5 big ideas shaping journalism’s next chapter

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps.

The recent International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy drew 2,000+ journalists, including 526 speakers, for four days of conversation about what’s next for our field. It was one of the most vibrant conferences I’ve attended.

I spoke on a panel about how journalism training evolves when AI does entry-level work. I also attended 15 other sessions. Five ideas stuck with me, each about how journalism can be more human, more sustainable, and more inventive, even as the industry contracts.

Live Journalism Resonates

Madrid-based Diario Vivo puts journalists and ordinary people on stage to tell personal stories. Nothing is recorded. It’s pure human storytelling.

Audiences don’t know what stories they’ll hear when they arrive at a show. Founder Vanessa Rousselot says the format is designed to make people laugh and cry and to restore trust between journalists and the public. Diario Vivo began in 2017 with 100 people in the audience. Now they sell out 1,000-seat venues. More than 25,000 people have seen their shows thus far, in various cities.

Correctiv, a German nonprofit newsroom, turns its investigations into theater performed by professional actors. Editor in chief Jean Peters says Correctiv is building a network of 50+ theaters across Europe to distribute journalistic productions. Correctiv’s publisher, David Schraven, estimated that each two-hour theater performance is “equivalent to 3.6 million seconds spent on TikTok, but with a much bigger impact.”

These projects follow in the tradition of Pop-Up Magazine, which launched in California in 2009 and hosted sold-out shows for tens of thousands of people around North America until closing in 2023 after the pandemic devastated their business. Diario Vivo, Correctiv and others are now reviving the live journalism movement.

Nonprofit Newsrooms Can Thrive

Five non-profit news leaders shared strategies that are actually working:

• ProPublica has 90,000 individual donors, ensuring that they’re not relying on any one rich person’s whims. They’re on eleven different platforms and have partnered with hundreds of publishers, from the New York Times to NPR. They’re now developing a Local Reporting Network.
• The 19th‘s founder and CEO Emily Ramshaw raised a $30 million endowment in six months. She started out by sending 100 cold messages per week to wealthy people. She targeted non-traditional news philanthropists like women’s rights donors. Now she’s aiming to raise a total of $100 to $200 million to put the organization on strong footing for the long run. She joked that her $75 Instagram verification and $1,000 LinkedIn Pro accounts were her most valuable investments for donor cultivation.
• The Center for Investigative Reporting merged with Mother Jones to expand from documentary film and audio to a broader digital media portfolio. CEO Monika Bauerlein said the newsroom hit 50 million video views in the first three months of 2026. Her advice to nonprofit leaders: “Get over your attachment to how you used to do things.”
• Memphis-based MLK50 has a tagline of “Justice Through Journalism.” They pursue stories with a direct financial impact on the lives of locals, like businesses profiting from the poor. They belong to two organizations that support hundreds of independent newsrooms: the Institute for Nonprofit News and the Local Independent Online News publishers.

AI That Actually Helps Reporters

The Lenfest Institute’s two-year fellowship program has embedded AI engineers across the country. More than 50 projects are now in development across 11 metro newsrooms.

Kevin Hoffman, an AI Engineer at The Philadelphia Inquirer, said he was surprised how quickly some projects have taken flight. With AI assistance, development that would once have taken a year can now be done in a few months.

• The Philadelphia Inquirer has been publishing for more than 190 years, but their archives have always been tricky to navigate. So they launched Dewey to make it easy for staffers to find anything. They also built Scout, a local media aggregator that helped reporters cut down the 15 hours a week they spent gathering info for local newsletters. Rather than just scraping what they needed, they sought permission from local publishers.
• The Seattle Times built an AI tool that transcribes city council meetings and automatically notifies beat reporters when their topics come up. They also developed an AI prospecting tool for their sales team. One salesperson used the tool to find a new advertiser, then pitched and closed a deal the same day.

One Journalist. Five Videos a Week

Dave Jorgensen, who built the Washington Post’s TikTok account into one of the most-followed in the industry, left last year to launch Local News International, a video startup. Jorgensen researches, scripts, shoots, and edits five videos a week. Each takes a full day, including extensive research and fact-checking.

He and a team of former Washington Post collaborators hit 330,000 YouTube subscribers within 10 months. His most-viewed video: a 30-second clip about negotiations over Egyptian rockets, with 45 million views.

Revenue comes from YouTube ads, brand partnerships, and video strategy consulting. Jorgensen has a knack for explaining the news with a light touch. “Humor is a really powerful tool,” Jorgensen said, “because it’s getting people important information… they might never have clicked on or engaged with.”

Hype Literacy for Journalists

A group of international researchers focusing on “hype studies” challenged popular narratives around AI. They analyzed 231 AI benchmarks and 138 model releases in 2025. They found that most AI benchmarks aren’t independent measures. They’re company self-tests. 63% of benchmarks were used by only a single model, and 41% by only one company. The researchers questioned whether journalists should accept AI companies’ metrics at face value, rather than developing independent assessments.

Because hype centers around claims about the future, it’s hard to critique. You can’t fact-check far-off predictions, but you can identify inflated claims and point out hidden assumptions. The toolkit helps detail how hype shapes public perception, and how journalists can step out of the hype cycle.

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps.

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