ICFJ President Sharon Moshavi recently joined Interlochen Public Radio News Director Ed Ronco for a public conversation on the state of journalism, hosted by the International Affairs Forum at Northwestern Michigan College.

The discussion, part of the forum’s ongoing series focused on global affairs and press freedom, brought together journalists, students and community members from across northern Michigan. Topics included the erosion of trust in media, the collapse of traditional business models, the growing impact of artificial intelligence and the need for innovation in how journalism is practiced and supported.

Drawing on global insights and audience polling, Moshavi emphasized that while journalism faces serious challenges, there are signs of hope, from new models of community-based reporting to cross-border collaborations and tools to fight disinformation. The event followed a morning session on campus with local reporters focused on strengthening independent journalism at the regional level.

Below are highlights from the conversation.

Q: Do you think trust in national media is rising or falling?

Moshavi: Trust in media is at an all-time low. Gallup’s been measuring this for over 50 years, and we’ve never seen it this low. That’s not just about the media – it reflects broader distrust in U.S. institutions. We’re a polarized country, and that plays into this. People trust their own sources and actively distrust others. The other issue where trust comes in or lack of trust is because of the proliferation of places to get your news. It is not clear. There is no Walter Cronkite. You are looking for your own trusted voice that speaks to you. You're in your own ecosystem and bubble that social media feeds to you. We seek out news less and less, and more and more as it comes to us…

Q. How much do we have to give to places that are trying to set up free press and how much can we learn from places, especially like nascent democracies, as they're starting to build their own free press?

Moshavi: My organization was founded 40 years ago by three journalists. And when they did that in the 80s, the goal was to sort of export American journalism. And that was great for a while. But our model has changed, because the world has changed. And frankly, at this point, I think we have more to learn from the rest of the world than the world does from us. Space for press freedom is as closed as it has ever been globally. The U.S. has fallen in the last couple of years... One of the things that my organization tries to do is build those connections between U.S. journalists and international journalists. We held a roundtable in February with these different communities. And it was pretty eye-opening, I think, for the American journalists to see how much, especially now in the current context we're in, for them to see what they had to learn from the rest of the world.

Q. When you look at the world stage or here in the U.S., what are the things that excite you and give you hope for the future of a free press, for the future of the free flow of accurate information? Who are your celebratory cases out there? Who excites you?

Moshavi: We’re seeing an increase of what I call micro media. You know, one, two, three [people]. It’s sort of the next step from the influencer or news creator, and…they want to produce news. And I think that is really exciting. I do think that it’s more of the future of news. We’ll have some big ones at the top, but a lot of small ones niche-serving specific communities.

One of the things my organization is working to do, and this is what is exciting me right now, is we have a partnership we developed with organizations in South Africa and India to develop what I call critical infrastructure. So it’s the AI tools, it is the forensic analysis to investigate disinformation, it’s j the safety tools. Because nobody’s gonna have the resources to do that on their own.

But we need to have great journalism happening, and we need to have journalism that connects with people happening. I see more experiments like that. And journalism has not always been so great at experimenting, and I think that’s the role of an organization like ours. We provide a place for people to try things.

Q: How does AI challenge the financial future of journalism?

Moshavi: I could do a whole session on AI, but I’ll try to be brief here. AI presents a lot of opportunities for journalists, which I can go into if you’re interested, but on the threat side, it’s a huge threat.

I think it’s going to make the internet look like a walk in the park for news organizations, and that was what sort of killed the business model to begin with. Now you have AI summaries, which I’m sure we all look at when we do a Google search. So click-through rates through Google search have gone down, and Google search is a way a lot of news organizations get their views.

There’s no financial compensation for the content….. except for the very large organizations who have contracts with [AI companies]. The AP, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times is probably about to do one as well. So it is a huge, huge threat. And this is something where, again, the industry, I do fear, is not doing enough to address that head on.

Q: Can you comment on the death of Voice of America? How relevant is it to journalism? That's one phrasing, and I'll read you the other one, because I think the contrast is interesting. What is your opinion on the changes in Voice of America, and how will it affect the world? 

Moshavi: Just to clarify, Voice of America has sister networks, including Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia. I think what’s happening is a shame. They actually do great journalism, and they’re trusted. They produce work in multiple languages that nobody else can afford to do, and their reach has been huge.

We worked with the AP on a story last year about a disinformation campaign targeting migrants, tricking them into coming to the southern border. It had an enormous impact – there were protests outside the embassy in Tijuana. And out of that, Voice of America teamed up with the Mexican reporters to develop a weekly show about migration and about the ruses that were being used to bring you to the U.S. That show reached 60 million people a week. And so, you know, that had a huge impact. And I think the kind of impact we wanna see. So I think it actually did a lot of good in the world.

I was talking to the general counsel for Radio Free Asia last week, a lot of the journalists who work for these outlets are here in the U.S., a lot have fled and been persecuted in their own countries. Their visas now are mostly all going to be pulled away, and so they can't safely go back and so there's going to be a very human cost as well. And I know a lot of these journalists, it's pretty heartbreaking.

Q: Is there a cure for news fatigue? What do you do when you’ve had too much news?

Moshavi: So, I'm gonna put this on the journalists – and I talked about this a bit this morning. This is where I think we need to be fundamentally changing things. People want to make sense of the world. They want actionable news and information, and I think that we as an industry need to be much more aware of that and actually do something about that. It's not about activism. It's about taking something and saying, “Okay, you read this. Here's the number if you want to reach out to any of these organizations, or you want to talk to your local congressman or whatever – here are the numbers, here's the email address,” whatever it is, whatever side of an issue you're on.

And I think part of the research into news fatigue comes a lot from people holding up their hands and saying, “What do I do about it?”… Journalists get news fatigue too. I can't tell you how many journalists are like, “I'm not doing this.” There's a lot of news avoidance as well.

I would say don't completely disengage, but do it at set times. Don't do it right before you go to bed and get agitated – that’s my personal advice. I'm trying to live that. So I think that's important. But, like I said, I think it's incumbent upon journalism – journalists – and this is an area that we're working on a lot: how do we take that and create actionable information?

Watch the full conversation.