Sharon Moshavi, the president of the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), recently joined the Ink and Insights podcast for a wide-ranging conversation on the future of journalism and the evolving information ecosystem.
The interview, hosted by author and storyteller Sumit Sharma Sameer, touched on the growing role of AI in both enhancing and undermining journalistic work, the importance of audience-centric innovation and why young reporters must build subject-matter and tech fluency to stay resilient in the industry.
Moshavi also discussed how AI-powered disinformation is reshaping public discourse and why forensic analysis must become a core newsroom tool. While acknowledging the collapse of legacy business models and the challenges of confronting misinformation at scale, she expressed optimism about experimentation, collaboration and the next generation’s ability to lead with creativity.
Below are key excerpts from the conversation.
Q: With AI and automation entering the newsroom in today's context, what excites you most and what keeps you up at night?
Moshavi: What excites me is the workflow piece – it’s the doing more with less. Most newsrooms these days, with the exception of a few big global ones, are under-resourced. Most newsrooms have very few people. The business model for journalism has really, really collapsed in most parts of the world. That has created a resource problem. And so AI has the potential to provide a lot of resources. It's not about getting rid of people's jobs. I mean, there are not gonna be journalism jobs if we don't solve the business model and the resource issues. So it's a way to protect journalism.
On the negative side, what keeps me up at night are several things. One is disinformation, right? You can do disinformation at scale, at warp speed with AI, and that is very challenging. The other is all of the AI training models are training on journalistic content. Most news organizations, there's a few big ones who have signed deals with the AI companies to pay for their content, but most of the content is being given away for free, and that's something that we're looking at. How can we change that?
And the second problem with that is not just, oh, I'm giving it for free, but there's all these ancillary issues. We have issues now where websites are being crawled by so many AI bots that they're crashing. So now your website cost just went up. And the other thing, which is probably a bigger thing, is that a lot of news is found by search. And I'm sure anybody listening to this, and you've done it and I've done it, which is you search something, you're going to the AI summary. And so links are not getting clicked on. So we've already seen news publishers, their traffic going down by 20 to 30%. So these are the things that from an AI perspective are really challenging. Again, there's more, on both sides, but that's in summary.
Q: At ICFJ, you are helping journalists navigate a rapidly changing media landscape. What's one innovation you think every newsroom should embrace right now?
Moshavi: I'll go back to what I call forensic analysis, and it really goes to uncovering disinformation. Disinformation, as we know, has become a huge issue. We have an incredibly polluted information landscape. And I think journalists' ability to deal with this landscape is enormously, enormously important.
So innovating…how do we better effectively reach audiences in this environment and truly engage with them in completely different ways? That's one area. The other area around disinformation is being able to understand where it's coming from. It's not enough to do whack-a-mole. There are often nodes of disinformation: How do we identify, investigate those nodes and how they're amplified? And then how do we use that information to change the landscape and change the narrative?
Q: When you think about the future of journalism, what gives you the most hope?
Moshavi: What gives me the most hope is that there are people trying to do things so differently. There are people who really are committed to a better news landscape, a better information ecosystem where we do want the facts. We do want to understand.
People are trying new things, and I think that's incredibly important. [...] One thing I love about the work that we do through ICFJ, and now will happen through ICFJ+, is providing the room and the resources and the peers from different disciplines to experiment.
We need to experiment and try new things…I do see a number of people who really want to try to figure it out. To build a better mousetrap, if you will.
Q: What's your advice to young journalists who want to make a difference but feel overwhelmed by the state of the industry right now?
Moshavi: That is a great question. I would say build up your skills in one area…Don't try to do everything. I think that is where people get overwhelmed. But pick a topic that you can become a subject matter expert in.
I think back to the days of the generalist, too. I was a generalist, and most journalists have been. And as I like to say, we know a little about a lot of things. And I think understanding a few areas deeply, and then you can sort of use that as a riffing-off point to then look at things, drill down and then more. And so I think that would be an incredibly useful thing for people to do.
The second thing is to build up your innovation skills. Build up AI…You've got to learn AI. You've got to understand it, understand what it can do, what it cannot do, where the dangers are. I think that is absolutely crucial for the next generation of journalists.
Q: What's one legacy you hope to leave behind, not just as a leader, but as someone who's spent a lifetime championing truth and storytelling?
Moshavi: I think the legacy I would like to leave behind is that reality does matter…There are different perspectives and we all live our truth, but I still do believe there may not be a single truth, but a fact is still a fact.
And there's a former, he's passed now, a senator in the U.S. back in the day named Daniel Patrick Moynihan. And he once said, "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. They're not entitled to their own facts." And I would love to help restore that. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and there is no such thing as absolute and ultimate truth. But, a phone is a phone. My AirPods are AirPods. I would like to get us there.
And I would like to be remembered as somebody who tried to push people to think outside the box when it comes to journalism – that we cannot trade in what we've always done, and we need to be willing to think differently. And I think only then are we going to get to that world I like where facts reign.