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Journalists from all over the world gathered again this year at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia to discuss some of the news industry’s most crucial issues in a time of upheaval. The Reuters Institute’s editorial team curated some of the festival’s highlights in this piece. You’ll find cool projects, several takeaways and quotes that made us think – but not the name of the person who was in everyone’s minds. We’ll keep updating the article in the next few days.
Stuff we learnt
1. Everyone is building AI summaries. But those doing it well are spending lots of time with human editors to truly understand their job. The panel on evaluating and integrating AI in newsrooms, moderated by our colleague Felix Simon, placed a spotlight on AI experiments from large newsrooms. Chris Moran from the Guardian, Rubina Madan Fillion from the New York Times and Tess Jeffers from the Wall Street Journal explained how they have been leading AI initiatives, especially around summarisation tools.
The most critical challenge they all faced was adjusting their outputs to reach the quality expected from these organisations. “Fine-tuning takes a lot of human work,” says Moran. “In some ways, we were trying to teach the machine news-sense.”
All the speakers stressed that fine-tuning these models required the input of working journalists and editors, who were asked to talk through exactly how they make editorial judgements. Fillion shared that this challenge required distilling qualitative editorial judgement into quantitative values the model could use.
One way the New York Times tested this was by putting the LLMs through a line-editing exercise designed for prospective editors, and working with editors for hours to evaluate the output. “The tech is easy,” echoed Tess Jeffers. “What’s new is that the newsroom is in the workflow and responsible for saying if something is a quality output that passes editorial judgement and is good enough to go on the site.”
Sometimes, the extra work required of journalists may not be worth it. Moran shared how a project to automate liveblog summaries was ultimately scrapped because the work of checking the outputs for mistakes would be more onerous for journalists than writing these summaries themselves. A second reason was that, even though the fine-tuning brought the tool closer to human ‘news judgement’, the team realised the way it made decisions was still unclear, unpredictable at scale and not rooted in context in the same way a human’s would be. | Watch
- Read a summary of our recent event on AI and the future of news
2. Diversify your revenue and work with other newsrooms if you’ve been hit by the USAID cuts. The impact of the cuts to US media development funding is being felt by news organisations and was discussed at length in Perugia this year. Our Hungarian alumnus Peter Erdelyi estimated that 50% of global public funding is now largely gone. Panellists affected by these cuts said that they are leaving a gap that will be difficult to fill, as they will be competing for funding with initiatives on health, science and education.
Panellists called newsrooms to diversify their revenue streams and to collaborate with each other. Initiatives like creating joint journalism networks, co-funding of expensive projects, and collective advocacy were mentioned as ways to move forward in this post-USAID journalism ecosystem. “Journalism has always been competitive, not collaborative. Now we are being asked to work in a radically collaborative way. When the USAID information news landed, I thought that maybe this is a moment for mutual aid and for radical collaboration,” said Eliza Anyangwe, editor-in-chief of The Fuller Project. | Watch
- Read our piece on the impact of the USAID cuts on journalism
3. If you are building your own news startup, don’t hesitate to ask for help. Starting a news business can be challenging for journalists. In a talk about journalists as founders, founders shared openly and honestly the challenges they’ve faced, from learning ‘founders’ language’ to appealing to potential funders, and putting together material for grant applications. One thing they all agreed on was the need to ask for help when starting out, whether that’s by hiring someone with experience, looking for free advice from nonprofits or applying for a fellowship.
“There are so many things I had in my mind that I had to put on paper that somebody forced me to. I’m so grateful. It keeps me accountable to all the things I wanted to do,” said Maritza Felix from Conecta Arizona.
