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We are back with our flagship FO Exclusive, which examines the most important issues, events and trends of the last 30 or so days on the last Wednesday of the month. Please sign up here to see Editor-in-Chief Atul Singh and retired CIA officer Glenn Carle make sense of the world. You can check out previous episodes of our FO Exclusive on YouTube. Dear FO° Community, As we wrap up the first month of the new year, we would like to thank our readers, authors, editors, partners and donors for supporting Fair Observer in 2025. We could not have continued our important work without you. To show you just how important your support has been, we would like to share our top achievements of 2025 and some goals for 2026. Our biggest milestones Our educational outreach expanded significantly in 2025. Last year, Roberta Campani began the Sunday Newsletter group. For those who do not know Roberta, she is in charge of Fair Observer’s communications and outreach. Her group gave those in our Young Editors Training Program the opportunity to focus on important issues and explain them to our global audience. In 2025, our Sunday Newsletter won appreciation from authors, professors, diplomats and many of our readers.
Assistant editors Farhang Faraydoon Namdar, Casey Herrmann and Liam Roman — who has been with Fair Observer for over two years — volunteered to write the Sunday Newsletters. These authors live on both the West and East Coasts (yes, I mean only the US for now), and you can explore their work below.
Our community outreach in 2025 also brought in many interesting authors into the fold. Olawole Fajusigbe, a legal practitioner in Lagos, examined the rise in Nigeria’s mass kidnappings and how the country’s structural shortcomings contribute to this rise. Priya Acharya, a high school student in New York, examined the demand of Rapa Nui natives for the return of Hoa Hakananai’a, a venerated statue taken by the British from their island in 1868. In a nuanced analysis, she was able to see merits in the arguments of both the Rapa Nui and the British Museum. Tell me where else you would find such widely different authors in the same publication. Both are a testament to us fulfilling our mission of publishing perspectives from around the world and bringing diverse voices together.
Our YouTube presence also increased significantly in 2025. For many of our authors, English is a second or third language. Writing an article is difficult for them, but interviewing with us is far easier. Doing video interviews has broadened both our coverage and our reach. Our interviews have been watched by students and professors, investors and ambassadors, lawyers and generals, highlighting our broad reach. As you can see, Fair Observer fosters a truly global discourse.
In addition to our videos, Fair Observer’s podcasts — FO° Podcasts and The Dialectic — have taken off. The Dialectic, the flagship podcast hosted by Editor-in-Chief Atul Singh and retired CIA officer Glenn Carle, saw a massive increase in listeners in 2025. The Dialectic has led to healthy debates amongst our readers as well as Fair Observer’s own team. In particular, Atul and Glenn’s first podcast in their trilogy on Europe had punchy counterpoints by Atul’s former chief of staff, Anton Schauble, and Chief Strategy Officer Peter Isackson.
FO° Podcasts, a different kettle of fish from The Dialectic, aims to have interesting conversations with interesting people. Guests generally record with a host in person. In 2025, Atul sat down with Ankit Jain, a voting rights attorney and shadow senator of Washington, DC, on US President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops in DC. You can listen to it here:
As with our online community, Fair Observer’s offline community has grown tremendously. Last year, we hosted 14 FO° Meetups, an increase from the ten events we hosted in 2024. Our meetups have evolved from more casual conversations to insightful round table discussions on important issues such as authoritarianism in the 21st century and the current crisis in journalism. Our meetups are invariably international and intergenerational and have fostered a real sense of community in Washington, DC, and New York City. In a world of echo chambers, we are one of the few institutions with the ability to convene a diverse set of people who can still hold a conversation without descending into disharmony. We have expanded our team Our expanding community and operations called for more hands on deck. In 2025, three new members joined the team full time. We welcomed Rohan Khattar Singh as our social media manager and YouTube producer. It is thanks to him that our social media presence has blossomed. Rohan has conducted many interviews with professionals, politicians and professors. Laura Pavon, a young and upcoming academic, joined as a contributing editor and published several thoughtful pieces in 2025.
