The longest month of my career taught me how to be present – Victoria Kyolaba Namatovu
‘When I learnt of Daily Monitor’s shut down, time stopped for me. Not literally, of course. The sun still rose every morning. School runs still had to be done. Meals still needed cooking. Laundry multiplied like it had a personal vendetta against me. But professionally… everything froze. For the first time in my career, I had nowhere to rush to. That should have felt like a holiday, but it did not. If there is one thing I have learnt about myself, it is that I am spectacularly bad at uncertainty. Give me bad news and I will deal with it. Give me a problem and I will find a solution. But tell me, ‘we do not know,’ and my brain immediately opens a full-time department of worst-case scenarios.
Every night became an Olympic sport in overthinking.
Will we reopen tomorrow?
Next week?
Next month?
Will my desk still be there?
Will I still have a job?
What if…
The ‘what ifs’ were relentless. They showed up the moment I switched off the bedroom light, fully armed with imaginary disasters and absolutely no respect for sleep.
Every morning, I woke up hoping for news. Every evening I went to bed with none. It turns out uncertainty is exhausting work.
Meanwhile, my children had a completely different interpretation of events. To them, someone had finally made a sensible decision and permanently assigned Mummy to the home department.
‘Mummy…’
‘Mummy…’
‘Mummy…’
If I had earned even one shilling for every time my name was called in a single day, I would have paid school fees in advance for the next decade.
The requests never ended.
‘Mummy, where are my socks?’
‘Mummy, watch this!’
‘Mummy, he is looking at me!’
Sometimes I would walk from the sitting room to the kitchen and hear my name seven times before I even reached the fridge.
There were moments I seriously considered changing it.
And yet…
There was something strangely beautiful about being needed so completely.
For years I had complained about missing the little things because work always came first. There was always another story, another deadline, another page to approve. My children had mastered the art of hearing, ‘Just give me five minutes.’
Five minutes that often became an hour.
During this pause, I had nowhere to hide.
We played games I had forgotten existed. We laughed at things that made no sense. We argued over the TV remote, invented competitions that had no rules and therefore no winners. At the weekend, we watched movies in the middle of the afternoon because… well, why not?
I learnt new things about my children. I also learnt new things about myself. Apparently, I have far less patience than I thought. There were days I genuinely longed for the office simply because nobody there asked me where their missing shoe was.
But there were also moments I knew I would miss once normal life returned.
The random hugs.
The conversations that started with dinosaurs and somehow ended with whether Michael Jackson is still alive. I have no idea where this obsession came from.
The pure joy on their faces simply because I was there. It made me realise I had been giving my family the leftovers of my day. Whatever energy remained after work had taken the biggest share.
This unexpected pause forced me to flip that completely.
Ironically, the closure reminded me I work so hard in the first place for these three small people who genuinely believe I know where every missing sock, toy and charger in the house is.
Did I miss the newsroom?
Absolutely.
There is an energy in journalism that is hard to explain unless you have lived it. The buzz of breaking news. The pressure of deadlines. The quiet satisfaction of seeing a story come together just in time for print.
I have missed all of it.
But I would be lying if I said this unexpected chapter was not also a gift.
Life rarely gives us uninterrupted time with our children. Usually, we are too busy thinking about tomorrow to notice today quietly happening in front of us.
This time, tomorrow refused to give us any answers.
So, we were left with today.
And maybe that was the lesson.
As Daily Monitor reopens and life slowly finds its rhythm again, I am genuinely excited to be back doing what I love. I have missed the newsroom, my colleagues, and that controlled chaos that somehow always produces a newspaper.
But I am also returning with something I did not have before. The awareness that one day, the house will be quiet. One day, I will probably miss hearing my name a thousand times a day.’
I rediscovered the meaning of journalism – Carol Ataganza
I was jolted awake by a flurry of phone calls and messages from family checking to find out if I was okay. At first, I was confused as to why I was being asked that question at 3am. That is how I discovered that my office had been raided and shut down. As shocking as that was, it did not come as a surprise. For weeks, there had been signs. The days that followed became a waiting game. I thought the misunderstanding would be resolved quickly and that we would soon be back to work, but it took a month.
During that time, I learnt a lot, not least that the so-called five stages of grief are not linear, tidy, or theoretical. I moved through all of them; denial, anger, bargaining, despair, and eventually acceptance. The experience forced me to think more deeply about the profession and its place in the world.
