Statelessness, and Crimes Against Humanity”, “The Persecution of the Catholic Church and the Confiscation of 39 Church Properties.”
• Rosario Murillo’s endless “purge” to decapitate “historic Sandinismo”and imprison operators loyal to Daniel Ortega.
• “Daniel Ortega’s Rings of Power,” and “Rosario Murillo’s New Power Operators.”

This is the journalism the dictatorship has criminalized and seeks to discredit as an attempted coup, simply for committing the supposed crime of informing, explaining, investigating, and telling the truth. 

In July of this year, we celebrated the 30th anniversary of Confidencial, the news organization I founded in 1996, during Nicaragua’s democratic transition, and which for the past five years has confronted a dictatorship from exile. Over the past three decades, Confidencial and its journalists have been honored with professional recognition from international institutions that rank our work among the finest in Latin American journalism. But the most important recognition of all has been earning—and preserving—the trust of our audiences. 

When no law or institution can protect Confidencial´s journalist amid the collapse of the rule of law, our only protection comes from the credibility of our journalism, from our reporters commitment to the truth –whatever the cost – and from the professional talent for continually reinventing journalism, even in exile. 

For Confidencial, reinventing journalism is not a matter of aesthetic change; it is a strategy for resistance and survival. We reinvented ourselves after our newsroom was raided by the police and television censorship forced us off the air, becoming a fully digital news outlet and reconnecting with audiences who now find us on their mobile phones. We transformed the trauma of exile into a transnational newsroom that, despite the persecution of our journalists and sources, continues to report on Nicaragua, overcoming censorship and digital blockades. 

Thanks to our audiences, our sources, and our journalists, we continue to defeat censorship under a dictatorship. As long as we continue to do more and better journalism, it will keep alive the flame of freedom of the press, as the first and the last of all freedoms.

Carlos Fernando Chamorro, Nicaraguan journalist, Golden Pen of Freedom Laureate 2024, Director of www.confidencial.digital

By Branko Brkic.

World News Day, 28 September 2026

In my life I have watched communities, organisations, and entire countries lose their grip on truth. I was just starting my book publishing career in Yugoslavia in the mid-80s when the shared facts that held our society together for 40 years came apart, piece by piece, until people could no longer agree on what our country stood for, on its basic values and, finally, what was actually happening. Hundreds of thousands eventually died. Millions were displaced. Individual lives were ruined. Communities were left devastated, with shards of inhumanity and hurt that were bound to self-regenerate for generations.

Decades later, in South Africa, I was part of the opposite movement: a group of dogged journalists digging through the wreckage of state capture, one document at a time, until the theft could no longer be denied. That fundamental work was the very spark that helped pull the country back into hope and, ever so briefly, even optimism.

Those two experiences taught me the same lesson from opposite directions. A society that loses its grip on facts loses its grip on itself. A society that fights for truth can still find its way back.

That is what World News Day stands for, and why on 28 September more than a thousand newsrooms from over a hundred countries will mark it together.

World News Day exists so we can strongly express our belief that reliable information is the infrastructure of our modern, information-based society. Like water or electricity, it is fundamental to our existence and yet nobody thinks about it until it isn’t there, or it’s been replaced by something that looks like news but isn’t. 

Sharing the medium with propaganda outfits and disinformation trolls is one of the great structural weak points of our entire edifice. Our reports, analyses and investigations travel along the same distribution channels as some of the worst perpetrators of hatred and madness ever to see the face of the Earth. And yet, and yet, we persist. We are still here, because it is our mission, our motivating force, to be on your side no matter what. 

We will always help you 

Know the facts.

They don’t arrive on their own. We have to go and get the facts: read the document, find the witness, check the claims twice, protect sources (who are the ones taking a real risk), ask the questions the powerful people don’t want asked, and then ask them again when they dodge them. We are here to put our name on what we publish and correct it in public if we get it wrong. Algorithmic speed is not the same as truth, and neither is confidence.

We will make sure you

Understand what matters.

A data point on its own only tells you that something happened. A flood level, a budget line, a vote count. Journalism’s job is to explain why something happened, who benefited, who paid, and what is likely to come next. The context is often the difference between information and journalism. Information can fill any number of feeds at blinding speed. Journalism has to make sense of the world.

It is crucial to

Choose trusted journalism.

