The future of journalism in conversation

In April, at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, four Judges of the European Press Prize sat on stage and talked about the state of the journalistic profession. Not with careful, rehearsed answers, but with the kind of directness that comes from people who have been doing this work for a long time and have thought hard about where it is going.

The conversation has stayed with us. As we get ready for Lisbon on 3 June, where the 2026 Winners will be announced, we wanted to share some of what was said as it connects directly to what the Lisbon programme is about and why we built it the way we did.

Adapting without losing what matters

The panel opened with a question about pressure: is journalism adapting fast enough to the forces pulling at it from all sides?

Cristian Lupșa pushed back on the framing from the start. “Racing to adapt should not be a strategy as a way to ensure survival,” he said. His concern was specific: that a race to adapt risks becoming a race to the bottom, where well-resourced media organisations grow more dominant, the newsrooms that already get grants get more grants, and the community-oriented or niche journalism that is hardest to fund gets left further behind. What he would rather see, he said, is journalism optimising for solidarity and sharing rather than survival.

Veronika Munk took a longer view, grounded in her own experience. She spent nearly two decades at large Hungarian news organisations before the political pressure became impossible, walked out with her colleagues, and helped build something new. The same happened at Denník N in Slovakia a decade earlier. Her point was not abstract: “Good journalism finds its way to its audience, ultimately.” Audiences in Hungary had spent 16 years watching their media restricted. When Peter Magyar spoke at rallies about freeing the media, she said, it got the loudest applause. That, to her, is evidence that sticking to the core values of journalism, being fair, balanced, impartial and transparent, is not naivety. It is a strategy.

Paul Radu agreed that journalism was doing its job. The problem is reach. “We are in tune with the public. We understand what the problem is and we perform really great journalism. The issue is we don’t have the numbers, we don’t have the reach.” His answer is to go beyond journalism, to connect investigative reporting to film, television, gaming, to inspire more people to become investigators and to build infrastructure others can use. Not to make money from it, he was clear about that, but to show that honest journalism pays off for society and to scale up from there. Hungary proved it works, he said. The problem is it took 16 years.

Clara Jiménez Cruz, Co-founder of Maldita.es, a Spanish nonprofit built around fighting disinformation and promoting information integrity, brought an interesting angle into the discussion. From her position within the world of fact-checking she has watched the fact-checking world navigate the same pressures as the rest of journalism, and her view is that it is better placed than most to adapt. The fact-checking community outside the US, she said, has been innovative from the very beginning in how it does the work and how it delivers it and measures impact across different audiences and markets. Fact-checkers are already evolving into platform accountability investigators, and that is a natural path. But she also said something more uncomfortable: journalism may need to do more advocacy, to work with prosecutors and legislators in ways that the profession has traditionally resisted. On platform accountability specifically, she argued, it may be the only way to create real impact.

Who gets to define excellence?

The second part of the conversation was harder. As journalism changes, who decides what good journalism looks like? And what does that mean for how we judge it?

Cristian was direct about how much his thinking on this has shifted. “I thought five years ago when I started judging for the European Press Prize that this was an easy question. It’s no longer an easy question, at least not for me.” The daily reality of excellence in Moldova is completely different from Spain. The same words mean different things across cultures. “We use the same language but we mean different things.” His conclusion was not that this is a problem to be solved but a conversation to be kept open, and he asked a question that has stayed with us: can we bring the public into the judging process? If journalism is supposed to make a difference in people’s lives, is there a way to actually learn from audiences about whether it did?

Veronika’s answer was about flexibility. Her 15-year-old daughter wants to learn about the world in three-minute explainers from her peers. That is not a failure of journalism. It is a different kind of journalism, and the people judging it need to understand it and be open to it.

