Poisoned chalice or strategic opportunity? Navigating AI for independent newsrooms
Sat 18 April 2026
14:00
Free
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AI is sweeping through newsrooms around the world, promising productivity and scale. But, for smaller organisations, that promise can feel like a poisoned chalice, bringing ethical dilemmas that cut to the core of journalism’s mission. This panel will examine critical questions of autonomy and resource dependency. How can publishers harness AI without becoming high-paying hostages to dominant providers? Can they build language-aware models rooted in their own proprietary data, and do so without breaking the bank? As traditional platforms decline, and search engine relevance rapidly diminishes, we’ll look at innovative distribution and discovery models that smaller newsrooms must adopt to secure their futures and ensure their journalism thrives.
Moderated by Will Church.
Organised in association with Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Modified more than a month ago
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Will Church
Will Church is Director of Media Freedom Programmes at the Thomson Reuters Foundation. In his 12 years at the Foundation, Will has helped to develop a comprehensive media industry support programme working with journalists, newsrooms and the wider ecosystem, using the Foundation’s combined expertise in media and law. Previously, as Head of Programmes and a project manager, he has overseen and run a portfolio of projects and strategic relationships in more than 60 countries, particularly in the Global South and emerging economies, with partners ranging from multilateral organisations, foundations and private institutions, to government agencies, NGOs, media companies and journalists.
Irene Jay Liu
Irene Jay Liu is Director of AI, Emerging Technology & Regulation at the International Fund for Public Interest Media. She previously led the Google News Lab in the Asia-Pacific region and was an investigative reporter and data editor at Reuters, where she was a 2017 Pulitzer finalist in the national reporting category. Earlier, she was a reporter at the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong and the Times Union in Albany, New York and taught data-driven investigative journalism at the University of Hong Kong and Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Paul McNally
Paul McNally is an award-winning journalist and media entrepreneur with 20 years of experience starting companies in AI, podcasting and community radio. He started Develop AI, an AI consultancy which has trained and assisted hundreds of journalists from around the world on how to create AI prototypes, build AI ethical policies and use AI tools. He was a Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 2016 where he focused on using tech to improve the business models of public interest media. McNally is also the founder of Develop Audio, home to the podcast Alibi and an organisation that produces audio of the highest quality with a focus on social justice, human rights and corruption. He started and ran the successful non-profit Citizen Justice Network that trained community paralegals to be radio journalists across Africa. He has won 16 awards and has worked extensively as an investigative journalist on stories involving assassinations, HIV, disinformation and wrongful convictions. He is the author of the influential book, The Street, published by Pan Macmillan, on police corruption & torture in South Africa.
Sannuta Raghu
Sannuta Raghu is an award-winning Indian journalist and television producer. She heads Scroll's AI Lab for News and Journalism. She and her colleagues are building Factivo, a versioning platform to repurpose text news articles into formats and interfaces - according to the information needs of users. Her work in AI implementation lays emphasis on creating workflows which are ‘fidelity-to-source’ and ‘fidelity-to-fact.’ Since 2016, she has built, shaped and scaled Scroll’s digital video newsroom – creating news products for platforms with 6 million to 200 million users. Sannuta is a Journalist Fellow (2025) at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford, and an ICFJ Knight fellow 2024-2025. She speaks Hindi, English, Marathi, Kannada, Konkani and Gujarati, and listens to Indian classical music on loop.
Festival Internazionale del Giornalismo
Il Festival Internazionale del Giornalismo di Perugia è un evento annuale che riunisce professionisti dei media, esperti di comunicazione e appassionati di informazione da tutto il mondo. Si svolge nel centro storico di Perugia e offre conferenze, dibattiti, workshop e opportunità di networking sui temi più rilevanti del giornalismo contemporaneo.