Perugia highlight: sustaining public interest news in a dicey media market

Speaking: Rawan Damen (Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism)

Credit: Alex Cano #ijf25 via Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-ND 4.0).

Public interest journalism is under siege across the world and news organisations must band together to ensure its survival. That was the top line of a series of back-to-back sessions at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia last week (9 April).

17 speakers looked at the increasingly important role of media hubs, amid the compounded challenges of funding cuts to foreign aid, suffering traditional business models and vulnerable media in exile, in a panel discussion organised by Report for the World (RFTW).

Helping hands

Media hubs offer invaluable funding, resources and connections for news organisations in challenging media markets.

Over the past 18 months, the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) has worked to support vulnerable Palestinian journalists in Gaza. It has to look outside Palestine for support, by working in partnership with Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists, says Raman Damen, director-general, ARIJ.

ARIJ has also successfully connected Palestinian fact-checkers with Arab and international counterparts to combat misinformation about Palestine and Lebanon. Its Gaza investigations, led by executive editor Hoda Osman, required collaboration with international media outlets like Forbidden Stories, the Guardian, Paper Trail, France 24, AFP, and Bellingcat. 

Another is International Media Support (IMS) which helps journalists in more than 30 countries. Programme manager, Che De los Reyes, identified two concrete approaches to strengthen regional media hubs. 

First is addressing dwindling funding by developing alternatives to Western support. IMS is working on a public journalism fund in the Philippines focused on "unlocking local capital" from the private sector and local charities. Similar initiatives are underway in Indonesia, reducing dependence on Western funding sources – a strategy accelerated by the recent USAID funding freeze.

Second is innovation in response to disinformation challenges, particularly in the Philippines, which De los Reyes describes as "patient zero" for disinformation and one of the world's largest consumers of social media. Though there are mixed results.

Collaborating with content creators helps to reach younger audiences, but has exposed creators to threats and abuse like journalists in the country. She reports higher success engaging with tech platforms like TikTok at country and regional levels rather than globally: "They're more responsive that way." 

Dinesh Balliah, director of the Wits Centre for Journalism, also set up the African Investigative Journalism Network, which holds a unique conference for 500 journalists across the continent. This is a rare opportunity for peers to identify joint projects, secure funding support specifically for collaborative work, and create dedicated spaces for cross-border journalism initiatives.

RFTW also funds the placement of journalists in partner newsrooms globally. But what makes this approach distinctive is that it establishes "a common understanding" of the journalists' profiles and capabilities, says director Preethi Nallu. This effectively builds capacity within media organisations while maintaining consistent professional standards across different regions.

Media punching above its weight

It is not like small newsrooms cannot survive and innovate, though. Indeed, there are many cases where the tiny newsrooms have "limited resources, but powerful ideas", says Sannuta Raghu, head of AI lab for news and journalism, at Scroll in India.

Scroll has developed a fully-tested and working, in-house text-to-interface tool to version articles across formats and multiple languages. But Raghu accepts that her newsroom is “among the exceptions, not the norm”.

So it is not ambition that holds such newsrooms back. It is the wider conditions for news, and as Kim Bode, head of revenue development, Newspack, emphasises “shaky tech stacks”.

From her experience working with nearly 300 publishers as a platform for news, she observes that smaller newsrooms are usually founded by journalists rather than business specialists or technologists. 

Bode argues that combining solid technical infrastructure with proven revenue strategies and clear processes enables newsrooms to "drive impact fast and at scale".

Done well, resource-scarce organisations often innovate in response to necessity, adds Noreen Gillespie, director at Microsoft. When supported by a big tech company, news organisations can pivot faster - and Gillespie is overseeing partnerships with the Lenfest Institute in the US and Thomson Reuters Foundation in South Africa.

Throwing money at the problem will not provide a solution either, she cautions. Funding organisations risk "inhibiting the speed of innovation" if not properly responsive to rapidly changing technology. 

Importance of impact

Discontinuation of donor funding is a core concern amongst small news organisations, says Ryan Powell, head of innovation and media business, International Press Institute. He has been researching with RFTW what keeps small media founders up at night. 

Disappearing funding is a key one, but so too are the wider media trends of talent retention and news avoidance. So funders need to do more than simply provide the money these days, they must also consider impact.

Lighthouse Reports is an investigative and project management team for impact-driven journalism, partnering with over 150 media outlets to reach broad audiences.

Impact director, Ariadne Papagapitos, explained that Lighthouse works with media partners for reach and with a wider ecosystem of stakeholders (civil society, campaigners, policymakers, etc.) to build momentum and support findings. The "Poison PR" investigation is a prime example that led to tangible impact such as contract losses for an implicated company.

Then there is climateXchange, which aims to make climate news relevant, addressing news avoidance by focusing on audience needs. One example includes "Planet Plate," a podcast on extinct foods in Indonesia which it grant-funded, with a view to monetise and licence a third season of the show.

Bilal Randeree, chief program officer Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF), says that news organisations need to put their rivalries aside and realise the bigger competition is outside the sector. At the same time, they cannot get complacent and rely on the same "donor darlings".

"While we're fighting for the scraps, those who can make big, swift actions that have massive impacts are getting stronger," he warned.

Criminalising journalism

Impact is also the key metric to gain funding. So what happens when measuring impact becomes complicated, as is the case for exiled media - organisations that cannot report from the countries they are focused on?

Russian exiled media IStories measures its work through documenting war crimes in Ukraine that serve as evidence for international bodies, says Anna Lelik. It also investigates supply schemes for Russian arms production leading to international sanctions and targets its Russian audience with regional, real-life issue reports that garner millions of views.

"It is possible to deliver impactful journalism on the ground while not being necessarily based in the country. It's just important to leverage collaborations and respond to the needs of the local population," explains Lelik. She also says that a strong indicator of impact is when an authoritarian government claims your work is irrelevant.

IStories is labelled as an "undesirable organisation", which means the Russian government has made it a crime to donate to, or fund, its work. The same is true for Iraqi exiled media, Jummar, where its domestic readership (which account for 90 per cent of its readership) are unable to make online payments to the organisation.

Co-founder Aida Al-Kaisa notes a shift in measuring impact due to funding changes, forcing them to consider audiences outside Iraq and different monetisation strategies.

She considers impact as the conversations happening on its platform among young Iraqis about critical issues, the types of engaged individuals (MPs, activists), and tangible change on the ground, such as halting deforestation after their reporting.

Other media professionals can help by engaging in conversations about match funding and amplifying their crowdfunding efforts through their networks, reaching potential funders. She is now exploring creative monetisation strategies outside of Iraq and learning from others' experiences in this area, including ideas like selling their unique art and designs.

We used an AI transcription tool, Good Tape, and a generativeAI, Gemini, to help write this article before a human edited the final draft

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