A few thoughts from Perugia

This year's International Journalism Festival was EPIC and full of needle-shifting, narrative-bending conversations.

I loved our panel with Evan Smith and Mary Walter-Brown about live events and their role in our attention-deprived world. The Texas Tribune Festival and Coda Media, Inc's ZEG Tbilisi Storytelling Festival ?as well as the International Journalism Festival itself are all increasingly important platforms of journalism that publishers can actually control. It was also great to dive into the challenges of AI in the newsroom with Akoto Ofori-Atta , Carolina Guerrero and Dawn Garcia of John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford. And it was an absolute treat to be on stage with this extraordinary, inspirational group of my all time favorite people: Prof. Julie Posetti, Patricia Campos Mello, Branko Brkic and Maria Ressa.

But for me, one of the highlights of Perugia was the conversation that began at this panel hosted by Jesper Doub and Madhav Chinnappa (ex Facebook and ex Google) who gathered a crowd of people for their talk on what went wrong between the platforms and the news industry. I was looking forward to seeing them both reflect on their time at Facebook and Google. My expectation was that of reflection and reckoning. And so, I was disappointed when we got instead what felt like same messaging we've all heard from the platforms before. I won't paraphrase it, but you can see the full session here.

And so I asked a question that went something like this: "Lets zoom out so that we can see the elephant in the room: while you were serving Prosecco to journalists in Perugia (reference to the enormous amount of money tech companies spent on the news industry. To be fair, only tiny amount of it went to prosecco), the companies you worked for were enabling authoritarian regimes that undermine the very structure of the society that enables journalism. What are your reflections on that"?

This question kicked off a conversation that continued through the rest of my time in Perugia, beyond the venue, in the bars and in the streets. I was surprised by the number of people who came up to me and thanked me for saying what they were thinking. I am also grateful to Madhav Chinnappa for continuing to engage on the subject well into the night.

Great as it is to have these conversations in a bar, it is essential to have them publicly. The Big Tech owners are emerging as the most powerful players on the global stage, and journalism is failing at holding them to account.

From the United States to Europe, from Africa to Asia, authoritarian populists are on the rise, elections are undermined, journalists are being silenced and space for free expression is shrinking because the Big Tech has created a world in which only the loudest, nastiest voices can win. It's a successful business model but it's detrimental to democracy.

I was asked to give examples. Here are a few:

• Tech, Tyrants and Us is Coda's multi-part podcast on people around the world whose lives were upended when technology and tyrants teamed up.
• Here's a story on Ukrainians fleeing Russian bombs while battling Facebook and another one on Silicon Valley helping authoritarians
• Here is another one on how Apple and Google let down Navalny
• And another deep dive from Kenya on the outsourcing model upon which Meta has built its global empire.

I can go on and there is so much more on codastory.com but the point is that one of the root causes of the world's problems is that today the biggest tech companies have more money and power than most governments. And they've captured so much of the media industry that's supposed to be reporting on them.

Over the years, and in part because so many fabulous ex colleagues like Madhav or Jesper went to work for the tech companies (no judgement!), journalism industry developed a weird relationship with the Big tech. It's time we stop pretending that we play on the same team. Scale, speed and attention grabbing that the new internet is build on could not be further away from the values of journalism as an institution of liberal democracy. AI is about to make it all worse.

If we, journalists, want to survive, we need to do better at holding power to account and no one is more powerful (and has made themselves more inaccessible) than the billionaires running Big Tech companies of today.

And so many thanks to Christopher Potter and his incredible International Journalism Festival team for providing us with an independent platform where this vital conversation can live in a way that's impactful, thought-provoking and, hopefully, leads to change.

Perfect example of why live events are the future of journalism!