Start learning today!
Get early access to learning opportunities from Journalism Courses by the Knight Center.
The future of journalism rests on technology and the human relationships that connect news organizations with their audiences. That was the central theme of the 27th International Symposium on Journalism (ISOJ), held Sept. 17-18 at the University of Texas at Austin and broadcast online.
The annual conference organized by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas brought together news executives, journalists, academics and others shaping the future of the news business. This year’s program largely revolved around the topics of artificial intelligence, audience trust and new business models.
The first day was headed by keynote speaker Elizabeth Green, CEO of Civic News Company, who urged newsrooms to define their value, build sustainable business models around it and develop revenue streams that protect editorial independence. On the second day, keynote speaker Jonathan Greenberger, editor in chief of Politico, turned to how technology is changing the way news is produced, distributed and consumed.
“We made it again!” said Professor Rosental Calmon Alves, founder and director of the Knight Center and ISOJ. “Another great symposium that helped journalists, media executives and scholars from around the world to better understand the challenges and opportunities created by the transformational impact of digital technologies on the news media ecosystem.”
The symposium featured 57 speakers and drew more than 800 attendees in person and online from 49 countries and territories.
The first day of the conference centered on journalists’ role in democracy and how they can remain relevant with their audiences.
Tom Rosenstiel, a veteran journalist and professor at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, said in conversation with Alves that journalism must move from a “journalism of attention” to a “journalism of value” — rethinking both how news organizations make money and what they offer audiences.
“What people need is journalism that will help them live their lives and improve their communities,” he said.
Community news organizations are taking steps to make audiences participants rather than passive consumers of news, according to speakers at a panel about “live journalism.” The Portugal-based Mensagem de Lisboa hosts events where residents share personal stories, said founder Catarina Carvalho. El Tímpano, which serves Latino and Mayan immigrants in California’s Bay Area, takes its journalism to community spaces, including a Día de los Muertos festival where residents created an altar to remember loved ones.
Audiences’ evolving consumption habits are reshaping journalism writ large, said Liz Kelly Nelson, founder of Project C, which supports creator journalists. At a panel on the “new information economy,” she argued that vertical, short-form videos and live events should be considered journalism, even if they’re not produced by traditional news organizations.
The second day focused on AI’s promise to make journalism faster and cheaper — and its potential to erode the audiences and revenue that sustain it.
Consumer chatbots such as Claude and Gemini are reshaping newsrooms. At Politico, journalists use AI to help mine through mountains of documents or to help write code, said Politico Editor in Chief Jonathan Greenberger. At Axios, reporters are using it to develop new products such as summaries of other outlets’ news coverage, said Allison Murphy, chief operating officer.
But at a panel on how AI is impacting traffic to news sites, speakers said chatbots are also diverting traffic from websites, raising questions about how publishers will reach audiences if AI becomes a primary gateway to information.
“If there’s a mass exodus from news sites to chatbots and AI summaries, journalism is going to get absolutely flattened by products cosplaying as objective omniscient oracles,” unless the industry finds a new approach, said Zach Seward, editorial director of AI initiatives at The New York Times, at a panel on agentic AI.
Participants at the 19th Ibero-American Journalism Colloquium, held the day after ISOJ ended, took a more practical approach. Rather than asking what journalism will become, its speakers focused on what journalists across Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula are doing now to sustain it.
The Colloquium’s 27 speakers from about a dozen countries pointed to collaboration, creativity and independent journalism as ways to confront authoritarianism and the rise of AI.
Keynote speaker Carmen Aristegui, an award-winning Mexican investigative reporter, argued journalists should respond to the rise of authoritarianism, the expansion of AI and climate change with a people-first approach.
“Everything that encompasses the human condition has to be at the center,” she said.
Other speakers highlighted cross-border investigations, local reporting networks and new approaches to sustainability, including solutions journalism. But they also warned that AI is accelerating sophisticated disinformation like deepfakes, while forcing newsrooms to weigh new tools against journalism’s core principles.
Recordings of all panels, sessions and workshops are now available to ISOJ 2027 registrants and will soon be available to the public.
The 27th ISOJ was sponsored by: Knight Foundation, Google News Initiative, The Lenfest Institute, Moody College of Communication at UT Austin, Chartbeat, John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University, Missouri School of Journalism, Newspack, Wallace House Center for Journalists at the University of Michigan, and the School of Journalism and Media at UT Austin.
ISOJ was also made possible with the help of more than 40 volunteers, most of whom are students from UT Austin’s Moody College of Communication.
The 28th ISOJ is expected to be held in April 2027.