Six young journalists, scattered across three continents and connected largely by screens, recently attempted an unusual exercise: writing letters addressed to the future instead of to editors. All six were members of the 2025 cohort of the English-language Y. Eva Tan Conservation Reporting Fellowship. The results read like field notes from a generation that has come of age amid overlapping ecological and informational strain. Their concerns differ in detail, yet converge on a single question: Wwhat kind of journalism will be needed when crisis becomes a daily condition?
For Shradha Triveni (India), environmental change permeates daily life. She describes working in cities where pollution is a lived reality and where trust in media is eroding as audiences migrate to video platforms and social feeds. Reinventing storytelling, she suggests, has become essential to journalism’s survival. Lee Kwai Han (Malaysia), arrives at a similar destination by tracing her journey from skepticism about sensational coverage to confidence in rigorous editing and verification as journalism’s distinguishing features. Ethics, in her telling, serves as the discipline that keeps reporting coherent and credible.
Elsewhere, the letters dwell on what conventional coverage often overlooks. Manuel Fonseca (Colombia) reflects on the tendency to reduce assassinated environmental defenders to statistics, arguing that numbers alone cannot explain why individuals remain in dangerous places to protect land and water. Blaise Kasereka Makuta (Democratic Republic of Congo) offers a meditation on traditional medicine, treating it as a knowledge system threatened by displacement, climate change and institutional neglect. The future, he implies, will judge whether such knowledge was documented in time to survive.
Hope appears in the collection, though it is measured and grounded. Fernanda Biasoli (Brazil) locates it in networks of young reporters sharing ideas across borders, likening environmental journalism to a river basin in which many tributaries sustain a larger flow. Samuel Ogunsona (Nigeria), writing ahead of last year’s climate summit, sees potential for regions often cast as victims to shape solutions, provided global commitments materialize.
Taken together, the letters offer a view of journalism as infrastructure that supports public understanding and accountability. Training programs that cultivate local expertise, their mentor Karen Coates notes, can ripple outward as alumni launch new desks or influence public debates in their home countries.
The implication is pragmatic. In places where environmental decisions determine livelihoods and stability, credible information guides choices and public oversight.
There is also an implicit rebuke to extractive reporting, the practice of parachuting into communities and leaving little behind. Ethical coverage requires collaboration, accessibility and sustained engagement so that those whose stories are told can benefit from them.
None of the fellows claim that journalism can avert the crises they describe. Their letters are more modest, and perhaps more durable, in their ambition. They suggest that the future will depend partly on whether societies maintain the capacity to observe carefully, verify honestly and tell complex stories without turning them into spectacle. In that sense, the letters function as commitments as much as reflections: a promise that someone, somewhere, intends to keep paying attention.
Credits