This is not a request to trust every newsroom, or to stop asking hard questions of us. Trust is earned over a lifetime, and it has to be re-energised with every new story. I told my guys at Daily Maverick way too many times that we’re only as good as our latest story. But we invite you, the reader, to look out for reporting that shows where its information came from, that separates news from opinion, that admits when it doesn’t know something yet, and that corrects itself when it’s wrong. A trustworthy newsroom isn’t one that never makes mistakes. It’s one you can watch making them right.

We owe you the same standard we’re asking you to apply. So on this 2026 World News Day, we’re not just going to tell you that our journalism matters. We’re going to show you and tell you about the work: the months behind an investigation, the checking behind a breaking story, the correction that made the record more accurate, the local report that actually changed the lived reality of a community. 

Alone, any one of us can be dismissed. In many countries we’re being sued into silence, driven into penury or simply ignored. Still, together, in dozens of languages and more than a hundred countries, we’re harder to ignore. That’s the whole point of doing this on the same day. This is not a  fundraiser. This is a rallying point.

And here is the fourth thing, the one that drives it all:

It’s your right to know.

Not a favour handed down by a government or a company that decides what you’re allowed to see. It is your true birth right. 

World News Day falls on 28 September for a reason: it’s also the UN’s International Day for Universal Access to Information. That’s not a coincidence we’re borrowing for effect. It’s the same idea, seen from two end points. Your right to know is only real if someone is doing the work of making information easy to find, check and, above all, true. That’s the job.

So before you share something juicy, pause. Before you believe something, ask how the person telling you knows it. Support the reporting that does this work in the open, and push back on the kind that doesn’t.

These have never mattered more: Know the facts. Understand what matters. Choose trusted journalism. Because it’s your right to know. 

And because a world that stops knowing will never be free – just easier to fool. See you in the trenches. 

The author, Branko Brkic, is the founder of Project Kontinuum, an alliance of people working to return journalism to its role as an essential service. He is the founder and former Editor in Chief of South Africa’s Daily Maverick and a co-organiser of World News Day.

By Alia Ebrahim.

For a couple of months in 2020, my dining-room table was covered by a huge map detailing the companies connected to Lebanon’s central bank governor, Riad Salameh. We had been investigating him for months, and by then it was clear to us that he owned at least two dozen companies, many of them hidden behind names that meant nothing to anyone but us.

My eldest daughter, Yasma, was about 14 then; her sister, Mia, a little over a year younger. When they asked what the map was, I would tell them it was for work. Only later, as the investigation took shape, could I give them and their friends a simplified version of the story.

It mattered to them.

After months of work, we published our first investigation into Salameh on August 10, 2020 – less than a week after the Beirut port explosion, one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in recent history, killed more than 200 people and devastated large parts of the city.

My daughters, like many of their generation, had been going to protests since they were in strollers. Now they were back in the streets on their own feet, shouting for accountability and justice. Unlike us, they were free of the memory of the civil war. They were uncompromising about their rights. They rejected the za’im – the sectarian boss – in absolute terms.

On days when exhaustion could have kept me in bed, it was the knowledge that someone would pick up this fight after us that made me keep giving it my best.

That is why my own children’s reaction to our first piece on Salameh was so disappointing – and so clarifying:

“We love the stories the way you tell them to us. Just not the way you publish them in Daraj.”

Our first investigation showed that while more than a million depositors had lost access to their money in Lebanon, the governor’s own wealth was protected in bank accounts and assets across Europe. The series that followed uncovered evidence pointing to aggravated money laundering, illicit enrichment and conflicts of interest.

The first page of the French investigating judge’s case file states that the investigation was opened following reporting by Daraj and OCCRP. Since then, assets linked to Salameh have been frozen or seized in six European countries, and today the former governor is back in detention, indicted and facing charges in Lebanon and abroad. He has denied wrongdoing, and the judicial process must now run its course.

I do not say this to claim sole credit for what followed. Many investigators, lawyers and journalists carried the work forward. But it is proof that work begun at a dining-room table can enter a judge’s file – and that evidence can become a consequence.

Investigative journalists are familiar with, and accepting of, the idea that we may sometimes work for only a few readers. Occasionally, just one reader is enough. In this case, that reader was Aude Buresi, the French investigating judge who opened her file on the basis of our reporting.

Still, when my own children – who for months had eaten lunch on the sofa because our table had found a more urgent purpose – understood why the investigation mattered but did not want to read it as we had published it, we realised we had a problem.

