So, goes the proverbial question in the media community, where does journalism go from here? It’s become the all-consuming existential dilemma for those of us in various fields of the professional media universe.
In whatever media space you are – journalism practice, content creation, development support, research and scholarship, training and academia, financing – we all obsess endlessly about the present and the future of media in times of digital disruption, patronised by a generation of consumers who are spoilt for choice.
In gathering after gathering, the future – let me say fate – of journalism is digested and debated with equal measures of hope and despair. You hear a lot of calls to come up with new business and revenue “models” to fortify the commercial viability of the industry.
Yet the very notion of a “model” has itself become questionable. At its core, a model assumes a degree of predictability and an element of durability.
However, we live in volatile and fascinatingly chaotic times. How so?
Artificial intelligence (AI) I has transformed the terms of the media’s engagement with technology. Algorithms are as emancipating and liberating as they are suffocating and oppressive. Audiences are harder to pin down than ever. Some of yesterday’s norms that were seemingly settled animate some of today’s most viciously contested and divisive ideological duels. Systems whose institutions we took for granted and (often grudgingly) admired have all but thrown us under the geopolitical bus.
In short, we can run but cannot hide from the shabby realities that define our moment.
For all the exciting prospects that technology opens for journalism, here’s the rub when it comes to AI-mediated information.
One speaker observed during the 2025 Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on 20-24 November, that you’re going to get news or content and information that are curated for you personally. The positive part is that this will help to keep “noise” out of your feed and information pipeline. The negative part is that within such an echo chamber, people and communities become more polarised, increasingly retreating into conversation circles that only confirm their biases.
That said, and before we get accustomed to stories of gloom, there was plenty of evidence during GIJC that journalism generally may not be as well as we would like it to be – but it is alive and kicking in defiance off all the odds stacked against it.
My key takeaway from GIJC was that the defining success factor for today’s journalism is experimentation. Journalism entreprises that have survived and thrived, whether for-profit or non-profit, are those that have embraced a culture of experimentation in their choice of topics to cover, methods of storytelling, forms of content delivery, and avenues of audience engagement.
Approaching journalism as a field experiment turns every assignment or story/reporting project into an innovation in its own right. That’s the way to keep journalism exciting, every story fresh, reporting liberated from formula, and audiences interested.
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Dr George Lugalambi is the Executive Director of the African Centre for Media Excellence.
