What Happens to Society When Independent Media Disappear?

When independent journalism weakens, society starts living by emotions, fears, and algorithms rather than facts. People lose their shared reality – and without one, mutual understanding, honest debate, and trust all become impossible. Journalism is often treated as nothing more than content. It is in fact a system of public navigation, especially in wartime. War is also a fight for the right to call things what they are.

When independent media grow scarce, propaganda, conspiracy theories, fatigue, and cynicism rush in to fill the vacuum. Society becomes far more vulnerable – politically, and psychologically too.

There is another point worth making. War creates a strong pull toward quick fixes and simple answers, and it is independent media that help a society stay grounded. They push people to ask hard questions, even of the side they support. They keep critical thinking alive and stop a society from running purely on reflex.

Today a journalist has enormous influence over how society lives through crises, imagines the future, and understands its place in Europe and the world. We are interested in people who can navigate complexity rather than just produce headlines – people who can pair empathy with critical thinking and refuse to reduce reality to black and white.

Kyiv Media School is more than an educational project for media professionals. It was important to us that it not be merely a journalism school. We saw it as an environment where a new generation of media leaders could build deep professional expertise alongside a broader sense of where the country is heading. It is an investment in the people who will shape the quality of public dialogue in Ukraine over the next decade.

According to our annual survey, 38% of newsrooms found 2025 more difficult than 2024. Another 25% said the year was «just as challenging,» while 25% described it as «far more difficult and stressful.» Sixty-one media outlets participated in the survey this year.

The workforce crisis has become especially prominent. While low salaries and burnout used to be the key reasons for resignations, this year mobilization topped the list for the first time, cited by 25% of newsrooms – 15 out of 61.

That has created another structural problem: a widening gap between the number of new media professionals entering the field and the number leaving because of relocation, mobilization, or burnout.

In-depth interviews with people in academia made one thing clear: traditional journalism education often struggles to keep up with how fast the industry is changing, particularly in wartime. So we designed Kyiv Media School to be more agile, able to respond quickly both to shifts in the media landscape and to what newsrooms actually need.

We can update our curriculum far faster than a large academic institution. When a new demand appears – AI tools, short-form video, journalist safety – we can build it in almost immediately.

We also bring in practitioners and business experts, so participants pick up strategic-planning skills for their organizations, particularly on the Media Growth course supported by ERSTE Foundation. That helps close the gap between education and practice, and graduates leave with relevant expertise rather than just a certificate.

The challenge the war has really sharpened is burnout. Media professionals were already a high-risk group before 2022; today they work under constant stress with little room to recover. That is why we deliberately built the schedule so it does not eat into participants’ personal time. Classes run for just one hour and twenty minutes, during the working day, from 4:00 to 5:20 p.m. We do not want education to become one more burden. It should be a resource, not another source of exhaustion.

This year marks the third edition of Media Growth, and every cohort impresses us. We take in small local newsrooms and major national outlets alike – true veterans of the industry. What they all share is a dedication to journalism and a drive to do it as well as it can be done. You feel that from the very first session.

What fascinates me most is that every participant is already an expert with a superpower of their own. Some have mastered AI in editorial workflows; others have built a strong HR system or are experimenting with video monetization. They do not just learn on the course – they learn from one another. That turns the program into something bigger than education: a platform for peer-to-peer exchange among accomplished professionals.

And the most inspiring moment, of course, comes at the end. When participants present their final projects, these are not abstract business plans for some future date. They are real results – hypotheses they tested, what worked and what did not – and that is valuable experience for the whole industry.

Kyiv Media School’s course turned out to be the most thorough, in-depth AI training I have come across. It ended with a practical final project: a roadmap for bringing artificial intelligence into our channel. Once the course was over, we held a long editorial meeting to decide where AI would be fully integrated, where it would be off-limits, and where its use would be left to the journalist’s judgment.

In practice, we already use AI tools to edit short-form video, structure news digests, process large volumes of information, and handle translation for dubbing. The final editorial call, though, always stays with a person.

Exchanging experience with colleagues from Channel 24 and TSN right there during the course, I learned which tools had failed in other newsrooms and why – which saved us a lot of time and spared us mistakes during our own rollout.

What drew me to Media Growth was its interdisciplinary approach. The curriculum brought together strategic thinking, product management, behavioral science, finance, and communications. Just as valuable was the chance to work alongside people facing the same challenges and the same level of responsibility.

The program let me see editorial processes from a more systemic angle and compare my own approach with those of colleagues at other outlets.

For me, the conversations that mattered most were not about efficiency or speed. They were about internal communication, sustainable workflows, and working well as a team in an environment defined by constant pressure and fast-changing circumstances.

At a certain point I realized I needed to grow not just as an editor but as a media manager. In a newsroom there is a natural tendency to see everything through content – the texts we produce, the topics we cover, how fast we react to breaking news. But media today is about much more than content.

I wanted to learn to see media as a product: to understand our audience, analyze how we are perceived, work out which internal processes serve us and which need fixing, build a strong media brand, and balance editorial quality against business goals. In other words, Kyiv Media School was a chance to step back from day-to-day operations and see the bigger picture.

Thanks to what I learned, our audience has grown by roughly 20%. (It varies from month to month, naturally, but that has been the trend lately.) For a small team that has not added editorial staff in that time, we count that as a real achievement.