Reporting from the Darkness: Journalism and Media in Myanmar 2023 Q4 and Annual Report Six journalists have died since the 2021 coup. These include one who died while in military custody, two in conflict-related incidents and three journalists, believed to be associated with supporters of the military, who were killed by unidentified armed groups in 2023. Since the coup, 202 journalists and news workers have been arrested, 67 convicted, and 138 released by the junta, according to media monitoring data since the coup. In 2023, the SAC introduced amendments to two laws and further restricted the environment around news, freedom of speech and expression – the Printing and Publishing Enterprises Law and Television and Radio Broadcasting Law. A major trend during the year was the escalation and expansion of armed conflict in Myanmar, one that affects the space for independent news work at a time of lesser international attention to the country's crisis. Conflict, which now affects most of the country, has added to the huge safety risks for journalists and news sources, the collapse of internet services and communication, and is a main factor shaping how news desks manage how get and report news from within Myanmar. Fact-checking and verification have become more challenging, due to news sources' fear of repercussions, journalists' limited mobility, and lack of access to responses from official sources. (In 2023, Myanmar's score was 10 out of 100 or 'not free' in Freedom House's Freedom on the Net index.) In an environment where being a journalist is a risk to one's life and that of one's relatives and friends, and where relying on news work for a living is a challenge, the news community inside Myanmar has become much smaller since the coup. From the often-cited figure of 4,000 Myanmar journalists at the time of the 2021 coup, this number is now 1,000 or fewer, estimates a Myanmar editor based in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai. He adds that among this total, around 300 are in exile. All the major news outlets, and many more smaller ones, have relocated to third countries, mainly Thailand, while working with contributors and citizen journalists inside Myanmar. While they are physically safer outside Myanmar, news professionals worry about being able to continue to rely on journalism as a source of livelihood. Many face challenges with the documentation needed to stay in Thailand, for instance. Their future prospects are related as 3