March Update

War has long been used as a pretext to crack down on dissent and with the situation in Iran and the Gulf growing more complex and troubling every day this is precisely what President Trump has promised. Over the weekend, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr took to Truth Social to warn that broadcasters that didn’t shape up could lose their license and accused the news media as a whole of “wanting the United States to lose the war.”

As troubling as Carr’s comments were, they are also just one example of how journalism in the US has become more difficult and dangerous, with a broad array of new and intensifying threats, from covering protests, to escalating online harassment, to mounting legal attacks. Larger and better resourced news organizations are spending more time and money on safety – The New York Times says it is spending roughly ten times more than it did a decade ago. But what about the thousands of smaller, local, and regional news organizations? What can they do to keep their people safe?

JPI's New Safety Planning Toolkit

Today the JPI is unveiling a new Safety Planning Toolkit that can help journalists and news organizations navigate this complex environment. It was produced by my colleague Kate Parkinson, who is the JPI’s Risk and Safety Manager, along with Mike Christie, the former head of editorial safety at Reuters. The Toolkit lays out the full range of challenges and provides a process to identify and classify the threats, develop mitigations, tap into the right resources, and create a safety plan that will allow journalists to carry their essential reporting with a higher degree of confidence.

This Safety Planning Toolkit updates and expands the original toolkit produced by the JPI last year, not long after the Trump administration took office. That resource was deployed in newsrooms across the country. But journalists and news organizations told us they wanted something that was easier to navigate and apply. The new Toolkit is just as rigorous and comprehensive in its analysis as the original version – but the application is more intuitive and more streamlined.

New Briefing on Legal Attacks

The JPI is also keeping up with the changing risk landscape via our Press Freedom Briefings. The latest, from Mike Christie, is on how news organizations can plan for the possibility of concerted legal attack. Such attacks are intended to overwhelm a news organization and produce a complex crisis, with managers having to plan a legal defense while communicating internally and externally and often responding to escalating threats.

The new briefing provides practical guidance on what news organizations can do before, during and after such an attack and is based on input from an array of newsroom leaders, legal advocates, and safety experts who participated in the 2026 Safety Summit which the JPI hosted in January at the Newmark School. You can read The Threat of a Broad Legal Assault by Government Against a News Organization here.

The spectre of concerted legal and regulatory action is increasingly real. Earlier this month, I spoke with lawyers for Georgia Fort and Don Lemon. Both journalists are facing federal charges in response to their reporting on a protest that took place inside a St. Paul church. As I describe in my most recent column for CJR, the Trump administration is nothing if not creative in its use of lawfare against the media. Now, thanks to the Safety Planning Toolkit, news organizations and journalists can better prepare and respond.

Accessing the JPI Resource Library

The JPI resource library continues to grow, and we are commissioning regular Press Freedom Briefings. To access the library please follow this link.