On a bright October morning in Monaco, the familiar hush of the Principality gave way to something more animated: a gathering of public authorities, journalists, students, researchers, and everyday citizens, all drawn together by a single, urgent question—what does it take to keep journalism alive, trustworthy, and safe in a world drowning in information? The occasion was a series of events built around the Council of Europe’s “Journalists Matter” campaign, a sustained effort to defend the safety and dignity of journalists across the continent. Monaco, with its shimmering coastline and quiet diplomacy, might seem an unlikely setting for such a gritty conversation about press freedom, but it was, in fact, a fitting one. The country currently holds the Monegasque Presidency of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, and it had chosen to host a meeting of the Bureau of the Steering Committee on Media and Information Society, known by its acronym CDMSI. These events unfolded on the margins of that official meeting, but they were far from peripheral. They were designed to bring the campaign’s message out of the committee rooms and into the open, where journalists, young people, and the broader public could wrestle with the realities of disinformation, media literacy, and the fragile role of the press in democratic life. The atmosphere was not one of abstract policy debate; it was a human conversation about how we know what we know, whom we trust, and what happens when that trust is deliberately broken.
The day opened with a press conference that set the tone for everything that followed. Journalists and officials gathered to present the “Journalists Matter” campaign and to shine a spotlight on several initiatives being developed under the Monegasque Presidency, especially those focused on youth and disinformation. There was a particular sense of anticipation around an upcoming international youth event with the evocative title “Youth Facing Disinformation—Why Journalists Matter,” scheduled to take place at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg on 9 and 10 November 2026. As the speakers described this future gathering, they painted a picture of an information landscape that has become almost unrecognizably complex. Young people today do not simply read the news; they swim through feeds shaped by invisible algorithms, encounter content that has been stripped of context, and graze on headlines that are often designed to provoke rather than inform. The rise of artificial intelligence has only deepened the confusion, making it harder than ever to tell a genuine photograph from a synthetic one, a real source from a bot, a fact from a fabrication. In the middle of this swirling chaos, the press conference offered a clear and somewhat old-fashioned message: professional journalism still matters. Not because journalists are perfect, but because the craft of verification—checking sources, weighing evidence, correcting mistakes—is one of the few remaining anchors in a sea of noise. Without it, democratic participation becomes a guessing game, and citizens are left to navigate public life with a compass that no one has calibrated.
From the formal setting of the press conference, the conversation moved to a more intimate and perhaps more revealing stage: an exchange with secondary-school students. Here, the abstractions of media policy gave way to the lived experience of teenagers who have grown up with smartphones in their hands and social media in their bloodstreams. Council of Europe representatives sat down with these students to ask the questions that adults often assume they already know the answers to. How do you actually decide what to believe when you scroll through your feed? What clues make you trust a video, or doubt a meme? How do you distinguish between a reliable news article and a piece of content that merely looks like one? The students, it turned out, had plenty to say. They spoke about the pressure to share things quickly, before friends move on to the next post. They described the strange feeling of being both a consumer and a producer of information, capable of broadcasting a thought to hundreds of people in an instant, yet often unsure whether that thought is grounded in anything real. The exchange was not a lecture, and the adults did not pretend to have all the answers. Instead, it was an honest dialogue, a mutual attempt to understand how the next generation is navigating a media environment that their parents never had to face. And in that dialogue, the central message of the “Journalists Matter” campaign began to take on a personal, almost tangible shape. Protecting journalists is not a niche concern for media insiders. It is a matter of public good. When journalists are threatened, intimidated, attacked, or silenced, the loss is not theirs alone; it is society’s. Every story that goes untold, every uncomfortable question that goes unasked, every government action that goes unexamined—these are the real costs of an unsafe environment for the press.
As afternoon light filtered through the windows of the Médiathèque Caroline, the public had its turn to engage. A round table gathered under the theme “Disinformation: what challenges, what responses?” and brought together a deliberately diverse mix of voices: journalists who had reported from the front lines of the information war, researchers who had spent years studying how lies spread, experts in media and information literacy, representatives of institutions trying to craft policy responses, and actors from the digital platforms that have become the battlegrounds of public discourse. The conversation was frank and at times uncomfortable. Participants acknowledged that disinformation is not simply a problem of “fake news” or bad actors; it is a systemic challenge, woven into the very architecture of the internet. Algorithms reward outrage, speed punishes careful thought, and the economic models of online platforms depend on keeping people engaged, not necessarily keeping them informed. Yet the round table did not descend into despair. Instead, it focused on practical responses: how to teach critical thinking in schools, how to design media literacy programs that actually resonate with young people, how to hold platforms accountable for the content they amplify, and how to support journalists in doing the painstaking work of verification in an environment that rewards whoever speaks first and loudest. The audience, seated in the library’s public space, listened with visible attention. Some took notes, others asked questions. There was a sense, rare in such events, that the people in the room were not there to be convinced but to figure something out together. The role of the journalist, it was agreed, remains irreplaceable—not as a gatekeeper who decides what people may know, but as a guide who helps people make sense of a chaotic world, who verifies what can be verified, and who refuses to let lies go unchallenged.
The Monaco events were not an end in themselves. They were, in a very deliberate way, a bridge toward something larger: the Strasbourg youth initiative scheduled for 9 and 10 November 2026. Organized by the Council of Europe under the Monegasque Presidency, as part of the ongoing “Journalists Matter” campaign, that event promises to bring together young people from across Europe with journalists, digital creators, experts, and decision-makers. The plan is ambitious. There will be a high-level conference, where big questions about democracy and the information ecosystem will be debated. But there will also be interactive workshops, where participants do not simply listen but actually engage with the challenges head-on. They will explore disinformation and media literacy, the promises and perils of artificial intelligence, the safety of journalists in an age of online harassment and physical threats, and the changing, restless ways in which young people consume and create information. The organizers seem to understand that a conference about the future of journalism cannot afford to be stuck in the past. It must meet young people where they are, acknowledging that their relationship with news is neither passive nor straightforward. They do not sit down to read a newspaper at the end of the day; they encounter stories in fragments, through friends, through memes, through algorithms that learn their preferences. The Strasbourg event aims to turn that fragmented experience into a coherent conversation, one that empowers young people not just to recognize disinformation but to see themselves as indispensable participants in the fight for reliable information.
Looking beyond that November gathering, the initiative has an even longer horizon. The Council of Europe plans to support youth-led projects that will continue well into 2027, with the clear intention of shifting young people from the role of passive recipients of information to active contributors to a more resilient and trustworthy public sphere. This is not a small gesture. It is a rethinking of what media literacy and democratic participation mean in the twenty-first century. Too often, young people are treated as a problem to be managed, a vulnerable population to be protected from the dangers of the internet. The “Journalists Matter” campaign, and the initiatives growing out of it, offer a more empowering vision. Young people, they suggest, are not just the targets of disinformation; they are also its potential antidotes. They have the digital fluency, the creativity, and the lived experience of the online world to build new forms of journalism, new ways of verifying information, and new models of civic engagement. But they cannot do it alone, and they cannot do it in a world where journalists are unsafe, where independent media are under attack, and where truth is treated as just another opinion. The campaign connects these threads with growing urgency: the safety of journalists, access to reliable information, and democratic resilience are not separate causes. They are one and the same struggle. As the conversations in Monaco made clear, that struggle is no longer the exclusive province of editors and policymakers. It belongs to everyone, and especially to the young, who will inherit both the information environment we leave behind and the responsibility to make it better.