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I spent much of 2025 thinking and writing about how we communicate about humanitarian crises. I attended and hosted panels, conferences, and convenings where journalists and humanitarians anguished over the current state of play. I had deep, often inspiring conversations with academics about why things are the way they are – and about what might be possible if we were willing to imagine something different.
There is no shortage of analysis. Over the past year, conversations about crisis reporting have grown sharper, more self-aware, and more sophisticated. We have named extractive storytelling, interrogated neutrality and objectivity in contexts of mass suffering, critiqued the politics of attention, and exposed the institutional incentives that reward spectacle over care. The diagnosis is strong. The evidence is overwhelming. And yet the harm continues.
To take just a few examples from one ongoing catastrophe: As the genocide in Gaza persists, a BBC host questioned whether it was “divisive” to raise the issue during electoral campaigns in the UK; Médecins Sans Frontières has publicly wrestled with the ethics and optics of complying with Israeli demands to provide lists of its Palestinian employees; and major Western outlets have continued to amplify dubious Israeli justifications for killing Palestinians, including their own journalists.
From Sudan to Iran, from Ukraine to Venezuela, and in countless other crises, the way events are framed, filtered, and narrated continues to dehumanise communities and to normalise – or at least render tolerable – violence that ought to shock the conscience.
In short, we have said much but changed little. Increasingly, it feels as if our analysis has begun to function not as a means to effect change but as a substitute for it, as if clarity is itself impact.
To be clear, this is not to say that nothing is happening. Important work is already underway. Kelsie Kilawna, for example, has developed guidance giving communities agency and power over whether and how their stories are told in the media, and reporters tips on how to approach writing these stories in a trauma-informed way. Initiatives such as Devex’s Better Conversations About Ethical Storytelling guide, the Pledge for Change, the Solutions Journalism Network, and Bond’s Ethical Storytelling Group have made meaningful contributions – translating critique into tools, principles, and practices that challenge some of the worst habits of crisis coverage.
The problem is not a lack of seriousness or commitment. It is that these efforts largely remain peripheral to the systems that shape everyday practice. They operate alongside – but not within – the dominant editorial, institutional, funding, and professional structures that determine what is commissioned, rewarded, and normalised. As a result, valuable work remains optional, unevenly adopted, and dependent on individual goodwill rather than embedded at scale.
We need to model and create structures that can work at scale: from newsroom processes to administrative systems to training for communicators in ethical decision-making.
A year ago, I argued that we need a new ethics for covering humanitarian crises that is grounded in practice and alive to the real constraints that communicators face: editorial pressure, institutional politics, commercial and fundraising logics, time scarcity, and risk. I noted that this would require changes to how journalism itself works. I still stand by that.
As long as ethical practice depends on individual heroism – on people doing the right thing despite the system – it will remain fragile and exceptional. We need to build new structures and develop ways of working to support ethical communications under real-world pressures. And because journalism sits within a much wider ecosystem of communication about crises, the same goes for humanitarian agencies, governments, funders, academics, platforms, and policy actors.
Thus, alongside ethics codes, we need to model and create structures that can work at scale: from newsroom processes to administrative systems to training for communicators in ethical decision-making.
So how do we do this?
No single person or organisation can fix it. Any framework imposed from above would inevitably reflect the position, access, and constraints of its author – not those of editors on deadline, humanitarian communicators navigating impossible funding pressures, or (most importantly) the communities whose lives are being reported on.
The “how” cannot be predetermined by any individual without reproducing the same extractive, top-down patterns we are trying to escape. It must emerge from those who will use it and those most affected by it. That requires a process of collective work.
I am not blind to the irony: After arguing that we need to move from critique to construction, I am proposing… a convening.
What we need is a shift from individual analysis to collective experimentation.
But this is not meant to be more of the same kind of talking. It is not another gathering to agree on abstract principles, since there is already broad consensus on what those are. The real question is how to operationalise them under real conditions: when you are an editor on deadline; when your organisation’s funding depends on emotional appeals; when publishing graphic images might galvanise action or simply retraumatise people for clicks.
What we need is a shift from individual analysis to collective experimentation – what Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed calls “praxis” and defines as “reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed”. It is a spiral of action and reflection that moves us from diagnosis to deliberate practice; from producing principles to prototyping tools and methods that can be tested, revised, and adapted in the real world.
One idea taking shape at The New Humanitarian that I’m excited about is the establishment of an independent Ethical Humanitarian Communications Working Group made up of a cross-section of stakeholders. This would not be a standards-setting authority imposing rules from above but is rather envisaged as a collective of shared practice: journalists, editors, humanitarian communicators, academics, and, critically, representatives from crisis-affected communities – working together to surface real ethical dilemmas and develop ways of navigating them.
It would not be about abandoning professional standards. Core principles – verification, truth-seeking, minimising harm, dignity, participation, accountability – remain foundational. It is about acknowledging that these do not adequately address crises contexts where normal rules break down: when “both sides” includes one side committing genocide; when “objectivity” obscures culpability; when “neutrality” risks complicity.
What does informed consent mean when people are fleeing for their lives? How do we balance urgency with accuracy? What justifies the use of graphic imagery? How should media and humanitarian agencies communicate when donors and audiences reward emotional appeals over dignity? These are questions standard frameworks were never designed to answer comprehensively, and in which those most affected have rarely had meaningful input.
Instead of producing guidelines in isolation, the Working Group will prototype decision-making tools with practitioners who face these pressures daily. An editor might test a tool on whether to publish graphic imagery; report back on what helped or hindered; and then refine it. The process would be documented so others can learn from both successes and failures.
Yet tools alone are not enough; they must be coupled with efforts to reshape incentives, funding models, and institutional power. How to do that is something the Working Group will undertake.
The group will also focus on building sustained connections between journalists, humanitarians, academics, and crisis-affected communities rather than one-off consultations. It will develop practical decision frameworks for recurring dilemmas that would make the ethical reasoning visible, so editors and organisations can explain why decisions were made rather than hiding behind vague claims of “editorial judgment”.
It will also create feedback mechanisms so communities can respond to coverage in ways that actually influence future practice and work with existing initiatives to understand why valuable tools have remained peripheral and how they might be mainstreamed. And it will examine the revenue models, funding structures, and professional incentives that currently make ethical communication so difficult.
The goal would not necessarily be a finished code but rather an evolving set of resources: adaptable decision tools, documented case studies of ethical reasoning under pressure, and training approaches that treat ethics as a collective skill rather than individual virtue.
The Working Group will not be a silver bullet, but it should hopefully help push widespread adoption of ethical tools by creating something that does not currently exist at scale: shared, accountable infrastructure for deliberative ethical practice that is grounded in real constraints and answerable to those most affected.
It is an ambitious undertaking and I am grateful The New Humanitarian is taking it on. But it will need the support of a wider community to succeed. If you are a journalist or editor who has faced impossible ethical choices, this work needs you. If you are a humanitarian communicator torn between urgency and dignity, this work needs you. If you are from a crisis-affected community frustrated by how your story is told, this work needs you. If you are involved in ethical storytelling initiatives that have remained marginal and want to understand why – and how to change that – this work needs you.
We know what’s wrong. In 2026, we can begin to build something better.
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