The world stands at a crossroads. The fight for human-centricity is far from over and the outcome is not certain. International institutions that have spent decades protecting human rights have become increasingly powerless. War diminishes people to anonymous statistics and abbreviations. Algorithms imposed by tech giants decide what you see — and what remains invisible. State policies are shaped around resources and territories, not people and their interests. And in all of this, media face a choice: go with the flow — or push back and return the human to the centre.
Donbas Media Forum knows the price of this choice. The Forum was born as a response to Russian occupation and war — from the moment when people were literally erased from the information space. More than ten years have passed since then. A full-scale war. Millions of displaced people. Entire regions are gradually and irreversibly disappearing from the information agenda. And one difficult question that still has no answer: what should media do about the people whom nobody wants to see?
DMF 2026 is not just a conference about trends. It is a conversation about return: to democracy, to understanding, to home, to each other, to the human.
That is why I_MEDIA is about each and every one of us.
We tend to think of media as newsrooms, platforms, algorithms. But media are people. Someone who creates. Someone who is portrayed. Someone who listens. And often — it is the same person in different roles at the same time.
A journalist reads the news in the morning, conducts an interview in the afternoon, and becomes the subject of a colleague's story by evening. Three roles — creator, subject, audience — are no longer a sequence. They are simultaneous conditions of one person. And that is why human-centricity in media is not a trend. It is a matter of professional survival.

Human as creator
A journalist is not a content machine. They are people caught in the middle of events, absorbing other people's tragedies, telling the story — and then trying to live our own lives. We love, doubt, celebrate, burn out, worry about family, and keep going. And now we increasingly compete not with a colleague from another newsroom, but with an algorithm. This year we talk about resilience and limits, about support and the right to be vulnerable — and about whether we can remain media when media becomes machines.
Human as subject
The subject of every story is first and foremost a person. But we do not always remember that. When journalism rushes, we turn people into flat illustrations, faceless statistics, or stock characters — heroes or villains. The world is growing more fragile, and the fault lines within our societies are multiplying. This year we talk about how to tell stories about people responsibly — how to find common ground and build bridges rather than deepen divides.
Human as audience
We are not numbers in a dashboard or targets in an ad campaign. We are people who — amid war, exhaustion and information overload — choose whom to trust, and make decisions based on that choice every single day. As creators and as consumers, we compete with algorithms for our own attention. This year we talk about how to hold that attention without losing meaning, how to make conscious choices — and how to remain human in a media landscape that increasingly does not need us to be.

The thread that runs through everything: the invisible person
DMF started in Donetsk and Luhansk regions — and Donbas remains in its DNA. A forum born as a response to occupation and information war cannot speak about human-centricity without naming those whom the system refuses to see.
Residents of occupied territories fall out of Ukraine's media space in all three roles simultaneously: they cannot be creators, they rarely appear as subjects without being reduced to stereotypes, and they are almost entirely outside the reach of Ukrainian media. They are the invisible. How to see them, hear them, and reach them — this is a question we return to every year, in every conversation at the Forum.


The world systematically dehumanises. Media are not bystanders — they either stop this process or accelerate it. Donbas Media Forum 2026 is an honest and safe space to talk about how journalism can keep the human at the centre when everything pushes them to the margins. Because if media forget this — they will lose themselves.
Donbas Media Forum — a national forum with a regional heart.