A year to choose solidarity over silence

If 2025 was the year the world woke up to democratic backsliding, 2026 may be the year journalism decides whether it will face that crisis alone or survive it together.

Around the globe, authoritarians have learned to use the law to criminalize dissent through courts that perform an apparent due process while they dismantle it. The new authoritarian playbook includes a captured judiciary, economic suffocation of independent outlets, media capture and the slow erasure of collective memory.

2026 will be defined by repression, but it may also be defined by whether journalists embrace what Maria Ressa calls radical collaboration. There is a blueprint: investigative reporters from different countries working together to build a shared defense against censorship. Veteran journalists passing down institutional knowledge to young reporters and content creators who bring momentum and innovation, and a civil society that gets organized to offer support and protection.

Solidarity is no longer a value, it is a safety strategy. As democratic spaces shrink and misinformation accelerates, the answer is not less journalism but smarter, stronger, collective journalism.

2026 brings the inception of strong, strategic networks that pool resources, risks, and reach locally and across borders, like the Journalism Assistance Network, the Latin American Network of Journalism in Exile, a stronger version of the International Journalists’ Network, and organizations that continue to build the future of local news.

Funders will also shift from project grants to infrastructure support that includes legal defense, digital security, independent archives, mental health support and networks of exiled journalists and safe platforms in which they can continue to hold their governments accountable from abroad.

Protecting the press will mean supporting local and global networks for journalists with efficiency and agility, because what is at stake is not just journalism, but the public’s right to understand their communities and the world. If 2026 brings anything, let it be this, a recognition that solidarity is our strongest form of defense, and that the future of press freedom — and of democracy itself — depends on how fast we choose to collaborate.