I came to appreciate that journalism is an act of faith. Every morning, you wake up not knowing where the day will take you, but trusting that by the end of it, you will have produced something meaningful. It may seem small in the grand scheme of things, but it matters. Journalism gives voice, records history, and holds power accountable. When it is interrupted, it is not just jobs that are affected; public memory, truth, and trust are also placed at risk.
The shutdown also revealed that resilience is not only about endurance, but about clarity. In moments of uncertainty, you discover what you believe in, what you can withstand, and what you are willing to return to when the dust settles. This month in the dark refined my perspective on purpose, duty, and conviction.’
Healing in the quiet – Promise Twinamukye
The closure of Nation Media Group found me in an unusual place, physically bruised and emotionally drained. Just two days before the announcement, on a Friday night, a friend and I were attacked as we returned from a quick trip to a supermarket in Kira. It was around 11pm, and with the supermarket only a short distance from home, we took a boda boda. As we approached Kasangati Road, barely a four-minute walk from the house, the rider suddenly stopped, claiming the motorcycle had developed a mechanical problem. It had not. He was waiting for his accomplices.
Within moments, they arrived on another motorcycle, choked and assaulted us before taking everything they could. My friend’s newly bought iPhone 16 was stolen. Mine survived only because, in a split-second instinct, I threw it into a nearby bush before they reached me. After they fled, we crawled home, shaken and injured, before spending the following day at the police station.
Then, on Sunday morning, came the news that NMG had suspended its operations. The timing could not have been stranger. Part of me welcomed the unexpected pause as an opportunity to recover from the attack, but it was also accompanied by uncertainty, a feeling many contractor journalists undoubtedly shared.
Days became weeks. Instead of regaining confidence, I found myself reluctant to leave home. The trauma from the robbery lingered, the feeling of a lockdown, slightly similar to the Covid-19 lockdown one, leaving me with an unsettling sense of vulnerability that, to some extent, remains today.
Professionally, the closure created another kind of paralysis. When I contacted sources, some responded with questions rather than story leads, ‘Where will you publish this? Is your newsroom not closed? When are you reopening?’ Eventually, I stopped pitching stories altogether.
Looking back, the closure was both a gift and a challenge. It gave me time to slow down, reflect and reconnect with myself. Thanks to a strong support system, I did not have to worry about my next meal or force myself to keep working before I was ready. Yet the abrupt disruption also left many of us in limbo. Rather than immediately embracing rest or focusing on neglected priorities, we were first forced to confront confusion, uncertainty and the loss of routine that had defined our daily lives.
Geoffrey Okwera on life outside the newsroom
On June 28, 2026, I woke up to shocking online news that my workplace had been raided by a security operation. At first, I could hardly believe what I was reading. I had heard about previous incidents involving the closure of Nation Media Group, but this time, the situation felt different. It was personal. I was directly affected, and suddenly, my livelihood and professional future seemed uncertain.
As a journalist, the newsroom had become more than just a workplace. It was where I spent most of my days developing stories, attending press conferences, interviewing sources, writing articles and working against deadlines. It was a place where ideas were exchanged, stories were shaped and the public’s right to information was pursued.
But on that day, everything changed as the inability to walk into the newsroom, sit at my desk and continue with the work I had become accustomed to was difficult to process. Management advised that we exercise calm and wait for the reopening.
For me, the events of June 28 brought that reality closer to home and I began asking myself difficult questions. How long would the situation last? Would I be able to return to my workplace? What would happen to the stories I was working on? And, perhaps most importantly, what does life look like for a journalist when the newsroom suddenly becomes inaccessible?
The experience has made me appreciate the newsroom in a different way. I have come to realize that journalism is not only about writing stories or reporting events. It is also about having a professional environment where journalists can work, collaborate and serve the public.
For journalists, however, the disruption of normal newsroom operations can create uncertainty, not only for reporters but also for editors, photographers, administrative staff and many other people whose livelihoods are connected to the media industry.
Being away from that environment has been unsettling. The silence that replaces the usual newsroom conversations can feel strange. The absence of deadlines, editorial meetings and the daily rhythm of reporting create a void that is difficult to explain to someone who has never experienced it.
Yet, even in uncertainty, the responsibility of a journalist remains. The need to seek accurate information, tell people’s stories fairly and keep the public informed continues to be an important part of the profession.
What kept me alive with hope is the Nation Media Group Fellowship where we exchanged God’s messages and preached hope to each other, every day. We even had chain prayers one week from 3pm to 3pm the next day and this changed my view about the situation.
For now, I am happy that normalcy has returned and that journalists will once again be able to carry out their work in a stable and professional environment.