Building on the success of the World Congress, and in particular this year’s virtual edition: Reimagining Journalism with 2020 Vision, IPI will deepen the connections between journalists across regions, continents and the world with a multimedia series of conversations, ideas and debates each month that will share information and strengthen the response of members facing challenges on the ground. 

Talks will be held at different times to meet our community at home across different time zones.

Alongside IPI’s ongoing campaign to insist independent, pluralistic journalism is the most powerful tool to fight disinformation, the IPI global network works to help reporters and editors understand the doubt and distrust that encourage disinformation and to recognise the bad actors who weaponise it, allowing misinformation to flourish. We recognize our role in restoring truth to the centre of public discourse and information sharing and to campaign for reform of tech platforms to end their use as vectors of fake news.

Built equally on the demand for truth and the public’s right to know, journalists and news media have a key role in confronting the plague of dis- and mis-information. We will work with the journalism community to build the toolkit and practices to recognize disinformation and to call out falsity in public figures without amplifying bad actors.

We will continue to defend journalists and media — particularly women journalists — who are targeted by bad-faith actors on social media.

IPI is committed to recognizing the strength of journalism and news media in our membership so that the network continues to represent the free practice of journalism around the world. 

Our national committees are working with the support of the secretariat to strengthen and expand membership, create activities that promote and celebrate independent journalism in their national context. 

This includes events and activities to elevate press freedom in the national conversation and celebrate the role of journalism in democracy. We will bolster our awards as well as find other ways to recognize courage and creativity in journalism, as well as innovation and leadership in the digital transition.

The IPI membership card is a statement of principles, an acknowledgment of our joint efforts to sustain a journalism that must be free to hold power to account and strong enough to serve the public interest.

The world has changed since 1950 yet the principles of journalism endure and the work of the IPI global network remains as important as ever.

As the first World Congress of the next 70 years, the 2021 Congress will play a key role in advancing the goals of the Global Journalism Project.

To take stock of where we are now and to recalibrate for “the next 70” the secretariat is working to confirm details and we’ll announce the dates and outline for the congress by the end of February.

To help guide the debate into the Congress and inform potential outcomes, IPI will launch a commission of leading media thinkers and doers drawn from our membership together with invited experts that will help identify priorities for action to secure independent journalism for the next 70 years.

The IPI network is in a unique position to share the practical information and experiences of journalists around the world. It is able to break the information silos on the changing industry by sharing across regions, continents and the world. This is done through regular newsletters and multi-media formats with original content that tell the stories of IPI members and their efforts in the field, breaking challenges to press freedom and navigating the digital transition.

We have spent 2020 listening to how our members define and face the challenges of this moment. This programme has been designed from these insights. While it doesn’t have all the answers, it creates a base from which we can together clear a path forward.

Listening, understanding and facilitating the exchange of information and wisdom across the network will remain central to our work. We are creating a system to constantly assess the needs of our members and create a knowledge directory of  expertise that exists within our network to match these needs and create opportunities.

We will share our research and insights to inform the broader media-development and journalism-support infrastructure, to help ensure that their efforts are meeting genuine needs, and to develop clear priorities and guidance for support. We will strengthen our existing alliances, and build new collaborations with industry supporters and press freedom advocates to give our work its greatest impact.

Currently, we are focusing on digital transition in local news. Local media lies at the heart of the journalism challenge right now. It’s a high stakes space for experimentation, where many are finding success with new ways of imagining journalism. By listening and learning, we will share more evenly the lessons we can all draw, turning them into the paving stones in the path of the digital transition.

It is already clear that two of the key actions are needed now: first to provide guidance and help facilitate the distribution of emergency and development funds to media in transition to help ensure they have the runway to succeed; second, to help network members build and access transition support infrastructure, in particular in the global south.

Shared values and a common understanding of what journalism means has been at the core of the relationships of trust that our members have enjoyed over the past 70 years. The diversity that is core to the IPI membership combined with our shared values have been IPI’s unique strengths. 

To celebrate its next 70 years, IPI will bring together a committee of IPI members to draft a declaration of principles of journalism, which can be supported by the entire IPI network, as a sign of the universality of the craft, and the rights that support it.