Dear friends of The VII Foundation,
As our community looks toward the horizon, we see increasing hostility towards journalism at home and abroad. In the USA, we are facing a government that is threatening to imprison and punish journalists for doing journalism. Overseas – plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The VII Foundation continues to work with significant effect amongst communities where journalism and journalists are at risk.
In recent years, U.S. foundations that support journalism have been focused on helping local newsrooms in the U.S., the motivation being to ensure the U.S. public was well informed ahead of the last election, assuming that they would make wise choices with that information. It is worth reminding ourselves that journalists are only the messenger. During this time relatively few resources have been assigned by U.S.-based foundations (and their European counterparts) to support journalists in the rest of the world.
The VII Foundation’s principal objectives are working in countries and communities overseas, and training journalists in places where the western media is infrequently seen. This is important for multiple reasons. Chief amongst them is to ensure that the most under-reported parts of the world are not continuously marginalized. When I went to Asia in the late 1980’s there were over 300 correspondents and stringers in Bangkok.
Every western media had a bureau there, including many that no longer exist. Now, if we want to know how the civil war in Myanmar will impact, for example, the Chinese economy and, therefore, everyone else’s economy, we need local journalists to keep us informed because no foreign journalists are based there, and few visit. Local journalists are the eyewitnesses who will allow us to anticipate what impact the war being fought around the lithium cobalt mines in eastern Congo will have on the seven most prominent companies in the United States (Apple, Tesla, NVIDIA, META, Microsoft, Alphabet/Google and Amazon). Equity and fairness, along with accountability and justice, are important reasons to support the training of foreign reporters and photojournalists, but there are also very pragmatic economic reasons why our work is vital to small-town communities thousands of miles away, in Europe and the United States. Like it or not, we are all impacted by the lives of others many thousands of miles away.
Local journalists are the future of international reporting, but the risks they face are significantly worse than for those of us who fly in on assignment, and the human cost of reporting is getting higher.
According to Reporters Sans Frontieres, 550 journalists are currently being imprisoned for being journalists, a 7% increase from 2023; China (124, including 11 in Hong Kong), Myanmar (61), Israel (41) and Belarus (40) hold almost half of them. Fifty-five journalists have been kidnapped, and 95 journalists are still reported as “missing”, 30% of them in Mexico. While the NGOs who report on media fatalities disagree on the numbers — their definition of media worker and journalist vary, and some do not count journalists killed at home in their beds or on the way to work in their cars — all agree that Palestine is the most dangerous place to work. Even with that narrowest definition, Reporters Sans Frontiers found that “more than 155 journalists have been killed by the Israeli army since October 2023 in Gaza and Lebanon, an unprecedented massacre. RSF has sufficient evidence that at least 40 of them were deliberately targeted for their journalism.” The U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists, says 63 were targeted killings. However we do our accounting, this is a terrible and outrageous ledger. Behind each number is a colleague, a journalist trying to tell a story, dying to keep us all informed.
Aware of all these risks — in some cases because of them — local journalists are queuing up to report from their own communities. I ask you to join us and support The VII Foundation in providing local journalists with the training they require so that they can provide us with the information we need to make prudent and thoughtful decisions that affect our lives, and theirs.
Please support our mission by sharing our annual report with your colleagues and friends so we can grow our network of supporters, expand our funding, broaden our donor base, and work together to create a new landscape for visual journalism.
Warmly
GARY KNIGHT
Executive Director
Arles, January, 2025