Another issue the panellists addressed was how they felt about no longer actively reporting. Award-winning investigative journalist Pavla Holcová from Investigatecz.com still wants to be a reporter, and spoke about the tension she feels between going back to their vocation and not wanting to abandon the outlet she started. Martin Kotynek from Media Forward Fund said he still considered himself a journalist, and that founding a new organisation also takes reporting skills. | Watch
4. Building a local news organisation has never been cheaper – but it takes discipline to focus on what matters to audiences. A panel moderated by Jane Martinson looked at the influence of media ownership on editorial decisions, a topic at the forefront right now after the Washington Post’s billionaire owner Jeff Bezos prevented his newspaper from endorsing Kamala Harris.
“There’s been an epochal collapse for local journalism. It used to be a very lucrative business. But many newspapers are now in the hands of owners that don’t care about the product,” said Joshi Herrmann, founder of Mill Media. This startup was launched as a Manchester-focused Substack newsletter and now has outposts in London, Glasgow, Sheffield, Liverpool and Birmingham. Four of these six sites are now profitable, with the ones in London and Glasgow, which launched recently, still in an investment phase.
“I started the company on my own: one journalist doing one story per week; now we are 20 journalists producing high-quality and we are sustainable,” Herrmann said. “Relying on large grants wouldn’t be good. When we raised capital, the kind of investing we got was from people who cared about journalism. There are a lot of people out there willing to pay for high-quality journalism, and now it is possible to produce it with much lower costs.” | Watch
- Read our piece on journalists’ owned newspapers
5. Meta’s U-turn has exacerbated the threats against global fact-checkers. Harassed by hyper-partisan voices and political leaders, fact-checkers see themselves in a precarious position after Meta’s decision to shut down its fact-checking programme and Mark Zuckerberg’s baseless accusations of bias. Several fact-checkers were in Perugia this year, and some discussed this dangerous ecosystem in a panel you can watch here.
Speakers explained how their work is being discredited by government officials and tech oligarchs that sow mistrust amongst audiences for political or financial gain. “My wish for 2025 was for me to talk less about harassment and censorship, and more about the good journalism that we do,” said Ana Brakus, from Croatia’s Faktograf. “Sadly, the events that have occurred in the US have brought the levels of harassment and narratives of so-called censorship to a whole new level and we have our tech bros to thank for that.”
Brakus also stressed that these threats were not a spontaneous phenomenon but the result of sophisticated information operations: “The attacks we are facing are coordinated and the intention behind them is not just to disrespect our work but to sow mistrust and achieve a political goal.”
Ed Bice, from the tech non-profit Meedan, pointed out that the modern fact-checking ecosystem was built in response to a world where most of the population has access to mobile devices and where the information ecosystem is decentralised. “It should be the work of these platforms that are making multi-billion dollar profits to support this ecosystem, and that’s what they did for a period of six years or so,” Bice said. | Watch
- Read our piece on Meta’s break with fact-checking
6. You can find positive and fun climate stories – if you know where to look for them. In a panel looking at the intersection of climate and conflict, journalists discussed how to identify climate stories that are positive or interesting to readers. Freelancer Nithin Coca suggested that going down to the local level can unearth these kinds of stories. “There are really interesting efforts to do local energy democracy projects where people are building democratically-managed energy systems,” he said.
Coca also shared a project that retrained Japanese farmers to grow fruit without the use of carbon-intensive greenhouses and saved 10% in carbon emissions. “What is the way someone is approaching a problem from a unique perspective that has data and science to back that up? That’s interesting,” he said.
Isobel Cockerell from Coda Story shared a fun story that they published about a group of guerrilla billionaires illegally reintroducing beavers to parts of Europe to rewild the land. She said it was “probably the most successful story I’ve ever done and got translated into many languages.” | Watch
- Check out the work of our Oxford Climate Journalism Network
7. Journalists from Lebanon and Ukraine opened up about the toll the war is taking on them. Multiple panels discussed the reporting challenges posed by the ongoing conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine. In Ukraine, more than three years after the war started, media managers explained how they’ve adapted to survive. Rosana Tuzhanska from Varosh Media said that the situation of Ukrainian local outlets has become even fraughter due to the loss of US funding and the uncertainty about foreign funding. Up to 80% of her own outlet’s funding comes from grants.
