Autonomy and collaboration as potential solutions to the challenges of journalism
In a context of varied challenges, journalists seek to avoid catastrophism by focusing on designing solutions.
Participants at two journalism festivals in France shared with the public some strategies for facing the challenges faced by journalism, as reported by the Reuters Institute correspondent.
Journalism currently faces several adversities, namely, maintaining the trust of its audiences (the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer report already pointed to a crisis of trust in information) and convincing them to pay for journalistic products, the dependence on third-party platforms to reach audiences, or the substantial technological changes that jeopardize business models.
From the Festival de L’info Locale and Audiencers Festival, three strategies emerged to deal with this scenario:
joint efforts between various media organizations, where collaboration can be dedicated to objectives such as, for example, greater visibility for small media outlets; or to design solutions to regulate data scraping to feed AI models – which need quality journalism to be trained – in order to increase the costs and legal risks of doing so (cooperation is also the proposal by fact-checking organizations to tackle issues such as a lack of funding);
seeking independence, as far as possible, on the part of newsrooms in relation to platforms. Here, the effort is made to create a direct connection with audiences, through mechanisms belonging to the newsrooms, avoiding dependence on algorithms that change without notice;
choice of tools used (and how) in newsrooms, for example, using AI to create audio versions of news, promoting greater accessibility.
These potential solutions are associated with the pursuit of quality journalism. The independence of news outlets, a value rooted in journalistic tradition, is essential for journalists to perform their duties impartially and objectively. Furthermore, accessibility is an indicator of the ‘information assimilation’ component, which is part of the ‘quality of journalistic information from reception’ dimension of the concept of ‘quality of journalistic information’, according to the measurement instrument developed by the Barómetro para a Qualidade da Informação.
