JournalismAI Festival 2025: Humans Return, Machines Behave (Mostly)
London, UK — After five years of virtual panels and mute-button mishaps, the JournalismAI Festival finally returned in person.
JournalismAI Festival 2025 finally reappeared in physical form in south London,
proving two things: journalism still needs people, and AI still needs supervision.
Journalists, academics and technologists gathered to discuss how
artificial intelligence is reshaping newsrooms—while carefully insisting it is not
replacing journalists, just their free time.
Small Newsrooms, Big AI Ideas
Projects from small and medium-sized newsrooms stretched from
Zimbabwe to Cuba, united by a shared philosophy: don’t build an AI that
does everything badly; build one that does one thing well and doesn’t
embarrass you in public.
AI Editors, Virtual Anchors, and Judgment Without Coffee
Among the highlights was a Swiss newsroom’s AI “companion editor,”
which lives inside the CMS and politely tells journalists when they’re using
too much jargon or drifting from their pitch. It doesn’t write articles, but it
does quietly judge them—essentially replicating an editor, minus the
coffee breath.
Zimbabwe introduced an AI news presenter named Alice, who can replace
an entire production crew and always introduces herself as non-human.
Despite this transparency, some viewers still tried to ask her out,
confirming that technology may advance faster than common sense.
Fact-Checking Governments and Informing Citizens
In the UK, fact-checkers unveiled an AI-powered tool that tracks whether
governments keep their promises. Using large language models and
human reviewers, it neatly categorises pledges as “kept,” “in progress,” or
“enthusiastically forgotten,” saving voters hours of disappointment.
Cuba’s El Toque demonstrated how AI can be less about efficiency and
more about survival. By scraping informal exchange rates from social
media—decoding slang, typos and chaos—the outlet provides vital
economic information to citizens and steady irritation to authorities,
which remains a strong indicator of journalistic success.
From Misinformation Monitoring to Chatbots With Personality
Elsewhere, AI was busy scraping public data, monitoring misinformation
so humans don’t have to doom-scroll Telegram, and powering chatbots
tailored to specific communities—some speaking local languages, others
with the personality of a fictional aunt who knows everything.
What Major News Organisations Learned
Larger news organisations shared their own lessons. The
Financial Times learned that AI boosts engagement but that disclaimers
can apparently hurt feelings. The Guardian focused on letting staff
experiment without panicking. The BBC moved slowly and reassured
everyone.
In India, editors discovered that audiences still prefer human presenters
over AI avatars—a finding warmly welcomed by people with faces.
Training Noodles AI Learn more of what AI can do for you
Strengthen your digital journalism Use digital tools and resources that can help you find, verify, and tell engaging stories.A free online course created by JournalismAI in collaboration with Texty, with support from the Google News Initiative.
This course builds on our Introduction to Machine Learning (see below) and shows journalists how to put ML into practice in their reporting. You’ll learn, step by step, how to train a machine learning model to identify and classify images across large datasets no prior technical experience required.
The Future of Journalism and Artificial Intelligence
The overall takeaway was refreshingly sober: AI works best when it
handles repetitive tasks, highlights useful patterns, and stays firmly under
human control.
The future of journalism, it turns out, isn’t machines taking over—it’s
journalists using smarter tools to do their jobs, while making sure the
robots don’t start pitching story ideas.
By K. Sayuri
LINKS TO SOURCE : https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/journalismai-festival-2025-fourprojects-caught-our-eye-and-few-rising-trends https://www.journalism.co.uk/12-lessons-fromnews-outlets-on-the-cutting-edge-of-ai/