“We have a lot of conversations about exhaustion, risks and fears. Care and support are in our DNA, but I don’t want this to become a trap for me as a manage,” Tuzhanska said. “It is not easy to work in the Ukrainian reality. It is not normal, but it is real. We try to find a way to continue being productive even in this situation,”
In Gaza, which is now the deadliest conflict on record for journalists, Palestinian reporters continue to report from the ground for local and global news organisations. AFP global news director Phil Chetwynd hosted this poignant conversation with Lebanese AFP photojournalist Christina Assi, who nearly died when she was hit by Israeli tank fire while reporting in southern Lebanon in October 2023. The attack killed Assi’s Reuters colleague Issam Abdallah.
“As journalists we didn’t realise this was going to be a systematic attack against those who document and seek truth,” Assi said. “Regimes in general fear journalists because they are going to expose their impunity.” | Watch
8. Journalists from Israel and Ukraine are grappling with censorship – and self-censorship. Several panellists stressed that many Israeli news organisations have turned a blind eye to some of the worst crimes of the country’s army. Oren Persico, staff writer at the Israeli media watchdog The Seventh Eye, said that Israeli media has failed at covering the war in Gaza: “They have created a dome of ignorance surrounding society,” he said. “It is such a complete failure of the profession.”
But not every news organisation in Israel is behaving in the same way. A panel moderated by Vivian Schiller featured investigative journalists Milan Czerny from Shomrim and Omer Benjakob from Haaretz, who have exposed government corruption and abuses by the country’s armed forces.
Both discussed the challenges posed by operating under military censorship, how army chiefs often broke their own rules by publishing “war porn” on their social media channels, and how they’ve managed to put their stories in the public domain despite official bans.
Benjakob explained how the army tried to kill this story about a fake Strava account exposing sensitive information about Israeli military bases. Czerny spoke openly about how he and his colleagues grappled with self-censorship, especially right after Hamas’ terror attacks. “I don’t think we could have published the piece on unruly behaviour from soldiers’ social media videos on the day after October 7,” he said. “It took some time for me and for society to be able to hear these kinds of stories.”
Olga Rudenko from the Kyiv Independent also shared her own experience with censorship and self-censorship during the war. “The formal rules haven’t changed much, but how they are applied has changed,” she said. “We don’t have a formal body that reviews things. But there are actors that put pressure informally asking to take something down, often for vague reasons. As a journalist, your instinct is not to trust people in government, You think they are trying to cover up their asses. But maybe it’s not that and I have to take a calculated risk every time this happens.”
9. Don’t underestimate the power of humour in journalism – especially in dark times. Several panels covered the power of humour to engage audiences – especially in the face of news fatigue and when dealing with complex topics.
Youtuber Adam Levy, known as Climate Adam, explains how he frames his videos on this crucial topic: “I try to think: if I was a viewer who didn’t care about climate change and I just stumbled across this video, what would be the things which would keep me watching regardless?” His own answer was often humour.
A panel on the power of editorial cartoons also highlighted how drawings can tap into comedic tools like exaggeration and contrast to cut through: “Editorial cartoons allow you take a complex political reality and condense it down into this one image – and the simpler you can make the image, the more impact your cartoon usually has,” said Dutch editorial cartoonist Tjeerd Royaards. Francophone journalist David Castello-Lopes noted that using humour in your reporting doesn’t mean compromising accuracy: “You can take things that are 100% true and well-researched and fact-checked – and [use those facts to] make people laugh.” | Watch
Cool projects
A news service for news avoiders. Svenska Dagbladet’s Inanna Lallerstedt spoke about a new standalone service from her newspaper that’s specifically designed to offer audience members a ‘moderate level’ of news. The product, Kompakt, has a newsfeed that can be filtered according to user preferences, with an option named ‘tired of the news’ that only offers constructive stories. Other features are a ‘One topic, one minute’ section with explainers, and ‘Slide into an expert’s DMs’, with Q&As with experts on important topics.
