In a recent interview, Shafiqul Alam–the former Bangladesh bureau chief of Agence France-Presse and now press secretary to the Chief Adviser of the interim government–called the internet shutdown of July last year the proudest moment of his journalistic career.

At first blush, the claim may sound odd. After all, how could a blackout–an act of state censorship that silenced an entire nation–be remembered with pride by any journalist worth their salt?

But Shafiqul has a good reason. While the country was plunged into a digital silence, with tens of millions stripped of the means to communicate or report, his AFP office in Dhaka remained one of the few islands still online.

And in a rare, defiant act of solidarity, he opened his newsroom’s doors to fellow journalists. They came with photos smuggled out of protests, handwritten dispatches, and memory cards full of raw footage.

Through that single connection, the outside world saw what was really happening on the ground.

That act deserves recognition not only for the courage but also for the moment of clarity it brought to Bangladesh’s fractured media landscape.

Looking back, I’ve come to realize that while Shafiqul’s AFP office was a lifeline to the global press, the crisis also offered an unexpected jolt of purpose to a sector many had already written off as dying: our own local print journalism.

With television reduced to parroting official lines and online portals rendered useless without access to the web, print newspapers were suddenly–perhaps for the last time–indispensable.

Cut off from everything else, the morning paper became the only reliable window to the truth for many educated Bangladeshis. In those pages, journalism did what it was supposed to do: inform, question, document.

I speak from experience. As a reporter for one of the country’s major English dailies, I’m used to my work vanishing into the void–glanced at, maybe skimmed, often forgotten. Rarely do readers write back. Rarer still is the colleague who offers a thoughtful critique.

We are, most of the time, publishing into an echo chamber of unread links and digital exhaustion.

But during the blackout, people were reading. Not scrolling, not doom-clicking–reading. Word for word.

I received more feedback–real, considered feedback–during those few dark days than in years of peacetime reporting. It was as if people, starved of noise, were finally able to hear.

The irony is painful. It took a shutdown to remind us of what journalism can be when it’s forced to slow down and focus. It also exposed the fundamental fragility of our information systems–how easily truth can be choked off, how quickly convenience becomes a vulnerability.

Old school lessons form the blackout

So yes, maybe it was a proud moment. Not because of the blackout itself, but because of how some journalists responded to it. Shafiqul Alam shared his bandwidth. Print reporters filled the void.

We rediscovered, briefly, the value of clarity over speed, of substance over signal.

The lesson for the rest of us? Don’t wait for the next blackout to value the kind of journalism that endures. When the internet goes dark, only the truth still matters.

In hindsight, now that I think, I believeI didn’t expect people to read my stories–certainly not in the middle of a nationwide internet blackout. And yet, during those tense, silenced days in July 2024, something strange happened. People began calling me.

Acquaintances quoted my reporting back to me. Strangers mentioned articles I’d written just days earlier.

For a print journalist in Bangladesh, that kind of engagement is almost unheard of. In an era where stories are skimmed, headlines misread, and attention spans hijacked by algorithmic chaos, we rarely know if our work actually reaches anyone.

It was a powerful, if sobering, revelation: when stripped of distraction, words matter. When no longer buried beneath the rubble of social media noise, journalism can inform. It can move. It can last.

But let me not romanticize it. Reporting under a communications shutdown was not some nostalgic return to simpler times–it was hell.

Without internet access, even the most basic tasks became uphill battles. You couldn’t Google a name, check a statistic, confirm the spelling of a remote village.

Everything had to be verified in person, on foot, often under curfew. Movement across Dhaka became a gauntlet of military checkpoints. Flashing a press card was no guarantee; we were stopped, searched, and questioned–sometimes politely, sometimes not.

And then came the real challenge: publishing.

There was no emailing your copy to the desk, no real-time collaboration with editors, no cloud backups. Calling a sub-editor to dictate a quote was too risky–lines were monitored, and a single misheard word could spark unintended consequences.

So we crossed the city, dodging curfew enforcement, just to sit down at a newsroom terminal, type out our reports in Word, and push them to the in-house server—hoping they made it to print before dawn.

Every line had to be right the first time. There was no safety net, no search bar, no fact-checking bot. Just our notes, our memory, and whatever sense of duty hadn’t yet been worn down by exhaustion and fear.

But that’s exactly what gave those stories their weight.

Now, a year later, that work has become more than just reportage—it’s record. It’s the foundation on which international organizations, human rights observers, and historical memory itself now depend.

If we hadn’t shown up–if we hadn’t fought to print what we saw—those days might have vanished without trace.

That, perhaps, is the quiet legacy of the blackout. It reminded us that journalism doesn’t need the internet to matter. It just needs journalists willing to do the work–the hard, unglamorous, sometimes dangerous work–of chasing the truth anyway.

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Jannatul Naym Pieal is a journalist based in Dhaka