From the editor
“We are not doing something that special … We just want to produce [the kind of] programs that we [did] in the past.”
That’s how Gloria Chan describes her work at Green Bean Media, a news site she helped found last year in the U.K. when it became impossible for her and her colleagues to continue to report in their native Hong Kong. China has systematically throttled Hong Kong’s once vibrant free press, forcing local journalists into silence or exile.
Given the circumstances, what Chan and Green Bean Media are doing is special — building and sustaining a newsroom outside Hong Kong to report what’s going on inside Hong Kong.
And it’s a strategy more and more journalists are resorting to as independent newsrooms come under increased physical, financial, and legal threat from authoritarian regimes and other bad actors. As the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance noted in a study of the global state of democracy in 2022, “Over the past six years, the number of countries moving toward authoritarianism is more than double the number moving toward democracy.”
Celeste Katz Marston profiles some of the exiled journalists and organizations finding innovative ways to continue reporting on their home countries, from using secure messaging apps with in-country sources to building mirror websites to circumvent censors — all while dealing with visa issues, language barriers, and lingering trauma.
“Being a journalist, especially in exile, is also to be an activist,” says Katya Martynova, an exile editor from Moscow working from Germany for DOXA, a digital outlet focused on Russian youth. “If you are fighting [against] Putin’s propaganda … that’s also a political act.”
Sincerely,
James Geary
Editor, Nieman Reports
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