International Journalism Festival 2026: What we learnt in Perugia about the future of news

This year’s edition of the International Journalism Festival was a sobering one, with journalism under threat from a new round of disruption, a hostile platform environment,  and attacks from powerful political leaders. 

But there were also glimmers of hope in Perugia if you knew where to look. It was wonderful to feel the joy of our Hungarian colleagues, to hear fact-checkers doubling down in their fight for truth despite a myriad of challenges, and to see journalists from Gaza, Yemen, Sudan and Ukraine speaking with nuance and courage about their work. 

The Reuters Institute's editorial team curated some of the festival's highlights in this piece. You'll find cool projects, several takeaways, figures speakers shared, and quotes that made us think. 

Stuff we learnt 

1. Newsrooms should apply strong editorial standards when designing and AI news experiences. 

Must newsrooms rethink editorial responsibility in the age of AI? This was the question at the heart of a panel chaired by Olle Zachrison, who leads the News AI team at BBC News. Zachrison pointed to interactive AI news experiences from outlets such as those from Aftonbladet, Time magazine and Swedish Radio, and wondered how newsrooms should approach them when editors in some countries can go to jail for anything they publish.

Panellists responded to this question in different ways. Helsingin Sanomat’s editor-in-chief Erja Ylajarvi stressed editors never really had “perfect editorial control” over what they published, and pointed to a recent example in which readers really appreciated her transparency about a mistake involving an AI tool. Mukul Devichand from the New York Times mysteriously suggested that designing AI interactive experiences is “maybe less than driving a car and more like riding an elephant.” 

So, how do you ride that elephant? Devichand said it’s important to distinguish between the non-negotiable (your publication’s standards in terms of accuracy and independence) and the liquid part of the equation (basically what you can’t control). An entire editorial process has to be codified into an AI system, and then it should be evaluated, tweaked, and evaluated again until it meets the right standards. “That’s how you build confidence in systems,” he said. “But even then, those systems are not deterministic. They are more like people, as you can’t be sure how they’ll behave.”

The New York Times hasn’t released a public-facing chatbot and their leadership is reluctant to do so. But they’ve used AI to build internal tools, to dig into the Jeffrey Epstein files, and a number of AI-assisted experiences for discovery and access. For example, adjusting recipes’ ingredients to the number of people you are cooking for, and providing automated voice for the pieces they publish. | Watch

• Explore our reporting and research on AI and the future of news

2. Most news organisations are not doing enough to engage with poor audiences on their own terms. 

Our Director, Mitali Mukherjee, chaired a discussion on mainstream news organisations’ failure to reach out to marginalised audiences, with panellists from Wales, Romania and the United States. 

One of the speakers was Romanian journalist Andreea Vîlcu, who recently researched and produced Prea Sărac (in English ‘Too Poor’), a six-episode podcast about relative poverty amongst ordinary people. “It’s not about extreme poverty but about people who are almost one emergency away from personal bankruptcy,” she said. 

Inspired by the American podcast Classy, Vîlcu produced the show because she couldn’t find those stories anywhere else. “I’ve struggled with financial vulnerability all my life and I’ve never seen any examples in the media about this,” she said. “I wanted to offer people like me a voice to feel that they mattered and belonged to the world.”

Shirish Kulkarni from Media Cymru pointed to lack of representation as one of the reasons behind this issue: “People in our communities see journalists in the same way they see the police, and not in a good way. When you have newsrooms devoid of people from working-class backgrounds, with no connection to the communities they are covering, people in those communities just check out and they don’t engage.”

The third panellist was Maritza Félix, who launched Conecta Arizona in 2020 on WhatsApp, where she debunked misinformation about the pandemic shared on one of her family group chats. “We decided to go where the people are, and the people are on WhatsApp”, she said. “We don’t have a fancy building, we don’t have a newsroom with big screens. Our newsroom is in the pocket of our community.”

Félix explained she reaches a transnational audience of over 100,000 people in Arizona and in the Mexican state of Sonora, right across the border. She sees the line dividing both countries as “a scar” or “a bridge,” with many people having their heart in one place and their feet in another. 