- How did it go? The experiment has been successful, Lallerstedt said, with 50,000 signups in one and a half years. More than half of those users are completely new to Svenska Dagbladet. “It’s so good for us to challenge old assumptions, it’s hard but it’s also changing our other editorial products. It’s taught us how to work in new ways,” she said. | Watch
A new life for a storied news brand. Digital Editor Basia Cummings offered quite a few details about the imminent relaunch of the British newspaper the Observer as digital news brand, recently bought by online news startup Tortoise Media. Cummings said she and her colleagues at Tortoise think they see many similarities between both brands and can offer things the Observer didn’t currently have. “We are now the custodians of this title and we will focus on reaching younger readers that would see it into the future,” she said.
Cummings explained that no investor, including Tortoise’s founder James Harding, has a controlling stake at the Observer, which will relaunch on 27 April with a brand new website, a new slate of audio products and a new dedicated commercial team. It’ll be free for the first few weeks and it’ll ask people to pay for its journalism at some point. “We are very inspired by the success of The Atlantic and others,” she said. “We are not here to make a lot of money. We are here to make a small amount of money but for a very long time.” | Watch
A Ghanaian news site building sustainability through credibility. The Fourth Estate is an investigative news site supported by the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA). Sulemana Braimah of the MFWA shared examples of Fourth Estate stories, including one which led to the cancellation of a $100 million fraudulent government contract and another about non-compliance with asset registry laws that led to hundreds of public officials declaring their assets. The impact of stories like these, he said, has led to people expressing support by providing the organisation with funding or pro bono services.
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A key quote: Braimah said the Fourth Estate’s relatively small size made it necessary to focus only on what’s important: “If you have fewer resources, you don’t have to be dictated to by the desires of others who want lots of stories with no context or analysis.” | Watch
An AI tool to generate story ideas. Swedish Radio’s Josef El Mahdi spoke about ‘Angle Buddy,’ a new internal tool that’s being tested across their newsrooms. Journalists can insert it on an existing news story and it will propose new angles for other stories that are in line with the user needs model. For example, ‘I want to understand’ or ‘I want a break’.
- A key quote: “For us it’s a way of turning strategy into action and reaching a big audience, especially on our digital platforms,” El Mahdi said. | Watch
An insurance policy for investigative journalists. In a panel on protecting journalists’ safety, Paul Radu, co-founder of OCCRP, pointed to Reporters Shield, a membership organisation that defends journalists from increasing legal threats like SLAPPs. Member newsrooms pay a small annual fee. In return, they get access to training and legal defence – the idea is to build a communal defence pot for journalists, to protect each other from being sued into silence. | Watch
- Read our interview with New York Times‘ investigative editor David Enrich, who’s just published a book on a legal crusade against investigative journalism in the United States
A collaboration between journalists and influencers. Earth Shorts, a pilot program by Internews’ Earth Journalism Network, connected journalists with influencers in the Philippines, offering social media creators training in journalistic skills, including accuracy and attribution, and encouraging them to leverage their audience and engagement to take a climate angle with their storytelling.
- A key quote: “There’s a stigma about influencers that journalists often hold: that influencers don’t want to be ethical news providers. This isn’t true – there is a large appetite for influencers to gain these sorts of skills,” said Hannah Bernstein from Internews. | Watch
A joint venture for collaboration. Sharon Moshavi from the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) spoke about a new nonprofit they are establishing with Code for Africa (CfA) to implement joint initiatives that combine CfA’s technical expertise with ICFJ’s global network.
