Citizens around the world have long declared a desire to be trusted with the formation of their own opinions, and that can only come when they have a… - Heather Brooke

Protesting is one of our most important democratic rights. It ensures the most fair and efficient running of a country because it allows new ideas to be raised, criticisms to be vented. If you suppress all protest, societal discontent builds like a pressure cooker. Sooner or later, it’s going to blow, and in that chaos, all sorts of bad actors can try and gain power. That’s the real importance of protest. It means something for both a society and for an individual. It gives us agency when so often we can feel powerless. It is such a worthwhile thing to come together and petition for reform. In too many countries, it’s a privilege, but it should be our human right.

At a time of information overload, good journalists are more important then ever. They serve as the public's hired guns to collect information from various sources and challenge it for the purpose of distilling down what is important and true. They-signpost issues that are worthy of our attention. In the past when we bought newspapers we were paying for that particular newspaper with its content- a bundle of news and entertainment. In the digital age we're buying the carriage (e.g. the Internet access) and readers decide later what information they want to view over that carrier.

As a newspaper reporter, I covered crime, then politics then investigations. None could be described as abundant with happiness. Yet I didn’t feel unhappy reporting on these realities. They were truths that needed to be told. Truth needs to be told regardless of how it makes people feel, and more often than not it makes people feel bad before it makes them feel good. It’s crucial to get through that initial pain, because only by doing so, and seeing reality as it is, can we learn and change.