As a reporter, she thinks the most important thing she can do is to listen to her own community. “We don’t tell people what is important,” she said. “They tell us what they need to know. It’s radical listening. We sit down, we have a coffee (a digital one) and we listen.” | Watch

• Read Marina Adami's piece on newsrooms engaging with poor audiences in Venezuela and the United States. | English · Español

3. Traditional journalists and news influencers can (and should) learn from each other. 

Spanish news creator Emilio Doménech, founder of WATIF, says his background in mainstream broadcasting anchors his work as a creator, where he strives to be an impartial and trusted source of news. He also acknowledged the vital work of traditional media in informing much of WATIF’s content. 

Without it, Doménech said at a panel moderated by our Mitali Mukherjee, “we wouldn't be able to cover most of the news that we cover. But at the same time, we think there's an opportunity there to tell the news in a different way. That's where we fit in.” 

Our journalist fellow Salla-Rosa Grohn, a producer at Finnish public broadcaster Yle’s Kioski news creator lab, believes collaborations with influencers can be successful as long as values are aligned and creators are paired with appropriate teams for mutual gain. | Watch

• Explore our report on the rise of news creators, with survey data from 24 countries. | English · Español · PDF

4. The value of ‘impartiality’ is being questioned in times of war. 

In several panels, journalists covering the wars in Ukraine and Gaza considered whether the notion of ‘impartiality’ continues to serve its purpose when reporting on governments who often spread lies. 

Ideas of impartiality, objectivity and neutrality are being used “to discipline discourse, to redraw the boundaries of acceptable truth,” and to obfuscate power dynamics and accountability in wartime, said Lebanese journalist Diana Moukalled in her panel on Gaza coverage. Through sticking dogmatically to impartiality, Moukalled said, “the intention is to appear objective but in fact it dilutes responsibility.” 

In a panel on the resilience of Ukrainian journalists, Mariya Frey from Ukraine’s public broadcaster Suspilne, shared similar beliefs, asserting that she’s “not impartial at all”. 

Frey is from Mariupol, a city devastated by the Russian onslaught. “Impartiality is being weaponised against people who care the most,” she said, “and it’s usually journalists, because they care the most about the victims and they care the most about telling the truth to the world [about] who is the aggressor.” Instead, the Ukrainian panel viewed professionalism and accountability to audiences as more important standards to abide by. | Watch: Ukraine · Gaza

A case study: the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in June 2023. At a panel moderated by Kyiv Independent’s editor Olga Rudenko, several panellist pointed to this war crime, which many experts have attributed to Russia, as an example in which impartiality didn’t serve Western newsrooms well “Many published, ‘Here’s what happened in Ukraine and here’s what Russia says about it,’ without giving additional context on who was in control of the dam, who threatened to destroy it, and who benefited from it.”

Journalist and historian Peter Pomerantsev explained the Kremlin was spreading these false narratives claiming Ukraine was about to blow up the dam way before it happened as it previously did before bombing Mariupol’s maternity wards. “They were seeding the disinformation before it blew up through Russian representatives in the UN all the way down to Telegram channels allied with the security services. Propaganda is not a crime. Being involved in committing a war crime is.” | Watch

• Read our stories on conflict journalism in: West Bank · Gaza · Ukraine · Sudan

5. GenAI hasn’t fundamentally transformed the news ecosystem, but AI agents might. 

So far, GenAI hasn’t fundamentally changed the purpose of news organisations, said our researchers Felix Simon at a panel hosted by the Council of Europe’s Giulia Lucchese. 

Consultant David Caswell agreed and called for big, broad and bold experiments in this space: “Media organisations are very effectively deploying AI to make their existing conception of journalism more efficient,” he said. “But ultimately AI’s capabilities are so fundamental that we’re going to be in a totally different information ecosystem in the future.” Caswell speculated that the deployment of agentic systems to peruse news and information on our behalf may make us so well-informed in the future that the news ecosystem of today will feel as limiting as an Internet blackout does to us now.

“We experiment a lot without a vision,” said Natali Helberger from the University of Amsterdam, adding that the news industry should instead develop a clearer vision for its own future, and how GenAI fits into it. She proposed to begin with the principle of freedom of expression: restructuring the industry around the freedom to receive and impart information, include a diversity of perspectives, and the right of citizens to benefit from innovation. | Watch 

• Read Caswell’s essay on how AI might reshape the news ecosystem

6. Fact-checkers strengthen their ties with their audience (and each other) to survive an increasingly hostile environment. 

In a panel moderated by IFCN Director Angie Drobnic Holan, managers from fact-checking organisations in Spain, Argentina and the United States explained how they are working together to weather a threatening storm. 

