As I write this, I’m flying home from the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy. Now in its 19th year, it’s an annual meeting of newsrooms, journalists, and news professionals from all over the world.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was blown away by the whole event.

Perugia in itself is a beautiful city: ancient, cobblestoned alleyways weave their way between the old city walls, revealing unexpected views, storefronts, restaurants, street vendors, and gardens. These days, I’m settled into a sedentary life in the Philadelphia suburbs, and I found myself walking a great deal more than I would even in a city like New York. The Italian tradition is to eat dinner far later than in America, so it was the norm for me to find my way back to my hotel far past midnight, buzzing from interesting conversations throughout the day. My legs were sore; I was hopelessly jet-lagged; I wandered dark alleyways in the vague hope that I was heading in the right direction; it was fantastic.

There’s something about that far-removed context, the beautiful surroundings, the breadth of journalists present, and our collective physical state that led to more honest conversations. At most conferences, I always have the sense that someone is out to sell me something; here, when someone attempted a pitch it stuck out like a sore thumb. The sense that people were holding back to maintain their newsrooms’ professional reputations and appease their comms teams was also mercifully missing.

In the panels and talks, people were willing to share their failures at least as readily as their successes, and I was particularly taken by a panel on AI deepfake detection that went into the computer science and discussed the practicalities, rather than gearing itself for a surface-level introductory audience.

The pure journalism track — which comprises almost all of the Festival — was similarly wonderful. A panel about media censorship in Israel and Ukraine didn’t shy away from the details, revealing a more complex situation in Ukraine in particular than I’ve been hearing from the US press, alongside some specifics about Israeli censorship that I found very surprising. (They have a direct WhatsApp chat with the censor! Who gives them a thumbs up or a thumbs down on stories before publication!)

This year, for the first time, the Festival also held a Product track. The News Product Alliance, where I participate in an AI advisory group, helped to shape it — and I was honored to participate in one of its panels.

My session, with Damon Kiesow and Upasna Gautam (both brilliant people in the field who I felt privileged to present alongside), was about ensuring we use technology in ways that are aligned with our values. As we put it in our description, “every design choice, paywall adjustment, build/buy evaluation, or marketing campaign carries a potential risk of violating journalistic ethics or harming reader trust” — and that’s before you take on the issue of newsrooms trying to model themselves on Silicon Valley business models:

“Social is radically transforming. Search is flatlining. AI continues to rapidly change the web. News organizations that relied on unearned audience windfalls to drive programmatic advertising revenues are in similar straits. It is time for local news organizations to return to their roots: serving local readers and local advertisers and giving up on the dreams of limitless scale and geographic reach which is the pipedream of Silicon Valley and the bête noire of local sustainability.”

Upasna shared a succinct, powerful summary of our key takeaways afterwards on Threads:

1) The false promise of scale:

• Journalism has always been innovative but adopting Silicon Valley’s values of scale, surveillance, and extraction was a false shortcut.
• Tech platforms succeed by commodifying attention but journalism succeeds by earning trust.
• When we embed vendor platforms without scrutiny, we don’t just adopt the tool, but the business model, the values, and the blind spots.

2) There is no such thing as neutral software:

• Software is not neutral. It’s a creative work, just like journalism. It’s shaped by the priorities, privileges, and politics of the people who build it.
• Tech decisions can enable serious harm when teams optimize for growth without understanding community impact.
• It’s not enough to ask if a tool works. We must ask: Who built it? Who benefits? Whose values does it encode?

3) Assumptions are the first ethical risk:

• The highest-leverage activity we have is to relentlessly challenge assumptions. Assumptions hide risks, and audience value should be the north star of every system we build.
• Ask not just what we’re building, but why and for whom. Does it create real value for our audience?
• Systems thinking is a necessity. If you don’t understand how your paywall, CMS, personalization engine, and editorial goals connect, you’re building on sand.

The message seemed to resonate with the room, and plenty of interesting conversations with newsrooms of all sizes followed. My most controversial idea was that newsrooms should join together, as governments and higher educational institutions have in the past, to build open source software that supports newsroom needs and safeguards the duty of care we have to our sources, journalists, and readers in ways that big tech platforms tend not to. To many people in today’s news industry, it feels like a giant leap — but it is possible, and products like the French and German government project Docs are showing the way.

While the Festival now has a Product track, it’s still sorely missing a true Technology track. These are different things: Product is about addressing problems from a human-centered perspective — and using technology to solve them where it makes sense. That’s a mindset journalism urgently needs to embrace. But it hasn’t yet made enough space for the people who make the technology: not Silicon Valley tech companies, but engineers and other technologists who should be treated as domain experts and involved at every level of newsroom strategy, not relegated to a backroom office and handed a list of product requirements. Newsrooms still seem wary of bringing hard technology skills into their strategic circles. That’s extremely shortsighted: every newsroom today lives or dies on the web.

But there were technologists and open source projects in attendance. Notably, representatives from the Mastodon and Bluesky teams were at the Festival. The Newsmast Foundation was also present, incisively taking part in conversations to help newsrooms onboard themselves onto both of them. I got to hang out with them all, connecting with people I’d spoken with but never interacted with in person. Mastodon has undergone a transformation, has doubled its team, and is working on smoothing out some of its rough edges, while not letting go of its core ethos. It’s also beginning to position itself as a European alternative to American social media platforms, with a community-first values system and new services to directly help organizations join the network.

Bluesky, on the other hand, has done an able job of bringing journalists onto its existing social app, and is now hard at work explaining why its underlying protocol matters. Both want to engage with newsrooms and journalists and do the right thing by them. They each have something different to prove: Mastodon that it can be usable and accessible, and Bluesky that it can provide a return to its investors and truly decentralize while holding onto its values. I’m rooting for both of them.

These platforms’ messages dovetail with my own: news can own the platforms that support them. Lots of people at the Festival were worried about the impact of US big tech on their businesses — particularly in a world where tech moguls seem to be aligning themselves with a Presidential administration that has positioned itself as being adversarial to news, journalists, sources, and, arguably, the truth. The good news is that the technology is out there, the values-aligned technologists are out there, and there’s a strong path forward. The only thing left is to follow it.