By 2025, we had fifteen lawsuits against us and were working in a mainstream media ecosystem deeply influenced by the central bank and the very banks it was supposed to scrutinize. Our reporting had shown that some of those banks’ CEOs had been the governor’s business partners for more than a decade.

The question had taken many forms, but the answer remained simple.

Producing journalism is not enough if we fail to distribute it.

And distribution does not simply mean publishing a link. It means finding forms in which journalism can travel.

The passionate journalist in me wanted to care only about the first half. But as CEO of the independent media outlet I co-founded with my friends and fellow journalists, it was my responsibility to focus on the second.

That was exactly what I had in mind when, at dinner with Mia and her friends last week, I pitched my new business model with a small box of watermelon gum.

I’ll come back to that. But first, some context.

In 2016, my co-founders and I began building Daraj, which we launched the following year. We called it Daraj – Arabic for a flight of steps – because we felt we were stuck in a deep hole and needed something to help us climb out, one step at a time.

Our tagline was The Third Story because we were terrified by the polarization around us. Our call to action was simple, and it was not a metaphor: we do it or we die.

It felt existential.

A decade later, Daraj is real. It has found readers and recognition far beyond Lebanon. We have changed enormously – but the world around us has changed faster, and in more frightening ways.

It is scarier not only because of the rise of populism, misinformation and violence, but because of something underneath all of them: a massive loss of reference.

As someone who reads and appreciates history, I understand what we are living through as a transition – a world ending before another has been born. As a realist utopian, I want to believe that societies eventually find ways to correct themselves. But correction is not automatic. It happens only because people refuse to sit on their hands and wait.

Whatever comes next, for our societies, our industries and the world we share, will be shaped by what those who still believe in the public interest are prepared to act now.

Sometimes, apparently, that might include selling chewing gum.

Here is what I think has actually changed over these ten years.

The divide is no longer simply Global South versus Global North. It is no longer left versus right, generational, or conservative versus liberal. Those divisions all had something in common: two sides that disagreed about what to do, but at least agreed on what was real – what happened, what the facts were, what counted as evidence.

What is collapsing now is that shared ground itself.

This is not a new side replacing the old ones. It is the disappearance of the thing all those sides used to fight over.

That is why The Third Story – the third place, the third voice, the third option– matters more now than it did when we started, not less.

Ten years ago, it meant refusing to be pro-Saudi or pro-Iran. It meant refusing to answer to political financiers or old families instead of the public we served. That was already a hard, narrow space to hold. But at least it was nameable.

Today, The Third Story means something bigger and harder. It means insisting that an outside still exists at all: a place from which conversation remains possible when the divide itself is making conversation about anything feel impossible.

I do not say this as a claim to neutrality. I have never believed in a view from nowhere, and I do not think readers trust it either.

I say it as something we have earned, one step at a time, over ten years: through investigations that took over dining-room tables; through daughters who told us the story mattered but the way we told it did not reach them; and through every day we insisted that our first responsibility was to the public we served, and that our loyalty was to our journalism and our audience.

Which brings me back to the chewing gum.

Last week, I took Mia and her friends – all of them studying business – to dinner and asked them to help me think through how to bring young audiences not only to Daraj, but into a real relationship with it.

Of everything said that evening, two comments got to the heart of it.

“Don’t assume I don’t want knowledge just because I don’t want to read an article.”

And, when I asked whether they wanted to hear from experienced journalists at all:

“Why would I listen to stories from someone younger than me – someone I know hasn’t lived?”

They were not rejecting journalism. They were not rejecting knowledge, authority or experience. They were rejecting the assumption that an article is the only legitimate container for knowledge, or that reaching younger audiences requires journalists to imitate them.

They wanted the story. They wanted to hear from people who knew more than they did. They simply wanted us to think differently about how the story reached them.

Earlier that day, I had found a small pink box of gum with a watermelon design, and I had thought: this is a good product. Three euros for thirty tiny pieces – an absurd amount of money for gum, but perhaps not for something people buy because they want to support a cause.

When I presented the idea, my young, talented guests went a little crazy. Every argument marketing school could produce came at me: You cannot threaten your positioning. This is product placement. You need stronger selling points. And on and on.

It became one of the most heated – and enjoyable – dinners I have had with my daughter and her friends in a long time.