Franco Piccato from Argentina’s Chequeado said around half of the claims his colleagues fact-check every month come directly from requests their community sends via WhatsApp. 

Spanish fact-checker Maldita has gone even further by creating a misinformation management system. This tool, used by Chequeado and dozens of fact-checking organisations, allows journalists to respond automatically to any query on a suspicious piece of content they’ve verified before. “If we don’t have the answer,” Piccato said, “it’s still great for us because we receive a question that we didn’t have in mind.”

Fact-checkers also spoke about two important alliances. Laura Zommer is leading Factchequeado, a project launched in 2022 that has built an alliance of more than 140 local partners to counter misinformation in Spanish in the United States. Zommer and Piccato also mentioned LatamChequea, a network connecting 46 fact-checking outlets from 20 different countries, which started operating more formally in 2024. 

Zommer said fact-checkers in Europe, Africa and Latin America were the first to see the need to work together, and she is happy to see this culture now emerging in the United States as well. 

“US journalists start to realise they are they they don’t necessarily need to invent the wheel,” she said. “They just need to look outside and see some of the challenges that other people in the continent have been dealing with for decades. If you have a president who doesn’t want journalists, you need to get together to protect yourselves, to protect your sources, to protect your community.”

Read Gretel Kahn's piece on how Latinos became a target for misinformation before the 2024 US election. | English · Español 

7. Publishers are reckoning with their relationship with Big Tech. 

With publishers facing a potential collapse in search referrals, they are now joining forces to confront some of the challenges posed by AI models. A panel of AI leaders from three major publishers discussed the best strategies to deal with these issues, including content blocking, proactive discussions with tech companies, and collective bargaining as in the case of the recently launched SPUR coalition. 

As a defense against AI companies, Ana Jakimovska, Head of AI Strategy at Mediahuis, suggested making it harder for journalism to be scrapped without any remuneration. By implementing technical protections like blocking bots and closing up your technical infrastructure, publishers can protect their intellectual property. However, she said that the next step is to signal to regulators and lawmakers that laws need to be implemented to protect journalism.  

“The industry is moving so fast and we're seeing that the regulation and the legal framework is behind so again,” she said.  “One of the things we could kind of improve from the digital sort of side is to accelerate good legislation.”

Caspar Llewellyn Smith, Chief AI Officer at the Guardian, said publishers need to prove their value to tech companies so that they are fairly compensated, while not losing sight of the value they have to humans. “We can prove why it’s better to come directly to a publisher, because publishers represent a particular view of the world. You can trust what [publishers] do.” | Watch

In a separate panel, Nick Wrenn, who used to work for Facebook/Meta, pointed to the misalignment between the intentions of platforms and news companies. This was echoed by our own Visiting Fellow, Madhav Chinnappa, who used to work at Google. “In the era of traffic, there was a value exchange between news and technology,” he said. “In the era of GenAI, I’m not sure what the value exchange is.” | Watch

Cool projects

The cartoon arena. CORRECTIV’s editor-in-chief Anette Dowideit explained how her organisation is making the political cartoon more relevant for today’s audience. Their team of five cartoonists all draw a cartoon based on a weekly topic chosen by their audience. The audience then gets to vote who won the cartoon battle each week. 

• A quote. “We think the political cartoon is really important as a democratic way of expressing, especially in a right-wing moving political environment, but it's not being so controversial anymore than it used to be.” | Watch

An AI archivist. Kevin Hoffman from The Philadelphia Inquirer spoke about Dewey, an AI-powered assistant that retrieves and summarises archival content from the newspaper, which was founded almost 200 years ago. Built with the help of this programme from the Lenfest Institute, Dewey parses through more than 350,000 pieces and links directly to the correct source system, and provides transparent citations. | Watch · Explainer · Code repository

A project to tackle news poverty. Spilnews is a Dutch-language initiative to tackle an issue described by Liesbeth Nizet from Mediahuis as young people’s ‘news poverty’: their lack of access to news that meets their needs. The project, presented in a panel moderated by our own Nic Newman, involves creators who trained as journalists but already had their own social followings: sizeable but not huge like major influencers. The creators, who are very young themselves, record social videos on news topics, each specialising in certain areas and constantly engaging with their audience to answer their questions through successive story iterations.

