The good news is that the media rights group Reporters without Borders has removed Gyanendra and Prachanda from its 'Predators of Press Freedom List' this year. The bad news is that despite restoration of democracy the Nepali press is still under attack.

Press Freedom Day this week was a time to assess the 12 months since People Power II. Ever since the king's military coup in February 2005, the Nepali media fought back by playing an activist role and defending press freedom by its maximum application. Journalists were not just struggling for their own freedom but for the peoples' right to information. It was the media's unity and courage, especially on the part of colleagues in radio, that made it possible to confront dictatorship and help topple it.

Across Nepal, most journalists are breathing a sigh of relief. The iron hand of the state has been removed. But the scars of past abuse remain. It wasn't just during the king's rule that journalists had their fingernails pierced in underground torture chambers. Back in 2001-3 a democratically elected prime minister allowed the police to use emergency powers to incarcerate and beat journalists. Some spent a year-and-half in jail with daily torture and still suffer post-traumatic stress. It is a warning to us that the press can be brutally supressed even by a government operating within the parameters of constitutional guanrateed freedoms while the parliament is in session. It has happened, it can happen again.

Having survived all that, the media this year faced a new kind of challenge. Journalists in the tarai who worked fearlessly through some of the bleakest periods of the war say things are much worse now. In Lahan, Rajbiraj, Janakpur, and across the central tarai lawless bands of criminals in cahoots with various militant groups are targeting journalists. For the first time, the threat is ethnic. Journalists are being targeted because of their race, their name, where they live, their appearance.

The Federation of Nepalese Journalists (FNJ) has counted more than 100 cases of intimidation and beatings of journalists in the past year. After the madhes uprising in January, more than a dozen journalists have been internally displaced. Many still don't dare return. Various militant madhes factions regularly call reporters and threaten them with death for not printing press releases prominently enough, or for news critical of them. Ironically, one of the former-Maoist JTMM factions is lead by Jwala Singh, an ex-hack and Siraha FNJ secretary.

The country is submerged in identity politics, led sometimes by groups which no one has heard of before. Their method is to try to manipulate the media and if reporters are unwilling use threats and violence. A correspondent in Butwal was beaten with iron rods recently by janajati protesters. There is photographic evidence proving who the assailants are, and they happen to be associates of the former mayor. Yet, no action has been taken. The Rajbiraj reporter of a national daily hasn't been back to his town since January. Kantipur and Image have been repeatedly and deliberately targeted in the eastern tarai. Birganj FM was ransacked by a mob. The region between Parsa and Morang is now the most dangerous place in Nepal to be a journalist.

In this twilight zone, cross-border criminal gangs and mafia work hand-in-hand with politicians. It is often difficult to tell these days whether threats to journalists are plain extortion or political forces using muscle to get their way. Or both. Even in the capital, journalists who dare write about these gangs get death threats.

In the past year, we have been forced to re-learn the role of media during a messy political transition. How can media move beyond talking-head journalism to be a part of reform? How to dig deeper than the political quarrels of the day to explain and interpret events? The media's role is not just to be a spectator but nudge the country towards stability and progress. There are challenges: Nepal's FM radio success story is now being undermined by ownership going over to businessmen and political parties. This is already undermining the public service function of decentralised radio.

A paradigm shift in journalists' approach to their job is now needed. Reporters can't just be stenographers looking for sound bytes, obsessed with snatching juicy scoops ahead of the competition. At risk of sounding pretentious, we can say journalism needs a higher calling. By focusing on the few areas of disagreement and magnifying them to distraction we spread cynicism and despair.

We shouldn't be sugar-coating the news, but neither should we just report confrontation and conflict. Facts, if selective, can lie.

Happily, the Nepali media's struggle for freedom and independence in the past two years gives us hope. It's not just journalists who are now used to freedom, empowered by information, Nepal's citizens also are. They will not tolerate totalitarian control of any kind anymore.