I feel the need to begin with that because, almost nine years after her murder, there is something unsettling about the way journalists like me are expected to speak about her. She has become a symbol of press freedom, fight against corruption, Malta's institutional failures and the dangers of investigative journalism. Her name has become inseparable from the darkest chapter in Malta's recent history, but before she became a symbol, she was a journalist. Before she became the woman whose murder forced an entire country to look at itself, she was simply a woman doing her job.

I am a journalist too. I have a press card, a notebook, a laptop and a list of people I need to call before my deadline. I ask questions, chase people for answers and sometimes write things that make someone unhappy. Sometimes a person refuses to comment. Sometimes they tell me I have misunderstood. Sometimes they tell me that I should be looking elsewhere. That is journalism. You investigate, you question, you publish and, ideally, you go home afterwards. That last part should be the ordinary part of the job. In Malta, it is difficult for it to feel entirely ordinary.

There is always a date sitting somewhere in the back of my mind: 16 October 2017. The day a journalist left home and never returned. The day a car bomb killed Daphne Caruana Galizia and changed the way an entire generation of Maltese journalists understood the risks attached to asking difficult questions.

Now, almost nine years later, Yorgen Fenech has been acquitted of the charges relating to her murder. The eight-to-one verdict must be respected. If I believe in journalism, in institutions and in the rule of law, I cannot suddenly abandon those principles because I dislike the outcome. Fenech was acquitted, and he must be treated as not guilty of the charges he faced.

But respecting a verdict does not mean pretending that everything surrounding Daphne's murder has been resolved. Five people have been convicted for roles in the killing, yet following Fenech's acquittal, nobody has as yet been found guilty of commissioning the assassination. Almost nine years later, the central question remains unanswered: who ultimately wanted Daphne Caruana Galizia dead? That is not an abstract question to me. It is personal in a way that I wish it was not, because I am one of the journalists who came after her.

Perhaps that is why the question of whether journalists are discouraged feels so strange when politicians raise it. Of course journalists are discouraged. What exactly did we think was going to happen? You cannot tell an entire generation that one of its own was murdered and then act surprised when that generation understands the risks. You cannot tell young journalists to investigate corruption, follow the money, question politicians and expose wrongdoing while showing them what happened to the woman who spent years doing precisely that. You cannot tell us that journalism is essential to democracy while expecting us to pretend that the fate of the journalist who became the country's most powerful example of investigative reporting has no bearing on how safe we feel.

The evidence shows that this fear is not simply something journalists have imagined. Malta is currently ranked 67th out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders' 2026 World Press Freedom Index, with an overall score of 61.44 and a political indicator score of just 42.63. Those numbers do not mean Malta is one of the world's worst places to be a journalist and pretending that it is would be dishonest. But they also do not allow us to congratulate ourselves and declare the problem solved. Behind every ranking is a person who has to decide whether a story is worth pursuing, whether a source can be trusted, whether a powerful individual will retaliate, and whether the institution that is supposed to protect them will actually do so.

The independent public inquiry into Daphne's murder made that concern even harder to dismiss. Its findings ran to 437 pages and concluded that the Maltese state had to bear responsibility for creating an atmosphere of impunity in which her assassination could take place. It found that the evidence it heard led to the conclusion that Daphne's assassination was intrinsically or directly linked to her investigative work. In other words, the connection between Daphne and her journalism was not some convenient narrative invented by journalists after her death. It was part of the conclusions of an independent inquiry into the circumstances that surrounded it.

That is why the political conversation of the past few days has been so difficult to follow. Joseph Muscat has said he is perplexed by Fenech's acquittal while defending his handling of the case and arguing that the rule of law must be respected. Robert Abela has pushed responsibility for the public inquiry back towards Muscat, arguing that the former prime minister must answer for decisions taken under his government. Alex Borg, meanwhile, has criticised the failure to properly implement the inquiry's recommendations and called for stronger protections for journalists. They have all found different ways of talking about responsibility, but from where I am sitting, there is a more immediate question: who is responsible for making journalists like me feel safe enough to do our jobs?

