Exiled journalism’s biggest threat is something more mundane than censorship

In the summer of 2021, when our newsroom in Afghanistan was forced to leave the country urgently and resettle across the United States and Canada, I believed that moving to free societies would bring safety and stability. I assumed that once we escaped censorship, repression, and direct threats, our journalism could continue under normal conditions.

After four years in exile, I have learned that exiled journalism is not only a geographic relocation. It is a kind of shift of crisis from physical danger to institutional, economic, legal, and psychological uncertainty.

In the first months, our main concerns at Afghanistan Women’s News Agency were the safety of sources, censorship, repression, and direct threats from the Taliban. Over time, these concerns changed into more complex and long-term questions: How can a newsroom be rebuilt in a completely new environment — without a domestic market, without structural support, without clear legal protections, and without long-term institutional commitment from the media ecosystem?

Exile is an entry into uncertainty

When a newsroom is forced into exile, relocation is often described as hope: physical safety, freedom of expression, open internet access, and the ability to publish without censorship. In practice, however, the main challenge quickly moves from physical security to survival and continuity.

After leaving Afghanistan, we had no clear roadmap. There was no defined market, no sustainable revenue model, and no reliable infrastructure to reach audiences inside the country. Most responsibilities depended on individuals, personal commitment, and ethical responsibility rather than institutional systems.

This experience showed us that migration does not end a crisis; it just changes the form of the crisis.

Inside Afghanistan, security threats were the main source of stress. In exile, the main pressures became lack of time, limited resources, and absence of long-term support. Unlike those working for large media organizations, exiled journalists must handle multiple responsibilities at the same time: producing journalism, managing small and dispersed teams, fundraising, writing grant proposals, building media partnerships, producing multilingual content, and rebuilding personal and family life from scratch.

In reality, exiled journalism operates as a full-time mission with less than part-time resources.

Over the past few years, I have met journalists from Myanmar, El Salvador, India, Iran, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Syria who eventually could not continue. Not because of direct government repression, but because of long-term economic pressure and human exhaustion.

Many leave journalism, move into academia, take non-media jobs, or stop publishing. Some Afghan journalists I know in exile, especially in the United States, now work in service jobs, including driving for Uber or Lyft, to support themselves.

Although some institutions provide funding (mostly in Europe) for short-term projects and emergency responses, there is still no long-term, coordinated model that can turn exiled journalism into a sustainable and institutionalized media sector.

Based on my experience, most support are short-term, emergency-based, crisis-driven, without a multi-year strategy.

However, journalism requires more than initial support. It requires continuity. Without continuity, projects weaken, teams shrink, audience trust declines, and personal motivation disappears. This reveals a major weakness in the global media ecosystem: There is no clear strategy to sustain exiled newsrooms after the initial crisis loses international attention.

Even in exile, journalists and media organizations face serious challenges such as repression, cyberattacks, pressure on family members inside the home country, lack of clear protection frameworks, absence of sustainable financial support for exiled media in countries such as the United States, and, finally, uncertainty about long-term legal status in host countries.

In many cases, exiled journalists do not receive the legal protections available to domestic journalists. Exiled media organizations often operate in a legal and institutional gray area, without clear recognition or protection.

In the first years of exile, audiences inside Afghanistan and other authoritarian countries urgently needed independent news. Today, increased censorship, filtering, and digital restrictions have made access to exiled media much more difficult. As a result, domestic audiences continue to decline.

A prediction for 2026

Based on my personal experience, exiled journalism is approaching a decisive moment, especially in 2026. It will survive only if two conditions are met:

• New economic, institutional, and diversified revenue models are developed that go beyond emergency grants and allow long-term sustainability for exiled media outlets.
• Diaspora and migrant communities become active participants — not only as audiences, but as contributors, supporters, and partners in governance and sustainability.

If these changes do not happen, many exiled newsrooms will quietly disappear. In 2026, exiled journalism may face its most serious threat not from authoritarian repression, but from burnout, lack of support, and unstable funding, in democratic contexts.

If exiled media disappear silently, truth will disappear with them — not through censorship, but through isolation and exhaustion.

The future of exiled journalism in 2026 will be contradictory: it will be more necessary than ever, but also more fragile than ever. If media institutions, funders, universities, and democratic governments continue to treat exiled journalism as temporary or exceptional, instead of recognizing it as a permanent part of global press freedom, many essential independent voices will not survive.

I believe that press freedom does not disappear only inside national borders under authoritarian rules. Sometimes it fades outside them in democratic society, when exile provides safety but not sustainability.