Thousands of journalists descended on Perugia, Italy, for the 2023 International Journalism Festival, to discuss everything from democracy to technology, revenue, audience engagement and the future of journalism. Here’s an overview of five themes from a range of panels.

1. Who’s your audience?

More and more newsrooms are moving towards audience-based revenue models – and yet, many still lack a clear understanding of who their audience is and how to cater to them.

Media consultant Dmitry Shishkin argued that many, if not most, newsrooms produce the wrong type of content for the audience’s user needs, often overproducing content that updates the audience on the news but doesn’t put it in context, make them feel emotionally connected or explain how they can take action – despite the fact that most actually prefer the three latter types of content.

“If you satisfy your audiences’ content needs creatively, consistently and strategically, growth will come,” he said, presenting an updated user needs model that newsrooms can use to analyse their output and see how it matches with what their audience actually wants from them.

An audience-connected newsroom will also find it easier to retain their audience, and it’s worth differentiating yourself from other news organisations. “Look out into the sea of journalism and ask what aren’t people getting right now,” advised Vox’s co-founder and its parent company’s publisher Melissa Bell.

One thing several panels argued people aren’t getting right now is agency and information on how to solve problems, instead of being treated as passive observers to whom problems happen. Once adults finish their formal schooling years, they learn from the media, remarked Dina Aboughazala, founder and CEO of Egab which specialises in solutions journalism, yet too few media help give audiences the tools to understand and impact the world around them.

“You must report on the problem. But you must report the full story. It’s not enough to say ‘hey, this is a problem and this is a problem and this is a problem,” said Ruona Meyer, Africa initiative manager for the Solutions Journalism Network. “It’s important to say this is why the problem is happening, this is what you can do about it, or this is the solution (that did it).”

The experiences of all parts of your community should also be reflected in the news. If your reporting isn’t diverse, you’re missing part of the story, argued Tina Lee, editor-in-chief of Unbias the News. “You’re not doing good reporting if part of the people are not being talked to.”

2. Inside the newsroom

It’s easy to think that most of the threats and opportunities are external, but a takeaway message from many panels at IJF 2023 was that future-proofing your own newsroom is equally important.

Stress, threats, and diversity challenges are just a few of the factors that affect journalists’ mental health. The so-called Great Resignation sparked by the pandemic is still ongoing.

“Our experienced colleagues leave. They’re giving up their jobs,” said Beata Balogova, editor-in-chief of SME about how threats and online abuse take their toll on colleagues, with junior journalists being left without senior journalists to pass on their experience to them.

If those junior journalists are still there, that is. Talent retention is key for newsrooms today, with journalists belonging to minority groups particularly affected by career stumbling blocks.

Newsrooms need to set targets and measure inclusion, and focus on talent retention programmes, advised Luba Kassova and Richard Addy of AKAS, which produced a report on how to include the missing perspectives of women of all colours in leadership and coverage.

3. The climate crisis: How are you covering it?

The climate crisis presents publishers with a dilemma. On the one hand, it’s one of the current and future most pressing problems that the world faces. On the other hand, it’s one of the topics many find audiences are the least interested in reading or hearing about. So how do we fix that?

A report by the EBU found that although there’s no one-size-fits-all model, there’s generally too much focus on doom and gloom and too little on explanatory journalism and solutions. Impactful climate journalism should focus on stories about the here and now, provide local context, emphasise the benefits of change, help people find agency and know its various audiences.

Alexandra Borchardt, the lead author of the report, told a panel that human voices are needed in reporting because people tend to learn more from their peers than the experts, and that climate journalism needs to be part of all your beats, not only as its own vertical in the newsroom.

But not enough journalists are climate literate. Phil Chetwynd, global news director at the Agence France-Press explained that they actively train their journalists in climate reporting, which he described as “human-first storytelling (…) about real things happening to real people”.

A separate panel about what communities want from their climate reporting also stressed the importance of climate literacy and giving audiences the tools to act. Camille Padilla Dalmau, the founder of 9 Millones, a Puerto Rico-based platform, mentioned that her site’s most popular story in the past year was an explainer about where to recycle alkaline batteries in Puerto Rico.

4. Artificial intelligence

At least five panels were on the topic of AI, which has existed for years but quickly became the Next Big Thing in news when the ChatGPT chatbot burst onto the scene in November 2022.

“AI won’t replace journalists, but it makes a really good assistant,” said Gina Chua, executive editor of Semafor. “We need to think about how journalists can use it in practical ways.”

Such ways could include using AI to complete mundane tasks such as transcription, short news reports that follow similar templates, taking care of metadata such as tagging, or research.

But AI tools can’t do everything, and they still often get things wrong, so especially newsrooms that are built on audience trust need to take extra care to make sure a human eye (and brain) is involved in the process, and that stories produced with the help of AI are clearly labelled as such.

A recurring warning was not to go down the route of adapting your newsroom to what AI can do, but instead think of what your newsroom’s work and goals are and how AI can fit in with that.

“All our technology is user-focused. We’re not doing it just for the sake of it,” said Uli Köppen, head of the AI and automation lab at Bayerischer Rundfunk, advising newsrooms to first look at their unique selling points and only after that ask how they can use tech to best meet them.

And crucially, an AI strategy could also mean knowing when not to use AI.

“The rush to sound smart and use AI is causing newsrooms to rush into something they don’t have an understanding or infrastructure for,” cautioned Lisa Gibbs, director of news partnerships at the Associated Press. “I worry about all these newsrooms who are jumping into ‘let’s write articles with the help of ChatGPT’.”

5. The X factor: What’s next? Nobody knows

When the pandemic sparked a breakdown of the advertising market, it forced a lot of media companies to rethink their business models. We don’t know what the next thing is. It could be another pandemic, climate disasters, anti-democratic governments, wars or something else entirely, but even if we don’t know what the future holds, we need to be ready to face it.

“Thinking about tomorrow is something we have to do today,” said Ezra Eeman, change director at Mediahuis.

In the long term, newsrooms can’t go chasing everything. Instead, they have to decide who they want to be, what their values are, and who they want to reach, advised journalism innovation and inclusion consultant Shirish Kulkarni. In other words, setting out your goals and strategies for reaching them is more future-proof than investing in every shiny new thing that comes along.

There’s a lot of talk about attracting young audiences with glitzy high-tech tools and social media trends, but another factor is that many newsrooms operate in countries with ageing populations, and need to consider accessibility. “We need to lean into innovation that isn’t cool,” said Kulkarni.

At French investigative online newspaper Mediapart, they’re working on building up reserves on top of being profitable to be able to afford a future Plan B in the event that, for example, a hostile future government bans them, or if another challenge forces them to build a whole new business model, explained CEO Cécile Sourd.

Jessica Davis, senior director of data initiatives and news automation at USA Today, said that uncertainties aside, it is an exciting time to be a journalist and experiment with new trends.

“I want journalists to be cautious, but curious,” she said.

IJF

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