More than 1,000 news providers around the world have signed up to support World News Day on Monday, an event designed to promote the role of journalism at a time when organisers describe the industry's situation as an "existential threat" - which, for once, is not hyperbole designed to get you to click.
Participating media organisations, including the New York Times, Reuters and the Kyiv Independent, are sharing editorials, ads and cartoons to highlight the value of "trusted journalism," presumably hoping that if they say it enough times in enough formats, the public will stop getting their news from a stranger's TikTok breakdown of a headline they also didn't read.
Trust in news dropped to a new low globally in 2026, according to the Reuters Institute's latest Digital News Report, which noted that people are increasingly turning to social media and AI chatbots for news - because nothing says "informed citizenry" like asking a large language model to summarise a conflict it was trained on eighteen months ago.
Branko Brkic, co-organiser of World News Day, said media organisations that were once rivals must work together, adding: "If we do not change the game, we are just not going to exist." A bold stance, though "exist" is doing some heavy lifting when the alternative is being replaced by a chatbot that confidently invents quotes.
World News Day has grown since it began in 2018, and its message that "trusted journalism matters" aims to highlight the role of news providers in investigating and explaining important events - a service currently being undercut by algorithms that rank "guy yelling in a car" above a three-month investigation into municipal corruption.
It comes against a backdrop of what the recent Reuters Institute report described as "anxiety, disengagement, and cynicism" towards news among the public, "but also openness to new sources and formats, and continued belief in what news at its best can offer." So: cynical, checked out, but still vaguely hopeful. The news industry's target demo is apparently the emotional equivalent of a shrug.
Social media and video networks overtook news organisations' own websites and apps as the main source of online news last year, but are trusted less, the report said - a finding that suggests people know they're drinking from a firehose of nonsense and have simply decided hydration is overrated.
In another report, published earlier this month, UK media regulator Ofcom also said people now get news from a wider variety of sources, with YouTube "growing rapidly" and 20% of people using AI tools to access news. That's one in five people asking a machine to tell them what happened, which is fine, provided they enjoy the machine occasionally making things up with total confidence.
But growing choice has gone hand-in-hand with greater uncertainty about who and what to believe, and traditional providers are still seen as more trustworthy, accurate and impartial than online platforms, Ofcom said. A small victory, though being more trusted than a random reply guy is a bar so low it's practically subterranean.
Brkic, who founded South Africa's Daily Maverick, accepts that the media landscape has changed, and said established news organisations must respond.
"The old days are not coming back. We need to form a new equilibrium, and the only way we can do it is that if we actually join forces," he said - a collaborative spirit that will surely survive first contact with the next round of layoffs.
"If we continue like this, we're just going to be weak individual players waiting to be taken out. If we don't change something pretty fundamentally and pretty urgently, we're just going to be roadkill."
Brkic said the mainstream media has "committed mistakes," but professional and reliable journalists play a vital role in society. Mistakes were indeed made - some of them spectacular, many of them on front pages - but the alternative is a world where the only investigative journalism is a thread by an anonymous account named after a Greek philosopher.
"We need to talk to our audiences and explain to them, it's not in your interest not to choose truth and trust," he said. "We cannot function without a thing called the truth, without facts." A noble sentiment, though the definition of "the truth" is often contested, as seen in US President Donald Trump's long-running battle with what he labels the "fake news media."
Brkic added: "This is the information-based society. We are the infrastructure for that information-based society. And that society is actually going to really struggle without us." Which is a polite way of saying: you'll miss us when we're gone, and by then you'll be getting your news from a chatbot that thinks the moon landing was a budget meeting.