PMA’s 2025 Highlights

Advocacy Amplified

2025 was a strong year for PMA’s advocacy, with increased involvement in partner statements and an expansion of our own advocacy efforts. This year, we’ve also talked more directly with our members about daily challenges, including fair election coverage under scrutiny, handling media bargaining issues and platform influence, and maintaining reliable emergency broadcasting when needed most. These conversations have not only been informative but have also reinforced something simple: public media cannot protect themselves alone; instead they need people willing to notice, name the problem, and act.

Strengthening our own advocacy therefore mattered so much. Through our revitalised PSM Call Out and our new ‘On Our Radar’, we’re focusing on how to respond faster, speak more clearly, and show up for our colleagues. Sometimes that’ll be loudly, with statements and calls to action, and other times quietly, with behind-the-scenes solidarity and diplomacy. Either way, our point remains – these issues matter, and they shouldn’t pass in silence.  

In 2026, we hope to keep strengthening this work and invite our members and partners to be part of it, by sharing issues that need attention, lending their voices in moments of solidarity, and helping us shape where and how PMA speaks out next. 

Focusing on young audiences

This year for PMA’s editorial team, we’ve had a real focus on public service media and young audiences. The ways in which young people consume content, whether that’s news, entertainment, or educational content, are rapidly changing. The shifting winds mean that public service media must fight extra hard to remain relevant and accessible to young audiences. And throughout the year, we’ve been looking at some exciting and innovative projects which are leading that charge.  

There have been the projects which bring content creators and public service media together, from Australia to the Western Balkans. I was in Brussels on World Press Freedom Day for a workshop on this very subject, and it’s clear that young people connect with and trust creators. Public media needs to understand why and work alongside them also.  

There’s the work public media are doing in the virtual world. Exciting and crazy projects run by PTS, RTBF and Yle, are all exploring how public media can get involved on gaming platforms, and what such interactions look like. 

Or there has been the creative collaboration from VRT who partnered with other non-media companies on a fact-checking initiative that saw great success. Or efforts to directly engage with young audiences, such as Mediacorp’s “School Invasions” that are so popular.  

Challenge breeds creativity, and I’m always impressed by all the innovative ways public media seek to reach this age group. Ahead of elections in Sweden next year, I’m excited to see how SR and SVT seek to engage young audiences and ensure they’re informed ahead of voting. We’re also running a workshop part of Radiodays Europe that will be searching for ideas on how audio can remain relevant for young people.  

Communicating with PMA’s audiences

Stepping into PMA’s first Communications role earlier this summer offered an opportunity to reflect on not only how the organisation’s external communications represent the critical work we do to support public service media globally, but the way in which we connect and engage with our member alliance and wider PSM supporters. Joining such a dedicated and creative team, it quickly became clear how important it was to bring their efforts to the forefront, ensuring the organisation’s work to protect and preserve public service media values were clearly represented across our outputs. 

Good, trusted communication is the basis of any strong relationship, but it is always a two-way street. This has guided how we’ve thought about how PMA communicates with its varying audiences, ensuring it reflects both member priorities and wider audience trends. Diversifying our channels and outputs has been a key part in this process.  

Our bi-weekly newsletters, PSM Weekly and the PMA Update, have become important spaces to share timely public media and organisational developments in a ‘trade-mag’ style across the Alliance. Visualising our research insights and reports has also offered a fresh way to bring PMA’s work to life across social channels, helping us reach new supporters and partners.  

Shaping this role has also provided space to reflect on what a more positive and sustainable future for social media could look like within PMA’s work. Looking ahead, I’m excited to build on this momentum in the new year, and continue developing creative, engaging ways to support and strengthen public media.  

A new age for international public media

2025 has seen many a storm for the media, but some hit closer to home than one can imagine.

In March, I discovered, like everyone else, the new Trump Administration’s order to dismantle the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) and the international broadcasters it oversaw. I did not discover it in the media, but around a cup of coffee in one of Brussels’ European Quarter’s busy little cafés, from a close friend who worked as a reporter for one of USAGM’s agencies and had just been laid off. It was here that we started to grasp the severity of the situation and the impact it would have on a global scale.  Unless independent media stepped up to fill the gap left by VOA, RFE/RL and RFA in parts of the world where access to information of quality is scarce, the empty space could be filled by other actors with a more authoritarian agenda.

Read more: Filling the gap left by RFE/RL

But the event carried an even broader significance. The dismantling of USAGM highlighted the growing hostility from certain political families against the mission of international public service media and what it stands for: freedom, dialogue and expertise through providing impartial news and information to audiences worldwide.