A creators’ studio inside a traditional TV channel. CNN Creators is a team of young creators pursuing stories that matter to the youngest generations. They publish videos both on news and topics of interest to young people, and have a live program in which they talk their audience through how and why they pursue the stories they do. The programme will soon have its own ‘hub’: an office with cameras all around so audiences can follow the creators’ full process at their desks, in the kitchen, and in planning meetings.  | Watch

Features in Farsi for Iranian audiences. The Tehran Bureau recently launched a new Farsi-language service called “Raisonne Gar” (“media maker”) in response to current events, fully separate from their English content. Marketa Hulpachova, co-director of the Tehran Bureau, said the goal is to create feature-style journalism in Farsi without alienating audiences who are used to either hard news or literary writing, with little tradition of something in between. | Watch

Involving homeless people in community reporting. ‘The Manchester Maze’ is an interactive web documentary portraying the experience of homeless people in the UK city of Manchester and the multiple barriers they face when looking for help. The project was borne out of a collaboration between journalists and people experiencing homelessness in Manchester, with the latter leading in developing the core idea and reporting on their own and others’ experiences, and the former working to produce the story into a high-quality journalistic product. | Watch

Figures speakers shared

1. On what journalism’s enemies fear most. Up to 68% of investigative journalists said those actors who attack them most dread global journalistic investigations, more so than NGO statements (15%) or legal action (17%). This is according to a new report by Forbidden Stories, shared by founder and executive director Laurent Richard. | Watch

2. On the funding challenge facing Ukrainian journalism. It will take €500 million for Ukrainian journalism to fully recover, says Ola Myrovych, CEO of the Lviv Media Forum, in a panel on the resilience of Ukrainian journalists and the immense challenges they continue to face. | Watch

3. On Wikipedia’s traffic decline. Anusha Alikhan, chief communications officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, said traffic to Wikipedia has plummeted in the last year. “As of December 2025,” she said, “we saw about an 8% decline in page views year-to-year. Eight percent is a lot of 15 billion, so that’s something that we're deeply paying attention to.” 

• Alikhan also warned about the inherent bias built into the internet: “Around 50% of the internet exists in English, 1% exists in Arabic, and 6% exists in Spanish. Because it exists in 300 languages, Wikipedia has the ability to change that [bias] going forward.”

4. On public service media’s funding troubles. 95% of UK adults consume BBC products every month but only 80% pay licence fee, said Liz Gibbons, acting controller of global journalism at the BBC World Service and executive editor of the BBC World Service’s long-form and investigations department. | Watch

5. On the cost of journalist safety. US news organisation The 19th spent $250,000 on digital and physical security for its team since the beginning of the second Trump presidency. | Watch

6. On bypassing the Great Firewall. Veteran Chinese journalist and founder of Dasheng Media Vivian Wu pointed out their YouTube channel has 92,000 subscribers, with around 40% of them coming from inside China, highlighting how Chinese audiences are able to bypass government censors. | Watch

7. On the importance of exiled media. Only about 10% of the Russian adult population accesses independent media, according to Thibaut Bruttin, Director General of Reporters Without Borders. | Watch

8. On the impact of Hong Kong’s National Security Law. According to Tom Grundy, founder and editor-in-chief of Hong Kong Free Press, around 1,000 journalists in Hong Kong are out of work after the government passed National Security Law which was brought in in the wake of the 2019 protests. | Watch

9. On involving audiences in investigations. Over 1,100 people shared their TikTok data with the Washington Post for an investigation into TikTok’s algorithm, said data reporter Caitlin Gilbert. | Watch

10. On the impact of the war in Yemen. Over 30% of journalists in Yemen have had to flee their home to another city or country due to the pressures on press freedom from the “forgotten war” that’s taken place over the past 10 years, said Mustafa Nasr, Yemeni journalist and Chairman of the Studies and Economic Media Center. | Watch

Quotes that made us think

Chilean news influencer Nicolás Copano, founder of Turno, on YouTube being the backbone of any news creator’s operation. “YouTube is the new WordPress.” | Watch

Mukul Devichand, Editor of AI Initiatives at the New York Times, on foregrounding journalism’s humanity. “We are changing our own product experiences to be less AI in many ways. We want to foreground the humanity of what we do. We have journalists who have done real work on real subjects. So a number of the experiences we’ve launched, like the Listen and the Watch tabs, are all about seeing the reporter on camera or in the studio. | Watch