When they had said everything they had to say, I took a deep breath and told them that when I was growing up, our parents used to warn us that if we did not study hard and succeed, we would end up selling chewing gum on the street. Back then, the people selling gum and kaak-sesame-covered bread on the corners of Beirut were, depending on whom you asked, either beggars or intelligence agents.

And yet gum makes sense to me today if it becomes one small point in a much larger network: something sold in the bookshops and coffee shops where our audiences gather, allowing people who want to support journalism to receive something tangible in return. There could be books, card games and other products too. But gum– or postcards– might be the simplest place to begin.

The bottom line is this: selling chewing gum might be the best business idea I have had yet to save my journalism.

As I spoke, my guests listened.

“You see,” one of them said. “That is the story you should have told us from the beginning.”

By the end of dinner, we had ideas ranging from three-dollar products to thirty-thousand-dollar partnerships – and a promise from them to come back with better-designed products.

Their enthusiasm that evening gave me the same energy that had carried me through the days when I was ready to give up.

I say this as a Gen X mother of two Gen Z daughters, and as the CEO of a young newsroom where generational differences can be as maddening as they are exhilarating.

That is the distance we are operating across now: between an existential “we do it or we die” and a generation fluent in positioning and brand architecture that still, underneath all of it, showed up to fight about how to make the story land.

As loud as it became, the argument was never really about gum. It was about whether the story could survive contact with a world that no longer agrees on what a story is for.

My wonderful guests were right. Not wanting to read an article does not mean not wanting knowledge. Young people do not want journalism stripped of experience and authority. They want us to stop confusing the form with the purpose.

I do not know exactly what the next ten years of Daraj will look like. But I know the answer is not to wait for the world to correct itself.

What I am working hard on these days is learning the business side of our industry and figuring out how to build a shared infrastructure that will allow our journalism to fly, even if that means my daily life is now filled with acronyms I once hated, like KPIs and ROI, and words I once refused to say, like growth and scale.

As a correspondent, I would not even fill in my own expense sheets because all I wanted to focus on was journalism. I have surprised myself with how much I am enjoying the new hat.

Looking outward from the little newsroom we began building ten years ago, I can see, for the first time in my career, an advantage – even a head start – in knowing exactly what is at stake.

I know what a society without strong journalism looks like. I do not have to imagine it. I have lived it all my life: growing up during a civil war, reporting on fights for reform that kept failing, and now fighting to protect whatever common ground remains.

I am fighting for journalism not only as a principle, but as a point of reference – and as a reminder that no matter how deep the divide becomes, hope lies in the conversations we can still have with one another.

That is the battle I will keep fighting, even if it means selling chewing gum to save my newsroom. 

Alia Ebrahim, Co-founder and CEO Daraj.com

By David Walmsley, Mariya Gabriel, and Liz Corbin.

We are not short of information. We have never had more of it. Yet across the world, people struggle to answer the simplest questions: What actually happened? Who decided what? Is it true?

This is the paradox of our age. The most connected societies in history are also among the most vulnerable to confusion, manipulation and distrust. Information moves faster than accountability. Algorithms reward outrage before accuracy. Artificial intelligence generates plausible falsehoods at scale. In such an environment, the right to know is not just a matter of transparency; it is the heartbeat of freedom. 

Without an accurate understanding of what is going on and what is being done in your name, the fog of deceit thickens, and bad actors can mislead with impunity.

Society is most vulnerable when access to information is denied. Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition documented 313 internet shutdowns in 52 countries in 2025, the highest number ever recorded. Shutdowns block journalism, silence communities and deny people potentially life-saving information.

Access to information laws are an anchor of information integrity, and UNESCO’s latest monitoring shows progress. Its 2025 survey showed that 141 countries have legal guarantees for access to information. But adoption is not implementation, and many countries still face practical gaps in oversight, appeals, enforcement, record-keeping and data management. Of the countries surveyed,  51 could not provide record-keeping data despite reporting to have systems or procedures in place.

Information commissioners and other overseers turn legal provisions into enforceable rights. Yet many of them are hampered by weak mandates, delayed appointments, budget cuts, political interference, limits on their powers and attacks on their independence. For access to information to work, these bodies must be protected by law, given adequate powers and resources, and shielded from undue influence.

The gap was further confirmed by a 2025 test of access to information laws, jointly conducted by UNESCO and the Centre for Law and Democracy. Across 146 identical requests in 76 countries, 38% received no substantive response, only 42% resulted in full disclosure, and the average response time was 22 days. A similar exercise will be repeated this year to measure any change.

