Perugia Journalism Insights: 2025 Trends for Business Leaders
Every year in April, Perugia, Italy, becomes the newsroom of global journalism. Thousands of journalists, editors, media thinkers and technologists gather for the International Journalism Festival (IJF), one of the most influential events in the media calendar.
This year, the conversations in Perugia weren’t just about journalism but the future of the media, information, leadership, and public trust. And if you’re in a position of influence in business, government, or public affairs, what’s happening in journalism should be on your radar.
In 2025, journalism’s most significant challenges are becoming universal leadership issues for businesses and government alike:
How do you build trust in a skeptical world?
How do you harness AI without losing credibility?
How do you communicate effectively when your audience is scattered, distracted, or tuned out?
Here’s what every senior leader needs to know.
1. AI Is Rewriting the Rules—And Leadership Needs to Catch Up
Artificial Intelligence and GenAI were dominant themes in Perugia. Not in a theoretical, someday-soon sense, but in the here-and-now of daily newsroom operations.
As an example, newsrooms around the world are today using AI to:
Generate article summaries
Translate content in real time
Tag and archive video/audio content
Analyse audience behavior
Even draft story templates.
The upside is speed, scale, and personalisation. The downside? Misinformation, hallucinations, and the risk of losing the human touch or not including context are critical for people to make informed decisions and develop trust.
How AI is impacting and disrupting media and journalism is a subject that affects us in strategy and communications, and I’ll be debating with freelance journalist, newsroom consultant and journalism trainer Laura Oliver (who was in Perugia) and Hans-Petter (HP) Dallen, IBM’s Business Executive for AI in EMEA, as part of Folgate Advisors AI Month.
This webinar will take place on Wednesday, 23 April at 15.00 (UK Time). To sign up, click my LinkedIn post below and complete the online form.
2. Trust Is the Most Valuable—and Fragile—Asset
Trust, or the lack of it, is an issue that affects us all. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer painted a sobering picture: 61% of people worldwide feel a sense of grievance toward major institutions. Trust in media? Hovering at 50% and falling in many international markets.
Even more concerning:
63% say they struggle to distinguish real journalism from content designed to mislead.
That confusion is happening at the intersection of social media, AI, and information overload—and it affects more than news organisations. It’s hitting businesses, governments, and NGOs alike.
I remember the days in the early 2000s when media outlets invested in the creation of user-generated-content teams who spent time finding real stories which they could verify and then publish with context. Today, well, for the last eight to ten years, content online has been challenging to verify and issue that is becoming even more difficult with AI being used by ‘actors’ to negatively influence perceptions and opinions not just of governments but of businesses and individuals.
How businesses and their communications teams and advisers react will be even more critical as when continue to move into unchartered media territory.
3. The Collapse of Traditional Traffic Is a Signal for All Sectors
Another major headline from IJF 2025: Social media no longer reliably drives traffic to news sites, an issue that has been raised in the past by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism Annual Report. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter) have reduced external linking. AI assistants now answer questions without sending users to source material.
That collapse in referral traffic has forced newsrooms to reinvent how they reach people. Some have invested in:
Direct relationships (newsletters, apps, SMS updates)
Community-building tools
Compelling video/audio content
Platform-specific storytelling (e.g., TikTok, Reels)
The parallel is clear. Businesses and governments can’t rely on a single channel—social media, SEO, or third-party apps. Like media organisations, organisations must build deeper, more direct relationships with their audiences.
The platforms that they choose need to be able to support fact over fiction.
4. Storytelling Is Now a Strategic Skillset
I’ve said this for many years, but how organisations, businesses or governments are perceived is down to the real-life experience of audiences, the quality of their storytelling, and how relatable this is to the audience.
How human, engaging, transparent and trustworthy an organisation’s storytelling is will shape, or not, how they are perceived and the trust and reputation that their audiences will give them.
For media, long-form storytelling is becoming less common, primarily because it secures less engagement and retention. Instead, newsrooms are getting creative with:
Short-form vertical videos
Podcasts and voice notes
Interactive explainers
Live Q&As and comment blocks
Multilingual, multi-platform storytelling
This is more than a format change—it’s a mindset shift to reach audiences whose attention span has steadily dropped.
PRs and strategic communicators need to invest more time in thinking like storytellers - aligned to simple, engaging narratives, not just spokespeople. Content should be explicit, visual, and built for the platforms where your stakeholders spend time. The message may be profound, but the delivery must meet modern expectations.
5. Audience Behavior Has Changed—for Good
One concern raised at IJF 2025: News avoidance is rising. People are overwhelmed, anxious, and distrustful. Many opt out of news or stick to platforms that confirm their views. We’ve known this for many years, and it is an issue that needs to be addressed. We need to see how AI is leveraged to retain audiences.
This matters for public engagement across the board. Whether rolling out a national campaign or managing an organisational shift, your audience might not be listening as they used to. Media outlets have known about this for quite some time, and communicators need to learn more from journalists and their media outlets.
Some organisations and their communications advisers already understand and shape their comms based on an understanding of audience fatigue, for which they simplify their messages and use a trusted messenger who is not the CEO.
Equally, they engage with audiences not just on email but on more personable broadcast platforms like WhatsApp, YouTube or even Instagram if the platform is relevant to the brand and they can maintain control and trust.
6. Collaboration Is the New Competitive Advantage
Faced with shrinking budgets and massive complexity, media outlets have been partnering more than ever. They’re co-funding investigations, sharing tools, and forming alliances with NGOs and tech companies.
They are becoming critical at hosting events and private dinners at which they can convene decision-makers- events for which consultancies charged a hefty fee. Outlets like The Financial Times have their Strategies team that delivers counsel to media outlets.
Thinking collaboratively unlocks value and can enhance trust. In a fractured-attention economy, sharing the stage can amplify your impact.
The Bottom Line: Journalism’s Struggle Is a Mirror
The Perugia Journalism Festival showed us that the media industry is grappling with the very same pressures that businesses and governments now face, such as the disruption that AI is enabling and the impact of the current trust-deficient audience. This is forcing many organisations to reassess how they communicate and engage with their audiences and stakeholders.
What’s happening in media is bigger than journalism. It reflects the information economy in which we all live and lead. The leaders who adapt to these shifts—who lead with clarity, transparency, and a sense of responsibility—will not only survive this transformation. They’ll lead it.
What You Can Do Now
Join our webinar and learn how AI is transforming the newsroom and business of news, changing the business of communications.