2025 is the year where I reported not only on VOA, RFE/RL and RFA’s fight for the existence but also on the various attacks to other international public broadcasters. In only a few months, BBC World Service and Deutsche Welle’s (DW) budgets have been cut. Swissinfo had to advocate for the safeguard of its financing which was threatened to be reduced significantly until the Swiss government rejected the cuts last week. The necessity of international public broadcasters’ existence and their mission is also being questioned in parliaments while authoritarian states exert their pressure through censorship. This is one of the risks that we discussed in one episode of PMA’s podcast Media Uncovered, with the leaders of the BBC World Service and SwisInfo.

But despite all these challenges, these institutions fight back. The watchwords: cooperation and mutual support. With threats of disinformation in regions of the world risk to go underserved, it has become more vital than ever to protect international public media organisation and their mission across the 6 continents.

Hope amidst a confronting and challenging year

What a confronting year it has been. From the drastic cuts to federal funding for public media by the Trump administration to the latest attempts to undermine the independence of the Lithuanian public broadcaster, public service media around the world have experienced escalating political pressure, slashed or precarious public funding, an increasingly weaponised and hostile atmosphere, curtailed and curated access to warzones, and threats that could ultimately undermine their ability to hold truth to power. The situation is truly global, with Argentina, France, Israel, South Africa and Switzerland all among the countries with public media under pressure.

But these threats don’t exist in isolation. They sit alongside longstanding pressures such as the speed of technological development, audience fragmentation, and the climate crisis, the pace of which are challenging public media’s ability adapt, let alone afford to adapt. Examples of this can be found in our latest PSM and AI report, where we highlight the compromises some organisations make when procuring and using AI tools. Another has been demonstrated by how PSMs are in some cases providing direct aid in addition to their tireless work to provide lifesaving information as hurricane and cyclone seasons intensify, as recently experienced by our members in Jamaica and Sri Lanka.

The simplistic irony of these challenges is that they come at a time when the need for independent public service media is, to us supporters, more evident than ever – as a remedy to dis- and misinformation, to shed light on corruption, to counter populism and promote social cohesion over polarisation.

But not all hope is lost. Democracy survives where public media thrives – and as the threats to public media become increasingly shared globally, so too does the importance of working together to protect these unique institutions.

It’s imperative that PSM learn from one another, share knowledge, collaborate, and combine where they can develop compelling new narratives to make the case for a viable and sustainable future. We’ve seen this across Europe, where the case for public media as critical infrastructure is increasingly being deployed during a time of heightened tensions; we’ve seen the launch of cross-industry factchecking initiatives in Taiwan; the ongoing Public Spaces Incubator project; and marked increases in young audiences turning to public media for news in Belgium.

Continuing our work with Indigenous public media

PMA has spent much of this year involved with the Indigenous units, departments and broadcasters of several public media organisations with strong Indigenous services around the world, committed to improving representation and inclusion of Indigenous Peoples and content across public media.  

That has involved work with Unesco and their work with the rights of Indigenous media, but a particular highlight came in July, at the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum in Bonn, one of the world’s largest global media gatherings. That involved friends from Swedish Radio Sameradion, CBC/Radio-Canada, and Hakka TV in Taiwan.  

The panel on reaching and reflecting Indigenous Peoples was well received, and included the challenges and opportunities for Indigenous storytelling, the labours of fighting for visibility and space in large organisations, and the media’s role in truth and reconciliation, among plenty of other things.  

What is clear is that this is just the beginning of this much-needed work, with plenty more to come from this group in 2026. 

Creating change at MediaStrong

Sitting in the front row at MediaStrong 2025 was a powerful reminder of how urgently journalism needs meaningful mental wellbeing support. The audience brought together journalists, editors, health professionals, academics and students. A salient realisation for me was that trauma affects staff across the newsroom, not only those on the frontline who hear, read, watch and witness it directly. Assuming that the job requires an element of resilience cannot continue – without acknowledging individual vulnerabilities and the pressures that shape entire newsroom cultures. 

I felt reassured hearing practical examples of what is, and can be, done to support media professionals. Discussions also sharpened awareness of the hidden dangers journalists face online – risks that spill into personal lives and families. Watching the conference’s founder, the formidable Leona O’Neill, reveal the MediaStrong Charter created a hopeful atmosphere at the conference as we work towards creating caring newsrooms globally.