Access to information has to evolve, but examples of the shortcomings are everywhere, even in countries with well-intentioned legislation.

And in an information vacuum, brave and independent journalism is indispensable. Journalism distils information into public understanding. It investigates, interrogates, corroborates and contextualises, but it also counters disinformation. It asks questions that some parties would rather avoid. And it gives citizens the means to participate meaningfully in public life.

The damage caused by disinformation is real. UNESCO estimates that individual disinformation cases can incur economic and social costs of US$350 billion to US$510 billion – annually, through weakened public health responses, distorted elections, delayed climate action, financial losses, reputational harm and the erosion of trust in institutions. Disinformation is therefore not just a communications problem. It is a governance risk, an economic liability and a direct threat to people’s ability to make informed decisions.

Public service broadcasters and independent news media organisations are a key counterweight to this problem. Their mandate is not to chase engagement at any cost, but to inform and serve all audiences. But they face the simultaneous pressures of fragmented audiences, declining trust, political interference, financial constraints, platform dependency and rampant false, synthetic and manipulated content. Their struggle to keep producing quality journalism is not a sectoral concern, it’s a democratic one.

The response must include renewed investment in public-interest journalism, editorial independence, fact-checking, open-source verification, media and information literacy, and collaboration across borders. Just as falsehoods travel globally, so purveyors of trusted journalism must cooperate transnationally. 

The information ecosystem would be poorer and much more fragile without public service media – but they cannot defend it alone. 

On World News Day and the International Day for Universal Access to Information, the challenge is practical, and we call on all actors in the information space to do better:

• Governments must enforce access to information laws and protect independent oversight.
• Platforms and technology companies must take full responsibility for the information spaces they create, in total alignment with international human rights law. 
• And media organisations of all stripes should always choose rigour over reach. 

By David Walmsley, President, World Editors Forum, Editor in Chief, Globe and Mail  |   Mariya Gabriel, Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information at UNESCO | Liz Corbin, Director of News, European Broadcasting Union.

By Kyle Pope.

As awful as the climate headlines have been in 2026 – from melting glaciers to historic wildfires to deadly heatwaves – here’s a sobering fact: there is a very good chance this will be the coolest year of the rest of your life.

This year will be hotter than the last, and last year was hotter than the one before that. Scientists now say that next year, especially with the El Nino weather pattern taking shape, will obliterate records, sending the planet well above the levels experts have held out as the dangerous tipping points of the climate crisis.

Amid all of this, it can be difficult to know where to turn for help and for solutions: governments around the world – and especially in petro states like the United States – seem to be making things worse instead of better. Individual choices can seem trivial given the scale of the problem.

There is, it turns out, an often overlooked solution to the climate problem – and that is journalism. Understanding what is happening, what’s causing it, and who is at fault (and don’t be fooled, there definitely are villains in this story), is a necessary predicate to solving the climate problem. Tuning out doesn’t make science, and reality, go away.

Our nonprofit has spent the last seven years studying how media around the world covers climate change, and helping news outlets do a better job of connecting with their audience about  it. 

Here’s the good news: the audience is interested. 

Peer-reviewed studies show that, on average, 89 percent of people on earth not only care about the climate crisis, but they want their governments to work on fixing it. The problem is that many of those people don’t know they are part of an overwhelming climate majority; they think they’re siloed, on the sidelines. They also don’t know that their neighbors often think like they do and, most critically, they don’t vote like they’re part of the solution.

This is where journalism comes in. For the past two years, dozens of reporters from around the world have been working to tell the story of the 89 percent in their communities, profiling them and giving them a voice. And the world is taking notice: people have begun showing up on social media identifying themselves as part of the 89 percent, and in August,the global drinks company Oatly began featuring the 89 percent message on its cartons worldwide.

Journalism has the potential to help the public break through on climate change. By dismissing the narrative that people don’t care, and identifying what’s needed to urgently solve the problem – in the voting booth, on the streets, in people’s homes – news outlets have an opportunity, and duty, to join with their audiences to solve the most urgent issue of our lives. That connection will not only help address the climate problem, but it also will help close the trust gap plaguing journalism. People support news outlets that cover what they care about.

It won’t be easy, though. 

For decades, the fossil fuel industry – remember those villains we referenced earlier? – has been investing hundreds of millions of dollars into campaigns intended to mislead the public about the dangers of burning fossil fuels. They have funded disinformation campaigns aimed at undercutting climate science and have sought to erode trust in journalism that is accurately covering the problem. 

