Resilience in Perugia: 5 ways we see journalists persevering during times of turmoil and change

As Perugia’s alleys and eateries breathe a sigh of relief after surviving the influx of hundreds of journalists, academics, and other attendees of the 2024 edition of the International Journalism Festival, The Fix zoomed in on how the theme of resilience emerged in five different ways during this year’s sessions.

When they weren’t busy battling this year’s wind and rain, this year’s participants were busy fighting for a spot inside Perugia’s historic venues to get a glimpse of media world heavyweights such as Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, anti-mafia writer Roberto Saviano, and the BBC’s Ros Atkins. Topics that featured prominently in the different panels included AI, war reporting, and elections. While the subject matters varied, a theme that kept popping up was how despite the different challenges each type of reporting brings with it, despite the hurdles journalists are facing in 2024, many are showing how their resilience means that investigations continue to be completed, readers are kept informed, and power continues to be held to account. 

“Conspiracy to commit journalism” is how the prominent Irish human rights lawyer Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC described the charges her client Jimmy Lai is facing. Lai, who founded Apple Daily, which was one of the most popular media outlets in Hong Kong, is currently on trial under Hong Kong’s controversial National Security Law. Gallagher explained how these laws effectively criminalise any dissent.

Matthew Caruana Galizia, the eldest son of slain journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, drew parallels between both cases saying that independent news outlets frighten the establishment since they’re not directly within their control. One thing that makes a difference, he said, is if the family members of the victims get involved in the fight for justice. Luckily this is what’s happening in Lai’s case where his son Sebastien Lai still hasn’t given up and joined the panel via a video link.

“You need people like Matthew, his family, his mother, like Maria Ressa, like my father to hold the line, to tell these autocratic regimes that we deserve these freedoms and we will keep fighting for them until we receive them,” Sebastien Lai said. He also highlighted the importance of the free world telling Hong Kong that there will be repercussions if they continue persecuting people like his father.  

Aged 76, Lai has now spent over 1,300 days behind bars. He’s being held in solitary confinement in a maximum security prison.

Journalists have had to survive the switch to digital, the rise of social media platforms, a changing advertising business, and are now competing with artificial intelligence – with some of the AI models even being trained on their work. While it often feels hard to keep up with the constant announcement of new tools, industry leaders still believe we’re in the early days of generative AI.

“It’s very early days. Let’s use a soccer analogy, where it’s a 90-minute game. I’d say we are in the first five minutes,” VP News for Google Shailesh Prakash told those attending his fireside chat. However, Prakash, who spent over a decade at the Washington Post, said that if journalism doesn’t thrive democracy will be in trouble.

Freelance journalist Anna Codrea-Rado shared a personal anecdote about how one of her clients she was creating custom newsletters for replaced her with AI. She was initially told AI would be used to help create more time for her to do more complex work.

On the other hand, journalist Sophia Smith Galer showed Perugia how she’s leveraging AI to create a new product that she’s selling to other journalists. She gave attendees a taste of her new AI chatbot Sophina which helps users create scripts for vertical videos. But don’t expect to go viral immediately as even Smith Galer pointed out things the chatbot spits out that wouldn’t feature in her actual scripts. 

Before introducing her chatbot, Smith Galer was advocating for more journalists to start producing videos on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. According to a survey she carried out among 126 journalists, the top three reasons people gave for not creating vertical videos were a lack of time, not having enough video skills, and that they’re scared of being on camera.

Another social media platform that was discussed was X (formerly Twitter), with a panel debating the issue of whether journalists should stay on during its Elon Musk era. 

“I’ve personally decided to stop posting entirely after Elon Musk’s decision to kind of go head-to-head with the journalism industry became really apparent. To me, it felt like staying on the platform was legitimising his campaign in a way,” said Platformer managing editor Zoë Schiffer.

Nevertheless, despite the existence of Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threadsб the consensus in the room was that none of these have replaced X. Panel moderator Phil Chetwynd said that as long as local fire departments, politicians, and other important actors kept publishing information on a platform, journalists would find themselves having to stay on it.

With 72 of the 99 journalists killed worldwide in 2023 being Palestinians reporting on Israel’s war on Gaza, discussions on this conflict arose throughout the festival.

“Our job as journalists in Gaza, my job as Youmna, despite living every horrific detail since the beginning of this genocide, this is completely different than any other war that we have covered in the Gaza strip,” Al Jazeera’s Gaza Strip correspondent Youmna ElSayed told a packed Sala dei Notari. She said that the Israeli military made it clear since the beginning that journalists are direct targets in this war, however her colleagues continued showing the world the daily challenges people in Gaza were facing.

On the other hand, the founder and general director of Filastiniyat: Media for Women and Youth Wafa’ Abdel Rahman denounced the media outlets who she described as being “complicit in this genocide” by not talking about the conflict or else simply taking the side “of the oppressor”.

Two years on from Russia’s full-scale invasion, several other talks were also dedicated to shining a light on what’s happening in Ukraine. A panel organised in association with The Kyiv Independent talked about how journalists working in Ukraine stand for journalistic freedoms as the state of free speech in the country has worsened. 

Editor-in-chief of Ukrainian newspaper Ukrainska Pravda Sevgil Musaieva explained how it’s important for them to keep Ukrainian officials accountable. She illustrated her point with the case of one such official who was inflating the number of rapes committed by Russian soldiers, an act that could potentially damage Ukraine’s credibility when it comes to prosecuting Russian war crimes.

When a journalist’s job is to publish something someone else wants to keep hidden, what should they do when they’re given access to hacked or leaked information? A panel that included The Guardian’s deputy business editor Juliette Garside and Gerard Ryle, the director International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, tackled a number of dilemmas journalists may face in the field.

Ryle explained how one of the main challenges of investigative journalism has now changed. While it used to be very difficult to get information, today one of the main challenges he sees is making sense of the large amounts of data hackers and whistleblowers obtain – often sensitive information from governments and corporations.

“These data sets are gold mines of potential public interest information but they also present new ethical legal and logistical challenges,” Ryle said.

“I've also been told to always be very careful when you're talking to a source about doing things that could be considered conspiring with them,” said the director of information security at The Intercept Micah Le. This included things like what at first may appear as good journalistic practice such as receiving particular data from a source but asking them to obtain something even more relevant to a story. 

Source of the cover photo: International Journalism Festival, Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-ND 4.0).