Clara raised something that will feel familiar to anyone who reads a lot of submitted work. The things submitted look more and more alike. Long articles, long investigations, always in writing. “There’s never a podcast or many other forms of journalism.” She is thinking more about what gets missed because of that convergence. And she said something else: over the years, the human factor has become increasingly significant to how she judges. “It’s become especially significant to me how much something moves me. I’ve cried with some of the shortlist work this year, to say the least.” That, she said, is partly because the wider world has detached itself so much from emotion and empathy that when a piece of journalism finds it, it stands out completely.

Paul returned to the question of the back end. The finished article is the front end. What very often matters more is what it took to get there: the editing, the fact-checking, the legal process, the constraints journalists were working under in their particular country or context. “In Switzerland, you can’t really use leaked banking data. That’s considered a criminal offense.” Understanding what it took to do the work, given those constraints, is part of what the judging process tries to do.

On our way to Lisbon

We did not design the European Press Prize Lisbon 2026 programme as a direct response to the Perugia conversation. But reading back through the notes from that panel and looking at what we had built for 3 June, the connections were clear.

The day programme at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation is called Collective conscience: A case for the human perspective. It opens with a live journalism performance by Stéphane Horel and Raphaëlle Aubert from Le Monde, the coordinators of the Forever Lobbying Project, one of this year’s shortlisted works and a piece that has been decades in the making. It is a reminder that some of the most important journalism takes time.

Another conversation that reflects this year’s themes of collaboration and collective thinking is On collaborations, moderated by 2026 Migration Journalism nominee Lydia Emmanouilidou of Solomon. Bringing together Elisa Simantke of paper trail media, Lisa Kreutzer of andererseits and Sofia Cherici from the team behind Scrap Wars, the panel explores how journalists increasingly work across borders, organisations, disciplines and formats as a practical necessity and a way of strengthening public-interest reporting itself. Three different models of working together, and three different answers to what collaboration actually means in practice. Given what Cristian said about freelancers in Romania and across Europe holding multiple jobs just to stay in the field, that last model is not a footnote.

The team from Civio, María Álvarez del Vayo, Carmen Torrecillas and Adrián Maqueda, will then take the room inside their shortlisted investigation Mole or Cancer?, a piece about an AI diagnostic tool that missed one in three melanomas. Their session is about what happens when technology is at the centre of the story and the journalism has to be rigorous enough to match it. It connects directly to what Clara said in Perugia about fact-checking as an investigative skill, and about the difference between automating journalism and doing it.

The morning closes with three talks on covering human suffering. Nidžara Ahmetašević and Andrew Connelly will speak about reporting on Bosnia’s mine-laden migration route. Ana Patrícia Silva, our 2024 Laureate, will share her latest work with women in Portuguese prisons. Bastian Berbner, Maud Effting and Willem Feenstra will reflect on what it meant to report on Gaza without being able to be there, one of the more difficult editorial questions of the past two years. Clara’s point about the human factor in journalism, about the pieces that move you, will be in the room for all three of those talks.

What Perugia pointed toward

Something Veronika said in Perugia is worth returning to. Real innovation in journalism is not about technology. It is about mindset, about building trust with audiences and finding ways to remain financially independent. Without that foundation, independent journalism does not hold together regardless of the tools available.

The questions that came up in Perugia do not have clean answers. Who gets to define excellence? How do you judge fairly across 48 countries and dozens of journalistic cultures? How do you scale journalism’s reach without losing what makes it worth reading? The European Press Prize Lisbon 2026 programme does not immediately resolve those questions but it puts the people best placed to work through them in the same room.

Some of them are on the 2026 Shortlist. Some of them helped shape it. All of them are doing the work.

The European Press Prize Lisbon 2026 programme opens on 3 June at 11:30 with Collective conscience, setting the tone for conversations around journalism, responsibility and public trust.

In the evening, guests are welcomed back from 18:00 before Mensagem de Lisboa presents Lisbon Live, a performance that leads into the European Press Prize Lisbon 2026 evening programme and celebration of this year’s Nominees, Winners and Runners-up.

See the full programme and register here.