The rise of social media has resulted in a targeted, coordinated effort to flood consumers with climate lies. A tiny minority of online trolls continues to scare some newsrooms away from being as aggressive in their climate coverage as the story demands.

Journalism has an opportunity to right this wrong – reporting factually and urgently on the crisis we face. And consumers – all 89 percent of us – can use this opportunity to rediscover the value of an independent press, and celebrate the people who are telling the truth about the crisis that is endangering us all.

Kyle Pope is the co-founder and executive director of strategic initiatives for Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of newsrooms committed to more and better climate coverage.

By Alberto Ibargüen.

When a community is no longer well-informed, a slow social and political train crash follows. We’re already on that track – but it isn’t too late to stop it. 

A Pew Research Center survey conducted in March 2025 found that 80 percent of American adults think Republicans and Democrats not only disagree on policies, but cannot agree on basic facts. Small wonder. The institutions Americans once relied upon for news, especially at the local level, have been dramatically weakened. Opinion increasingly presents itself as news; some of it is good reporting, much is simply point of view.

The Constitution’s Framers understood the danger of concentrated power. They created three branches of government—executive, legislative and judicial—and gave each power to check the others. They also protected religion, speech and press, different sources of expression, authority and values, each independent of government. 

I spent much of my career in and close to the news business. {I watched as public ownership of print and broadcast news often gave way to the pressure for ever-greater returns. That led to less investment in journalism and technology just as cable and internet alternatives proliferated.

Today, artificial intelligence poses a radical re-think of the entire process, likely transforming again how information is gathered, edited and distributed. But who will produce original reporting?

AI can summarize a city council investigation. It cannot summarize an investigation that was never conducted because nobody paid a reporter to attend the meetings, develop the sources, examine the documents and ask the questions. Ironically, technology has made the information inexpensive to distribute while destroying the economic entities that produced original reporting. But AI is the new reality. Serious journalism should be at its center – improving reporting while finding ways for the technology to help sustain the craft on which it depends. 

Some organizations produce news that transcends geography – those focused on national, international or business news, for example – and have natural synergy with technology unbound by geography. They seem to me to be the most likely to thrive. 

But what about local journalism – the reporting at the base of a democracy whose citizens still live, work, vote and govern themselves in actual communities? 

I believe the road back begins with a better-informed community.

I had the privilege of leading Knight Foundation as it funded hundreds of experiments in nonprofit local news. Today, investments by the MacArthur Foundation, Emerson Collective and others are helping support local journalism. Those are important—and not nearly enough. 

Producing reliable, high-quality journalism is expensive. It requires experienced reporters, editors and visual journalist who use technology responsibly to dig into public records and fact-check data. Too often it requires lawyers to push for public information that governments balk at sharing, and to defend reporters who are doing their jobs. 

Philanthropy needs to recognize what is at stake and invest much more substantially in independent journalism, particularly at the local level. It is the base of our democracy.

Efforts to encourage government support may also help. But such support has to be carefully structured to avoid the danger of political influence. Organizations such as Rebuild Local News are exploring tax credits and other methods intended to support journalism while protecting its independence. We should keep experimenting.

Internet and AI companies have a stake in reliable and independent journalism. Their products derive enormous value from journalism they didn’t produce. If the organizations producing original reporting disappear, the information on which their own product depends deteriorates. What’s needed from them is not philanthropy; it’s investment in the integrity of their own products. 

Citizens may play the most important role. They need to think critically about the information they consume online. What is the source, and what is its policy about verifying facts? Many news outlets who report responsibly need to charge a subscription …and consumers need to support it with dollars. 

A well-functioning democracy requires informed citizens. And informed citizens require independent, consistently reliable journalism. As a nation, we need to understand what the Framers understood: journalism is essential civic infrastructure.

Alberto Ibargüen is the former publisher of The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald, and former president of John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

By Fernando Belzunce.

Misinformation has ceased to be a system malfunction and has become part of its very logic.

One of the most pleasant effects of artificial intelligence – surely because it was unexpected – is that a popular topic of conversation has finally emerged that is even more engaging than football. 

AI is the great milestone of our era. In informal chats, people are fascinated by the tricks and achievements obtained with tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, and in more pretentious forums, the conversation already rises toward geopolitics, the restructuring of employment, the energy challenge, the transformation of the health industry, or the mutation of warfare. 