Kaitlyn Diana first joined as an Associate Editor and later became the Editorial Chief of Staff to Atul. She has upheld Fair Observer’s editorial and publishing standards diligently. Her professionalism is top-notch, and she has handled the increased volume of submissions with aplomb.
Lee Thompson-Kolar deserves a shout-out as well for his sterling work over the years. Though young, he is now an old hand at Fair Observer. In 2025, he worked endless hours with Atul and others to produce world-class timelines that have impressed no less a figure than the eminent educator Esther Wojcicki, who is also our adviser.
Our growing team is evidence that Fair Observer continues to support, mentor and educate authors and editors of the next generation. As young citizens of the world, Rohan, Laura, Kaitlyn and Lee have introduced fresher perspectives to Fair Observer. They have also given us new ideas and renewed energy, and we aim to build on this in 2026. Why our mission matters more than ever Finally, I want to make a personal pitch on why we matter more than ever. On January 14, The Washington Post (WaPo) published an op-ed authored by its editorial board: “Trump wants $1.5 trillion for defense. What a bargain.” It went on to justify Trump’s increased defense budget, claiming that spending it immediately would be the White House’s best option because the US must beat China. The worthies who run this august institution gave us no counterperspective, nor did they explore any other scenarios — even making defense spending less wasteful or improving innovation did not make the cut. WaPo clearly thinks that throwing more money at defense is the need of the hour, but I wonder how we can keep spending money when our debt has crossed $37 trillion. SOURCE: Opinion | Trump’s welcome push for $1.5 trillion defense spending – The Washington Post Note that the above op-ed was published by WaPo’s editorial board. You will never find Fair Observer publishing an op-ed like the one above. Famously and infamously, we are a fractious bunch. We debate, we discuss and we disagree. Atul may advocate more military action sometimes, but rest assured, Peter Isackson will counter. Fair Observer does not have a party line. Note, we do not advocate a higher defense budget in a cavalier manner. And if we did, I would not be here. We believe in viewing the world through many prisms. We believe in fact-based, well-reasoned discourse in an age of filter bubbles and echo chambers. Take the following two pieces by Andrew Morrow and Peter as an example. Both write about the same event — the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA — but provide differing analyses that contradict yet complement each other.
As more and more newsrooms buy into polarization and paywalls, informative and accessible news media has become a rare commodity. Fair Observer is one cure for journalism’s downward spiral, and we will need your continued support in 2026. Our goals for 2026 Despite all the work we have done, there’s still much to do. Increasing Fair Observer’s visibility is our top priority for 2026. We have to reach more people to counter polarization. This means continuing to improve and expand our outreach as well as publishing even more perspectives from around the world. The rise of ChatGPT, Google Gemini and other AI tools has hit journalism hard. People do not find us easily via Google or any of these AI tools. Bert Kelley, an eminent lawyer and one of our longtime supporters, found that Leonardo Vivas was one of the few who forecast Nicolás Maduro’s capture on December 14, 2025. When Bert searched Google AI for media that predicted an American action against Venezuela correctly, Fair Observer failed to show up. Bert very kindly called this an “extraordinary accomplishment,” but it has gone largely unnoticed. We will work in 2026 to make sure that more people know of our work and join our community.
We are organizing events in more cities around the US in the first half of the year. One of our supporters is hosting our San Francisco Bay Area community at her home in February. Others have offered to do so in cities such as Boston and Philadelphia. We will give a big push to meetups, discussions and even debates in 2026. We are doubling down on our Young Editors Training Program. We will expand the program and formalize it this year. Applications are open now, and we would be delighted to hear from curious young minds. It is time for me, to echo Atul, to bid adieu. Before I go, I want to share with you that I have joined Fair Observer instead of applying to WaPo or Fox Studios because I believe in journalistic integrity, and I want to make a difference. I very much look forward to hearing from you and to your continued support in 2026. My warmest regards, Cheyenne Torres Operational Chief of Staff Fair Observer How can you support us?
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