- A key quote: “It does not only help with cost saving in this environment but we think we’ll be helping news providers to co-create things that cut across AI, forensic analysis, safety and security tools – all those things that are incredibly expensive and newsrooms often can’t do alone,” Moshavi explained.| Watch
Figures speakers shared
On news deserts. Tim Franklin from Northwestern University said there are more than 200 local news desert counties in the United States and 279 counties at risk of becoming news deserts. Over 50 million people live in counties with limited local news in the country. | Watch
On news products. Our own Nic Newman presented striking figures from our survey of media leaders in 2021: only 26% agreed that the best ideas came from the top leadership with many thinking they came from audience and data insights (74%), multi-disciplinary teams (68%), and learning from other media companies (48%). | Watch | Read the report
On lifestyle content. Angela Pacienza from the Globe and Mail explained how they redesigned their home page, adding a new type of lifestyle content focused on questions that matter most to people in their daily lives. Open rates for push notifications are 10% for this type of content, compared to 5% for the rest of the website’s output, she said. Year over year page views are up 305% for this type of content, and 73% month over month. Unique visitors are also up 74% year on year.
On trust in local news. Trust in news is declining, but not at the same rate for local news, said our Director of Research, Richard Fletcher. “When we look at the list of the most trusted outlets in each country, local is often quite near the top. This is true for the US, the UK, France, and Spain.” | Watch
On Bluesky. The United States, the UK, Canada, Brazil and Japan are the top five countries in terms of Bluesky users, said Emily Liu, Head of Special Projects at the platform, which now has more than 36 million people. | Watch
On democratic backsliding. Steffan Lindberg from the V-Dem Institute said that three out of four people in the world live in countries that are not democratic. That constitutes a total of 72% of people who live in autocratic regimes today versus 49% in 2004. According to Lindberg, media freedom has been attacked and undermined in 44 countries in the last 10 years. | Watch
Quotes that made us think
Independent journalist Sophia Smith Galer on the rise of vertical video: “When I started making content on Instagram and TikTok, it was about reaching young people. But that has changed. For me now, it’s about a broad digital audience as the age of those audiences has changed. Journalists and non-media affiliated content creators have been going viral for a long time. That does not mean algorithms are not hostile to the values of newsrooms. But some people, myself included, try to game the algorithms and marry them to editorial standards.” | Watch Sophia’s conversation with our Director, Mitali Mukherjee
AP executive editor Julie Pace on distrust towards news media: “Some of it is what’s happening outside the media. Very powerful people have launched sustained attacks on the media, and people now compare what we do with other inputs. Some of those outputs are positive, but others spread misinformation. In that soup, there is a lack of trust that has become very embedded. But at the AP, we take any criticism very seriously. There’s nothing wrong with coming to the conclusion that we didn’t handle something in the right way. There are fraught topics and stories where adjectives are not your friend.” | Watch
- Read this chapter from our Digital News Report 2024 on how audiences think about trust in news
Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists, on the need to create emergency visa schemes for journalists: “A country might set up visa schemes for Ukrainians or Russians or Afghans. But this misses places where something deteriorates rapidly or when a particular journalist from a particular country, let’s say Cameroon, really needs to get out, but there isn’t a crisis generally in the country. That’s why we’re calling for a standing mechanism. Journalists are often targeted very rapidly, and they need to get out very rapidly. Systems are slow, bureaucratic and expensive.” | Read
- Read our work on journalism in exile
Our Director of Research, Richard Fletcher, on the crisis of local news: “People are getting less news, and this has hit local news particularly hard. It’s partly about digitalisation and the decline of traditional media. When we ask people where they think the best source for local information is, they often say platforms now for things like local activities or things going on in their area. Not necessarily for local politics, but for other things local news outlets used to provide. The part we are looking into now is how much this varies by country. In the Nordic countries people still prefer to go to local news outlets. In other countries such as those in East Asia it’s the opposite.” | Watch
