How to Survive the (Media) Apocalypse

The ongoing deterioration of press freedom and independence in the United States is deeply concerning to many journalists who don’t know where their country is heading. That chilling uncertainty is one we have lived through ourselves. We are journalists from Russia and Poland. Ksenia has been forced to leave her home in order to continue working, and has watched countless friends and colleagues do the same. Paulina decided to change her career to academia. In Moscow, TV Rain, where Ksenia worked, was declared an “undesirable organization,” and its reporters were forced to relocate. In Warsaw, Gazeta Wyborcza, where Paulina worked, faced economic and legal pressure from the government and its cronies, and had to learn how to fight back.

Poland and Russia are different countries with different trajectories, but both have experienced similar slides toward authoritarianism. As a result, journalists in these countries have come up with novel ways to stay engaged and fight back. We wanted to share some lessons from those experiences, in the hopes that it could offer some optimism to journalists in the States wondering what their future might look like.