Journalist and historian Peter Pomerantsev on the most successful Russian narratives. “The most successful narratives are the ones people don’t recognise as Russian, that people perceive as common sense. This idea that Russian domination of his sphere of the world is inevitable, that its victory is inevitable because of its size, that Russia is just this hegemon that you can contain and you can only resist but suffer… It’s almost as if we can’t imagine a different space. That goes so deep and is embedded in Russian culture as much as its politics.” | Watch

Our Senior Research Associate Lucy Kueng on the disconnect between strategy and execution. “In important strategic projects, we tend to over index on getting the strategy right and put too little emphasis on acknowledging how much work it is going to be to implement it. [...] Anything that involves knitting the old part and the new part of the organisation together or involves knitting together bits of the organisation is really painful invisible work and that has to be acknowledged.” | Watch

Helsingin Sanomat’s editor-in-chief Erja Ylajarvi on how to think about AI in news. “When there is something the machine can do way better than humans, it will not be acceptable not taking it into use. There are many examples in journalism’s past of machines being way more efficient and correct than humans in dealing with data and other stuff. There will be a time soon when you won’t like a tired doctor to operate you if there is robotic technology that is way more precise. So I think quite a lot about other fields.” | Watch 

Israeli investigative journalist Uri Blau on focusing on who’s profiting from war. “We’re not doing the body count, we’re doing the money count.” In the same panel, Russian OSINT journalist Milan Czerny said social media platforms can be a vital source of information: “Oligarchs are hiding, but their wife is on Instagram.”  | Watch

Sudanese journalist Raghdan Orsud, co-founder of Beam Reports on the need for global media attention. “Sudan is not a forgotten story to us. It’s our reality, it’s our present and it deserves sustained and serious attention. What we need from the community is not solidarity, we need action and we need attention beyond escalation moments like what happened in Darfur. We are struggling to be heard, and I think journalism by its nature is cross border. We should be compelled to care about what’s happening in the world and not just our countries and regions. Don’t make us beg for attention.” | Watch

• Read Matthew Leake's piece on why some wars don't make headlines.

Saad Mohseni, co-founder and Chairman of MOBY Group, on operating in repressive regimes. “There's always this pressure by the authorities and the countries we operate in to control the narrative. It’s a constant challenge and a tug of war. It's an ongoing challenge that journalists face everywhere, including in Western countries.” | Watch

Daniel Howden, founder and managing editor of Lighthouse Reports, on investigating AI companies. “In trying to understand specifically how AI companies are operating and what their relationship to the state is, I’ve found it useful to go back and look at the East India Company… This was a corporation set up by a bunch of wildly speculative chancers in London who managed to persuade the government of the time that there was a race for global domination with Portugal… It became by far the wealthiest corporation in history… None of these things are unprecedented in the way that they present themselves.” | Watch

Dave Jorgenson, founder of startup Local News International, stressed the importance of not being overly reliant on platforms. Despite making his name as the Washington Post’s ‘TikTok guy’, Jorgenson said: “The thing about a newsletter is people don’t really change their emails. They might get off platforms but they’re probably going to stay to some degree engaged with newsletters longer than they would with platforms over time.” 

• Other panellists agreed that the platform landscape is constantly shifting so news creators must be flexible and hedge their bets on what works. “LinkedIn has become an instant, indispensable part of my toolkit. I never thought I would say that in 2019,” said Sophia Smith Galer. | Watch

Emily Ramshaw, president and CEO of The 19th, on pivoting her fundraising from chasing foundations to reaching out to individuals. “The most valuable money I spent was $75 to get verified on Instagram and $1,000 for LinkedIn Pro and I spent every Friday for a year writing 100 cold messages to rich people. Now, the 19th is a  $15 million a year operation.” | Watch

Sannuta Raghu, Head of AI at Scroll.in, on how journalism should adapt to AI. “The information ecosystem is changing and we're going to face it with great force. The transition is not going to be easy, but we will adapt. We got into journalism for the service angle of it. We are here to meet those information needs of people, but we don't need to look at it in zero-sum ways. There are new ways of doing things and we'll find ways to do it.” | Watch

Veteran Al Jazeera journalist Wael Al-Dahdouh on feeling failed by international media. “We thought our colleagues, our fellow journalists all around the world, would have a level of solidarity [with us]. But the world left us while we were being killed, us, our families and all of our surroundings. We were hoping our fellow journalists would place more pressure on unions, governments and the United Nations to stop this genocide. But the truth is that it was not only us that were being genocided, there was a mass killing of ethics, and there was a mass killing of humanity.” | Watch