Culture, responsible innovation, and inclusive AI adoption – three insights for media leaders from Perugia

Editor’s note: this article is part of The Fix’s coverage of the 2025 International Journalism Festival in Perugia. Check our special newspaper produced for the IJF and stay tuned for more.

Offering a blend of learning, networking, and drinking, the International Journalism Festival 2025 in Perugia created a much needed space for spontaneous encounters and renewals of old friendships for journalism junkies from around the world.

During panel discussions tackling topics including AI and climate reporting, journalists were both challenged and inspired. From Christopher Wylie (whistleblower in the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal) calling out journalists for not doing enough to highlight the dangers tech titans like Sam Altman and Elon Musk pose, to tips from Fran Beighton (Head of Growth at Daily Maverick) on asking your readers to provide quotes to journalists covering topics they’re experts on, Perugia offered something for everyone.

With around 180 sessions being organised this year, it’s impossible to do proper justice to all of them. But three key themes stood out that you can start implementing in your own newsroom today.  

With a history of throwing new journalists into the deep end with little more than wishful thinking hoping they will thrive, newsroom managers may want to make better decisions about what culture they want to foster within their team.

In the session “Designing the newsroom of 2025: rethinking structure, culture and leadership”, Lea Korsgaard (co-founder and editor-in-chief of Zetland) told a full room that their daily meetings start at 08:45. Their first order of business? Singing a song. The aim is to instill a habit for building the daily practice of raising your voice.   

“The right kind of culture is what will foster creativity, courage, and willingness to do stuff you haven’t done before,” Lea Korsgaard said.

The Copenhagen-based media company was founded in 2016. It currently has 100 employees, all of whom started their new job with a 1-on-1 onboarding meeting with Korsgaard. The purpose of the meeting is to give them a crash course into Zetland’s culture. They also get a briefing on which competitors they do not want to emulate.

Korsgaard also explained how Zetland proactively combats silos at the workplace. One way this happens is by organising a single Christmas party for all the different teams and departments, to specifically combat any division that could foster between journalists and marketeers for instance.

Korsgaard was joined on stage by Aled John (Deputy Managing Director of FT Strategies). John noted how audiences are coming across news less directly and are consuming it in different formats. 

He posed a number of thought-provoking questions to the audience. Which customer should we superserve? What incentives drive innovation without hurting integrity?

The importance of driving innovation and how to approach the topic was also brought up during the final moments of the conference. The refreshing “Mistakes, setbacks and unfulfilled expectations: an honest f*ck-up session” on Saturday gave journalists a sneak peek at the messy realities behind media innovation.

Perugia veteran Chris Moran (head of editorial innovation at The Guardian) gave an account of his “Atomic Explainers” project which had the goal to help readers understand jargon through expandable explainers embedded throughout articles. Everyone he spoke to loved the idea and it was implemented. There was only one problem. Moran forgot to anticipate that these explainers needed to be updated frequently. 

“[Editors] were committing not just to creating one short piece of content, they were committing for the rest of their natural-born editing lives to continue to keep that up to date," Moran said. One explainer a day meant 30 new pieces that needed constant updating by the end of the month.

While failure in newsrooms is inevitable, the panellists felt that moments of failure are rarely framed as opportunities for growth.

“What I very, very, very, rarely see is newsrooms where the reflection phase is cherished and supported,” Anita Zielina (CEO at Better Leaders Lab) said. Zielina also pushed back against the Silicon Valley mantra of “failing fast”. “I actually also do not want to work in a company that enjoys running around and breaking things just for the sake of breaking them.”

However, Shirish Kulkarni (journalism consultant) mentioned that sometimes, despite getting buy-in and following all the right steps, a project can still fail. An organisation’s strategy may shift. Internal politics may kill a project. His new mantra is to focus more on working with people who are open to the idea of transforming and improving.

Featuring 14 different sessions on AI, the topic on the minds of many newsroom leaders was well-addressed in Perugia without feeling overbearing.

In a Microsoft-supported session on “Closing the AI adoption gap”, Heba Kandil (head of media initiatives at the Thomson Reuters Foundation) said a large gap in this space concerns the strategic roll-out of a new AI tool within the newsroom and bringing people together on that journey. She said newsrooms should think about how they approach this. This includes thinking about how to reiterate on a prototype and what level of seniority the people you’re consulting with should have.

Luke Feltham (Editor-in-Chief of South Africa’s Mail & Guardian) said they are currently drawing up an editorial document detailing the use of AI in the newsroom that will be signed by all their staff. Feltham said the policy would mention the purpose and direction they envision AI tools being used as well as addressing job loss. 

“We wanted it to be explicitly said that for both us now and for our successors in the future, that at no point will anybody's job be fully overtaken or subsumed by AI,” Feltham said. He added that there is a lot of distrust about AI and that a newsroom’s audience should know exactly where and how AI tools are being used.

Heba Kandil outlined a practical approach to identify and manage ethical friction points during AI tool implementation.

Kandil said that while AI tools change, it’s worth categorising tools depending on what function the tools play. Then the next step would be to map them: identifying where in a newsroom’s workflow they will be implemented. She suggested identifying likely ethical tension points and then crafting a mitigating strategy for each one. Kandil stressed the importance of having the whole newsroom contribute to the final policy rather than rolling out a soulless template.

Source of the cover photo: Monica Rizza for IJF 2025