Challenging times for journalism – takeaways from IJF

The 20th edition of the International Journalism Festival (IJF) took place in Italy last week, amidst a backdrop of unprecedented pressure on revenues and technological advances that threaten the newsroom’s very existence. 

The Reuters Institute produced a fantastic long read summarising the event which can be found here.  

I wanted to highlight some of the main points, particularly in relation to themes that impact our industry here in the Gulf. I’ve made no bones about my thoughts on influencers (one hack recently described them to me as “the damp sand in the crocs of journalism”).  

But the festival appeared to mark something of a watershed, with news influencers pointing to the role of traditional media in informing their content. One Finnish broadcaster celebrated collaborations with influencers, albeit as long as “values are aligned and creators are paired with appropriate teams for mutual gain”. 

We’ve talked a lot about AI in these pages, and it continues to define the rhetoric and challenges facing both journalism and PR every day. Researchers at the IJF claimed that GenAI “hasn’t fundamentally changed the purpose of news organisations”, and that many media companies are effectively integrating the technology into their workflows to make journalism more efficient.  

Instead, it was AI agents used to read news and information on our behalf that pose the existential threat: “[They] 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.” 

The decline in search referrals has increasingly pitted publishers against Big Tech, and IJF saw various strategies discussed, including content blocking and collective bargaining (see SPUR coalition). The Guardian’s Chief AI Officer was focused more on publishers proving their value to tech companies to ensure they are fairly compensated. View a recap of that great panel here.  

Elsewhere a fascinating stat about Wikipedia emerged as the site grapples with a decline in visitors. Page views were down 8% year-on-year in December 2025 – representing a loss of around 1.2 billion visitors – a figure the site puts squarely at the feet of GenAI. It also flagged the inherent bias at the foundation of the internet, with only 1% of it existing in Arabic compared to 50% in English.  

And finally, in a sobering speech Al Jazeera Bureau Chief in Gaza City Wael Al-Dahdouh expressed his disappointment with global journalism when it came to reporting on the conflict with Israel. “We thought our colleagues, our fellow journalists, would have a level of solidarity [with us]. But the world left us while we were being killed. We were hoping our fellow journalists would place more pressure on governments and the United Nations. But the truth is that there was a mass killing of ethics, and there was a mass killing of humanity.” See the full panel here.