I do not mean politically safe. I mean safe, literally. When I investigate someone powerful, I should be thinking about whether I have enough evidence, whether I have contacted everyone involved, and whether every sentence can withstand scrutiny. I should be worrying about my sources, my facts and my deadline. I should not have to wonder whether asking one more question will make somebody decide that I have become a problem. That is why calls for stronger protections for journalists cannot simply become another point scored in a political argument. They should be treated as a basic requirement of a functioning democracy.

Journalists do not need politicians to applaud them after the fact. We need institutions that protect us while we are doing the work. We need safeguards against intimidation and legal harassment. We need to know that investigating somebody with money, influence or political connections will not leave us personally exposed simply because we have asked a question that somebody did not want answered. We need protection, not praise.

Politicians, after all, love courageous journalists in retrospect. They love Daphne when they are standing beside a memorial, commemorating her life and promising that what happened to her must never happen again. They love the idea of investigative journalism when it exposes somebody else's corruption. But what happens when the journalist is standing outside their own door? What happens when the questions concern their own government, their own decisions, their own political allies or their own failures? That is when press freedom is actually tested.

That is also why the recent comments by Culture Minister Malcolm Paul Agius Galea were so difficult to hear. The minister suggested that it was not clear whether Daphne had been murdered because she was a journalist, before later apologising and saying politicians need to be careful with their words. But the problem was never simply the wording. The problem was what those words appeared to question. If an independent public inquiry has concluded that Daphne's assassination was intrinsically or directly linked to her investigative work, then asking whether her journalism was connected to her murder is not some harmless exercise in semantics. It risks weakening the very lesson that her assassination was supposed to teach us.

And that lesson was not that journalists should simply be more careful. It was that institutions should have protected them.

I do not want to become Daphne. I do not want a street named after me, a memorial erected in my name or politicians standing beside my photograph after my death explaining how much they valued my work. I do not want to become a symbol of press freedom because I am no longer here to practise it. I want to come home after work. I want to finish my article, complain about my deadline, argue with my editor over a headline, and write something that makes a minister angry before going for coffee afterwards. I want journalism to be ordinary. That should not be an unreasonable demand.

Yet there is something about being a young woman working in journalism in Malta that makes the phrase "be careful" carry a different weight. Be careful with what you publish. Be careful who you accuse. Be careful who you anger. Be careful who you trust. We are told to be careful because everyone knows what happened to Daphne. But if the answer to the dangers facing journalists is simply that journalists should learn to avoid danger, then we have misunderstood the problem entirely. The responsibility cannot be placed solely on the person asking the questions. The institutions around them have to make it possible for those questions to be asked.

This is where the political arguments between Muscat, Abela and Borg ultimately become secondary to something much bigger. They can argue over who should answer for the public inquiry. They can defend decisions taken years ago. They can point backwards at previous administrations and forward towards reforms still to come. But journalists are still going to work tomorrow morning. We will still have to decide whether to pursue the story, whether to call the source, whether to knock on the door, and whether to publish. We will still be the ones standing on the other side of the question when the person with power does not like what we are asking.

Daphne does not get to do that anymore. She does not get to defend her reporting, explain her methods or challenge the politicians now arguing about her legacy. She does not get to ask why, almost nine years later, Malta is still debating who should answer for what happened. The living get microphones; the dead get commemorations. And somewhere between the two, the questions remain.

Who knew? Who failed to act? What was ignored? What was missed? What did the State know? Who benefited from the culture of impunity? And ultimately, who wanted Daphne Caruana Galizia dead?

I am not Daphne, and I do not want to be. But I am a journalist, and that distinction matters. The point is not that every journalist who followed her must become another fearless figure willing to sacrifice everything for a story. The point is that no journalist should have to. We should not need martyrs to prove that press freedom exists. We should not need murdered journalists to remind governments why journalism matters. We should not need another tragedy before politicians decide that protection, institutional reform and accountability are urgent.

The trial may be over, but the questions are not. Tomorrow morning, journalists like me will still open our laptops, pick up our phones, make our calls and start asking them. I am not Daphne, and I should never have to be. But if Malta really means what it says when it talks about press freedom, then the woman sitting at the next desk should not have to wonder whether asking the wrong question could one day cost her everything.

That is not courage. That is a failure of a democracy.

And after almost nine years, Malta has had more than enough time to know the difference.