A strategic reserve for journalism: what World Press Freedom Day demands of us in 2026

By Mira Milosevic, GFMD Executive Director

World Press Freedom Day was born out of urgency.

In 1991, in Windhoek, Namibia, African journalists came together to articulate that a free, independent, and pluralistic press is essential to democracy. The Windhoek Declaration did not just inspire a UN resolution two years later establishing 3 May as World Press Freedom Day. It set a global benchmark for what journalism should be, and how it should be protected.

Three and a half decades later, its relevance has only sharpened.

I had the privilege of being among the group of experts who contributed to the Windhoek+30 process. The renewed Declaration affirmed information as a public good and called for collective action to ensure the economic viability of journalism, transparency of digital platforms and technology companies, and mainstreaming media and information literacy among citizens.

As Zoe Titus, former GFMD Chair, powerfully reminds us in her recent piece, press freedom remains deeply unfinished business. And as our current Chair, Rawan Damen, has put it plainly: journalists should be able to do their jobs without being targeted, imprisoned, or killed. That this still needs saying in 2026 tells us everything about where we stand. The RSF World Press Freedom Index confirms the trend: press freedom conditions have deteriorated in a majority of countries, with economic pressure and safety threats increasingly converging.

This year, the symbolism is particularly stark. Just days before the global community was set to gather in Zambia to commemorate World Press Freedom Day, RightsCon 2026, the world’s leading summit on human rights in the digital age, was abruptly cancelled. In a joint statement, GFMD and IFEX condemn the decision as “a serious and unacceptable violation of universal human rights standards,” one that undermines freedom of assembly, press freedom, and open civic space. The cancellation did not happen in isolation. It is part of a broader pattern: shrinking civic space, increasing media capture and interference, and a growing decline in fundamental freedoms and weakening of our communities.

Our ecosystem is even more fragile than we would like to admit.

For years, we have spoken about resilience. But resilience requires systems and infrastructures. And that is where we are still falling short. If the past decade has taught us anything, from Gaza to Ukraine, from Afghanistan to newsrooms in exile, it is that journalism cannot rely on goodwill alone. It needs systems that can withstand crisis, displacement, censorship, and attacks.

What we need now is nothing less than a strategic reserve for journalism and the free press in adversarial environments. Not a metaphor, but a practical, collective investment in the foundations that allow journalism to survive under pressure.

1. First, we need shared cloud infrastructure: for storage, processing, and preservation. When media organisations are shut down, hacked, or forced into exile, their archives are often the first casualties. When organisations endeavour to investigate large volumes of data and sensitive materials, their budgets and security are overstretched. Initiatives like the Journalism Cloud Alliance point to what is possible: secure, distributed environments where data can be processed, and content and institutional memory can be protected and restored. In conflict contexts such as Ukraine or in digitally repressive environments like Sudan, this is not a luxury. It is the difference between erasure and continuity.
2. Second, we need to build beyond the tech stack. Too often, support focuses narrowly on tools, while the operational backbone of journalism remains precarious. Legal incorporation across jurisdictions, financial management, human resources capacity; these are not administrative details; they are survival mechanisms. Larger organisations must step into roles as incubators and hubs, providing shared services and safe operational frameworks for smaller and exiled outlets.
3. Third, safety must be collective, not individualised. Digital security, physical protection, legal defence, and insurance mechanisms. These cannot remain fragmented or reactive. Journalists facing strategic lawsuits, arbitrary detention, hospital treatments, or targeted harassment need access to pooled legal resources, health insurance, and coordinated protection systems. The scale is growing: reports to police of online violence against women journalists have doubled since 2020, with one in four experiencing related anxiety and/or depression.  We have great models in our own and other sectors; they need to be scaled.
4. Fourth, we must rethink financing at a structural level. The current funding landscape is too volatile, too project-based, and too slow to respond to crises. What would it look like to develop shared collateral mechanisms, pooled investment vehicles, or proper emergency funding infrastructure that can be activated when newsrooms and whole national media systems are under threat, like what happened in Sudan? If journalism is a public good, then its financial architecture must reflect that.
5. Finally, we must invest in collective policy and collaboration as core infrastructure, not as an afterthought. The fragmentation we are witnessing is not accidental; it is the result of underinvestment in coordination and shared policy strategy. Platforms like GFMD exist precisely to counter this, but they need to be strengthened, resourced for the AI age, and used with greater urgency. Democratic governments in particular can no longer treat press freedom as a rhetorical commitment while quietly allowing the economic and legal conditions for independent journalism to erode. Budget decisions are a values test. The EU’s Multiannual Financial Framework is one of the most consequential ones currently on the table: how media support is treated in that negotiation will signal whether democratic institutions are serious about what they claim to defend. The GFMD EU Media Advocacy Working Group is working to hold them to account, but advocacy alone is not enough without the political will to match it.

None of this is hypothetical. Elements of this “strategic reserve” already exist in pockets across our community. What is missing is scale, coordination, and sustained commitment.

The Windhoek+30 Declaration called for independent and pluralistic media. Today, independence requires interdependence. Pluralism requires solidarity. And survival requires infrastructure.

World Press Freedom Day should not only be a moment of reflection. It is a day of reckoning that must lead to a moment of construction.Because the question is no longer whether journalism is under threat. It is whether we are building what it needs to endure.