JX Fund – European Fund for Journalism in Exile

In her new book, “Narcocracia,” Mexican journalist Anabel Hernández explores the links between drug trafficking and political power. In an interview with LJR, she discussed the challenges of investigating a phenomenon that leaves little trace.

Repression and intimidation are part of everyday life for media professionals in exile, says Omid Rezaee. The Iranian-born journalist works for the German weekly Die Zeit. At Hamburg’s Press Freedom Week, around 200 exiled journalists are gathering to discuss their work and the danger they live in.

For journalists forced to operate outside their home countries, exile does not end the responsibility to report. Instead, it creates a new set of ethical challenges. Reporters and editors must find out how to verify information, keep sources safe, and maintain credibility with audiences while far away from the events they’re covering.

This 30/90/365-day implementation kit helps newsrooms and exile media protect sources, minimize metadata, secure administrator access, bind vendors, and build emergency publication and archive continuity, all without turning controversial reporting or source contact into a permanent surveillance dossier on staff or readers.

Media development actors and funders globally are grappling with how best to measure results. An updated version of the IMS impact assessment tool is out now. It is also translated into six different language. The tool help editorial teams measure the impact of media projects based on effective ways to define targets and track progress and results.

While Finland ranks among the world leaders in press freedom, it still offers too few measures to help journalists forced into exile continue their work. This is the central finding of “When You Arrive in Finland, You Step into a Dark Room”, a report backed by eight Finnish organisations, including Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Finland.

Since Russia’s crackdown drove over 2,000 journalists into exile, more than 90 outlets now depend on YouTube, Telegram and other Big Tech platforms to reach audiences. This research examines how opaque AI algorithms shape their visibility—and how exiled media, in turn, try to exploit those same algorithmic biases to survive.

A new report from Cloudflare, a company that provides cybersecurity services to internet providers, highlights the array of digital transnational repression tactics employed against exile media outlets and journalists. The report finds that around 5 percent of the 41 billion requests directed to exile journalism websites between February 2025 and January 2026 were harmful and sought to disrupt the outlets’ connections to their readers.

Clare Cook and David Lush explore how exiled media managers keep organisations running through repeated forced relocations. Drawing on workshops and interviews with exiled media leaders, they map five stages of instability and apply mixed embeddedness theory to show how support for exiled media can be strengthened.

The 15th Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC) will be held in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, from October 19 – 23, 2027, and is being co-hosted by GIJN and De Vereniging van Onderzoeksjournalisten (VVOJ) — the Dutch-Flemish Association of Investigative Journalists — which has played an outsized role in promoting quality investigative reporting in the region and across Europe since its founding in 2002.

Alfred Friendly Press Partners, which has trained over 400 journalists from 90 countries for over 40 years, is now accepting applications for its 2026 program. The fellowship is a four-week in-person program focused on foreign journalists who are living in exile in the US. The program builds skills and resiliency in these areas: Security, Legal, Journalism and Entrepreneurship.

Five years after the Taliban’s takeover, research organizations and countless other Afghan-led networks persist—training scholars, running underground classrooms, providing legal aid by phone. With NED support, over a thousand partners were evacuated to safety. Despite erasure from public life, Afghan women and civic leaders continue building the foundations for their country’s future.

Coffee in the morning, fear by afternoon: an Afghan journalist works undercover for an exiled media outlet, dreading every knock at the gate. After interviewing a woman with a disability about domestic violence, she halts publication — fearing surveillance cameras could expose her identity.

Amu TV was born out of the collapse of Afghanistan’s media landscape, and is one of the most influential exiled media outlets serving Afghanistan today. By broadcasting via satellite from the US, the channel has bypassed Taliban censorship and reached millions of viewers inside the country, offering a rare space for uncensored news, political debate, entertainment, and more.

Natalia Belikova of Press Club Belarus hasn’t returned home since 2019 — not even for her father’s funeral. Since Lukashenko’s 2020 crackdown, over 1,000 journalists fled into exile, facing funding gaps, cyberattacks, and fading ties to audiences back home. She discusses censorship workarounds, ongoing arrests, and what keeps Belarusian exile media going.

At Belarus’s New Belarus conference, Media IQ’s Pavliuk Bykouski presented Press Club Belarus data (2025–26) on exiled independent media: 133 accounts across 13 newsrooms, views growing from 280M to 448M, and 31.9% of Belarusians reporting contact with independent media. The article examines what the data shows — and where it falls short.

In this podcast episode from taz Panter Stiftung’s “Freie Rede” series, jurist and writer Maxim Znak, journalist and photographer Sergei Balai, and journalist Alena discuss a law forcing exiled Belarusians to return home to renew passports—risking arrest if they do, or losing valid ID if they don’t—and its impact on those who fled after the 2020 protests.

Twenty years after the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya, Russian independent journalism survives only in exile, with a new generation citing her courage as their guiding principle against state repression. For many opponents of the current regime, her murder marked a definitive turning point in Russia’s post-Soviet trajectory, signaling the end of pluralism and the beginning of an irreversible slide into authoritarianism.

Independent Russian media in exile play a crucial role in providing audiences inside Russia with alternative information about the war and its consequences. CEPA argues that Western governments should treat these outlets as a strategic capability, supporting their access to audiences, credibility and digital infrastructure rather than undermining their efforts to challenge the Kremlin’s monopoly over information.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 challenged much of the common Western understanding of Russia. How can the world better understand Russia? What are the steps forward for Western policy? The Eurasia Center’s “Russia Tomorrow” series seeks to reevaluate conceptions of Russia today and better prepare for its future tomorrow.