However, it is striking how little reflection there is on its enormous impact on misinformation, given that it is one of the most urgent and complex challenges of our time. That this issue is glossed over in popular conversation is, indeed, an alarming symptom. A new sign that the truth no longer matters, or that at least it no longer matters as much. And that, paradoxically, remains a feature of misinformation itself.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report places AI-driven misinformation among the most severe short-term threats to global stability. It is not hard to understand why. Artificial intelligence makes it possible to produce fake images, videos, audio, and texts at a speed, cost, and scale that were unimaginable until very recently. What is to come, as Philippine Nobel Peace Laureate Maria Ressa anticipated to me three years ago, will make the avalanche of misinformation of recent years look like a child’s play. She showed me some of the attacks she received on social media. On her mobile phone, I saw all kinds of insults and humiliations, including sexual photomontages, signed by supposed anonymous users. The International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) put the number of messages at over 500,000.

“It is striking to think that someone would invest so much money to attack me,” she explained to me.

What used to require time, technical expertise, and significant economic resources can now be done in minutes. Furthermore, it can be adapted to different audiences due to campaign personalization, with messages tailored to the psychological, emotional, and, thanks to massive data analysis, individual ideological profile of specific groups of users,. 

Misinformation is ceasing to be artisanal and is becoming industrial, and we do not have to wait for the future to prove it. We have already seen fake images that become news before anyone can verify their origin, manipulated audio circulating as if it were authentic statements, or content specifically fabricated to feed a particular political emotion. 

The problem is no longer just distinguishing the true from the false. It is doing so when the false can be produced much faster than society is capable of verifying it.

For four years I held long conversations with some 140 journalists from different countries, including Ressa herself, to analyze the transformation of our trade. Their cross-testimonies paint an X-ray of a profession at a critical moment: professionals from wealthy countries alongside others who risk their lives to report, reporters from major outlets and independent lone rangers. 

Despite the differences, their voices reveal a common diagnosis caused by tech companies: Journalism’s great challenge is no longer just reporting what happens, but making it matter – Because the truth, by itself, no longer prevails. 

The media, in this juncture where there is a fierce fight for attention, no longer holds the preeminence of yesteryear, when they decided what was relevant, provided context, cross-checked facts, and helped build a public conversation. That position has been profoundly altered by the new standard setting rules of internet information consumption.

Multinational technology companies have changed the rules of content distribution and, with them, the relationship between relevance and visibility. What is important now competes in the same space with what is viral; explanation competes with reaction, and criteria with the algorithm.

Platforms are not designed to distinguish true from false, but to maximize attention and interaction. And in that competition based on volume, emotion, simplification and conflict usually gain an advantage over nuance, context and uncertainty. Algorithms, designed with a commercial logic, reward the most striking content, regardless of whether it is false, misleading, or deliberately manipulated. As a result, an ecosystem emerges in which information loses density, debate becomes polarized, and trust is eroded. To the point that populism is no longer just a social phenomenon, but a political current that permeates all decisions, with certain algorithmic leaders born or sustained in the heat of interpreting opinion trends and the emotional states of the populations they govern.

Misinformation has thus ceased to be a malfunction of the system and has become part of its logic. It constitutes an architecture designed to influence, confuse and erode societies. It does not confront the truth directly, but rather dilutes it, which makes it more dangerous and effective.

In this context, journalism faces a challenge even greater than the economic and technological transformation it has been addressing for years. It is subjected to a moral test.

It is about maintaining standards in an environment that pushes to lower them, imposing criteria over acceleration, protecting rigor when the rules of digital distribution promote the opposite, and continuing to play in the field of credibility rather than attention. 

AI can become an extraordinary tool to improve journalism if its focus is placed on boosting quality and not just speed or volume. There are already numerous examples of data extrapolation and astonishing visual narratives in journalistic outlets.

The value will always lie in obtaining original information, in investigation, in criteria, responsibility, the cross-checking of information, verification, context, credibility, or trust. A society can survive uncertainty, crisis, or conflict, but it can hardly endure the disappearance of truth as a shared reference. 

Fernando Belzunce is editorial general director of Vocento and author of the book ‘Periodistas en tiempos de oscuridad’.

This article, first published in Spain by ABC, is shared to mark World News Day, a worldwide campaign highlighting the essential role of journalism in providing facts and clarity.