Nicaraguan editor Carlos F. Chamorro on the attacks on journalism in Nicaragua: “Three media outlets have been assaulted by the regime. Several colleagues have been in prison for years. More than 15 media outlets have been cancelled, including some from the Catholic church. Many journalists have been in exile for years now. When people ask me, ‘What can we do for you?’ I always say the same: keep Nicaragua under the radar, keep talking about journalism in exile. Try to break the censorship and report from Nicaragua. Tell that story of resistance.” | Watch
Independent journalist Neha Wadekar on how to frame public interest journalism: “People don’t like to read stories about helpless victims, depressing as this may sound. We’ve found a better way, which is doing accountability journalism. Who are the bad guys? Who is creating the injustice? Giving people a sense of hope and inspiration is a better way to reach your audience.” | Watch
Jillian Green, editor-in-chief of the Daily Maverick, on reaching polarised audiences: “The polarisation of the diverse audiences that we have is a mountain we have to climb. The disinformation campaigns we face are organised and we have to preempt that. We have to ask ourselves how our pieces are going to be manipulated after they are published. We need to find ways to create spaces for our investigations. Our journalism can’t be elitist and intellectual.” | Watch
Sarah Jeong, Features Editor at the Verge, on how Twitter supercharges abuse: “Twitter seems to be designed in the worst possible way. This exacerbates the problem of abuse. You don’t have separate discrete pools. Everyone can respond to everyone else. Context collapse is very easy to create on Twitter.” | Watch
- Read this piece featuring New York Times‘ reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, who’ve author the best book about Twitter under Elon Musk
Branko Brkic from Project Kontinuum on the future of journalism: “If you stay where we are, in five or ten years time there will be no media houses in the world besides the big sustainable ones, which will be bought by big tech for big amounts of money. This includes the New York Times, which I fear will be bought by one of these companies in the way Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal in the early 2000s.” | Watch
Adam Cole, a former NPR reporter, on needing to shift his mindset becoming a full-time YouTuber: “When I was a reporter I was just trying to make accurate and engaging stuff. Now there’s another part of me which has to be asking, ‘Am I going to make a living?’ There’s another metric to success that I have to take into account.” | Watch
Tech journalist Karen Hao on how journalists should cover AI: “To me, this is a very canonical investigative journalism story of money and power and how Silicon Valley has fashioned itself as the only way through which anything can happen in the future. Silicon Valley is using AI as a kind of cloak around which it is consolidating power. We should think about big tech companies as new kinds of empires. They take resources that are not their own under the guise of progress and civilisation.” | Watch
- Read our interview with Hao on what the rise of Chinese model DeepSeek really means
Natalia Antelava from Coda Story on disinformation: “We misunderstand disinformation, we talk about fake news, but a lot of the narratives are based on facts. The problem is the noise. What’s really missing is the truth, not the facts. We increasingly live in bespoke realities. We need to hold up a mirror to ourselves, it’s the mainstream media, not the platforms that came up with the idea of the breaking news, 24-hour news cycle. Silicon Valley put that model on steroids. A lot of the internet is sewage. If we put water into sewage, we’re still drinking sewage.” | Watch
Media freedom lawyer Can Yeginsu on how to tackle the introduction of foreign agent laws: “Turkey put forward a sophisticated foreign agents bill in October 2024 and pulled it back in November. In between, we got judgement from the European Court of Human Rights. If you’re in charge of the economy of a country that is trying to attract foreign direct investment, tabling a bill like this doesn’t help. Countries with open economies are realising that there could be a cost in introducing this kind of legislation. So go to the treasury ministries. I won’t say this will always work, but you would be surprised.” | Watch
Gina Chua from Semafor on the opportunity AI offers to reinvigorate journalism’s public mission: “Journalism has not served audiences particularly well. We have missed out on entire communities. Coverage of civil rights was not good in the US. AIDS was ignored, and the LGBT community was not well covered. With a new set of technologies, we have an opportunity to rethink our mission, and how we can serve people better now that we can scale better.” | Watch
Jazmín Acuña, co-founder and editorial director of El Surtidor, on the impact of journalism beyond audiences: “The biggest transformation when we adopt an impact-approach to journalism is within the newsroom. It raises the morale of journalists and editors. They feel that publishing is just the beginning of the story sometimes. They start to see themselves as part of an ecosystem and change-making. Your job is reporting, but also making sure that your reporting reaches the people that can do something with it.” | Watch