Reporting from the Darkness: Journalism and Media in Myanmar 2023 Q4 and Annual Report "Financial issues are our biggest threat and concern for the upcoming years" Reporting in exile is something that Myanmar's media are all too familiar with. But on the third anniversary of the February 2021 coup, its exiled news outlets, even the bigger ones, worry about their short-term and long-term prospects, the editor-in-chief of an exiled media organisation in Chiang Mai, Thailand, says in the conversation below, held in December 2023. What's the financial situation of your news organisation now? How do you manage, and what about the media's reliance on grants and international media funding? Since February 1, when the coup took place, no commercial income has come anymore because the military will punish them (advertisers) if they advertise their products with us. So there is zero income from those channels, and our entire commercial system has broken down. The funding support from international organisations does not even cover 50 percent of our operation costs and activities. Financially, we are very much struggling. Now, we don’t have 60 percent of the cash flow to give as salaries to our staff for January. Despite some verbal agreements with some international donors, the money is not there yet. So the financial situation is very unstable. There were around 4,000 journalists and reporters before the coup, but now, the number is 1,000 or it can be even less than that. Among these, there are around 300 journalists reporting in exile. Unfortunately, Myanmar became second to Ukraine war in terms of international attention. Most of the aid and assistance shifted there, and now to the Israel-Hamas crisis. So international support for us has become more difficult in quantity and quality. What we are facing now is that despite the fact that the number of journalists and reporters decreased, the number of media outlets and organisations has increased. Today, if you have a Facebook account, you can have a media outlet with a couple of people. So rather than become a journalist, I may [instead] want to become a founder or CEO of a media outlet. We may have around 100 media organisations both inside and in exile. Before the coup, there were around 80 but some like 7-Day Media stopped, and there are many that have become a 18