Connection, collaboration and trust: what journalism still depends on

At the heart of the European Press Prize Lisbon 2026 was a belief that quality journalism is strengthened through conversation. Throughout the Collective conscience: A case for the human perspective programme in Lisbon, journalists from across Europe gathered to share experiences, challenge assumptions and reflect on the responsibilities their work carries in a time of political uncertainty, technological change and growing pressure on public trust. 

Some were discussing artificial intelligence. Others were talking about cross-border investigations, environmental reporting, migration, accessibility, or the war in Gaza. Yet beneath the variety of topics was a shared conviction: journalism may be changing rapidly, but its value still depends on human judgement, human curiosity, and human connection.

At a time when newsrooms are navigating technological disruption, shrinking resources and growing political pressure, the conversations in Lisbon offered something more useful than predictions. They offered insight into what journalists are already doing to adapt.

Collaboration is becoming journalism’s infrastructure

The day began with a reminder that many of today’s biggest stories are simply too large for one reporter or one newsroom to tackle alone. 

Stéphane Horel, Raphaëlle Aubert and Jose Miguel Calatayud from The Forever Lobbying Project, a cross-border collaboration on PFAS polluting Europe that has been decades in the making, vividly introduced their topic to our audience with a live journalism performance.

The first minutes of the live journalism performance were spent with eyes closed, listening to the sounds of forever chemicals.

After, during a panel moderated by Solomon’s Lydia Emmanouilidou, journalists from a range of collaborative projects reflected on what it takes to work across organisations, countries and disciplines. Their experiences varied widely, from international investigations involving dozens of media partners to smaller collaborations between freelancers, but many of the challenges sounded familiar.

“Sometimes it is a miracle that some journalism actually gets done,” Emmanouilidou observed.

For Sofia Cherici, part of the team behind Scrap wars, collaboration began with something deceptively simple: a rumour. As the story grew, so did the need for journalists with different expertise, local knowledge and skills. What started organically eventually required coordination, structure and trust.

Elisa Simantke, senior investigative editor at paper trail media, described a different reality: massive international investigations built around datasets so large that no single newsroom could realistically analyse them alone. In these projects, collaboration is not an added benefit, it is the only way the reporting can happen.

Yet the conversation went beyond logistics. Lisa Kreutzer, editor-in-chief of the Austrian publication andererseits, argued that collaboration also requires a willingness to rethink how journalism itself is organised.

As an inclusive newsroom where journalists with and without disabilities work together, andererseits approaches partnerships through the lens of accessibility from the outset. That means considering not only how stories are produced but also who is able to participate in producing them.

“The foundation of journalism is often built around hustle, competition and a certain way of working,” Kreutzer explained. “That excludes a lot of people.”

Her point resonated beyond accessibility. Again and again, speakers returned to the idea that good collaboration depends on creating structures that allow different perspectives, experiences and skills to contribute meaningfully.

To conclude, Elisa Simantke noted that journalists have become more hesitant to share their work in big Signal groups. She encouraged people to not shy away from doing so as informal places like this create new and exciting opportunities for collaboration.

Making technology understandable

Questions of technology surfaced repeatedly throughout the programme, nowhere more clearly than in a presentation from the team at Civio.

Journalists María Álvarez del Vayo, Carmen Torrecillas and Adrián Maqueda shared the story behind their shortlisted investigation Mole or cancer?, which examined an AI-powered diagnostic tool used in Spain’s public healthcare system.

Their reporting revealed that the algorithm had been trained almost exclusively on images of white skin and missed nearly one in three melanomas in the only clinical study evaluating its performance. But the presentation was not only about artificial intelligence. It was also about explanation.

A statistic may be accurate, but accuracy alone does not guarantee understanding.

“A percentage tells you something,” the team noted, “but seeing what it represents tells you more.”

Throughout the investigation, Civio combined reporting, data analysis and visual storytelling to help readers understand not just how the system worked but what its limitations meant in practice. The team created visualisations that allowed audiences to place themselves within recognised skin type classifications and see how the algorithm’s shortcomings might affect real people.

At Civio, journalists and developers work side by side from the beginning of an investigation. The graphics are not added at the end to illustrate findings. They are an integral part of the reporting process itself.

The challenge, the team explained, is not simply making complex systems visible. It is simplifying them without turning them into something false.

That balance between complexity and accessibility surfaced elsewhere during the day as well. Whether discussing data investigations, collaborative projects or audience engagement, speakers repeatedly returned to the same question: how do you make difficult realities understandable without flattening them?

Reporting human suffering without reducing people to it

The programme’s final session brought together journalists reflecting on different forms of human suffering: migration routes marked by landmines, women’s experiences inside Portuguese prisons, and life in Gaza during war crimes.

Despite the differences between their subjects, the speakers shared similar concerns.

How do you verify information when access is limited?

How do you report on trauma responsibly?

How do you help audiences connect with distant realities without turning people into symbols?

For Maud Effting and Willem Feenstra, whose investigation What the wounds are telling us won this year’s Distinguished Reporting Award, these questions shaped every stage of their reporting. Unable to work directly inside Gaza, they relied on interviews with doctors and nurses who had worked there, collecting testimony, photographs, medical records and personal accounts to understand what they had witnessed.

The reporting required rigorous verification and difficult ethical decisions about evidence, anonymity and the publication of graphic material.

A different approach emerged in One day in Gaza, a project that followed ordinary people through a single day of their lives during the war. Rather than focusing exclusively on destruction, the reporting documented countless everyday decisions: searching for food, caring for relatives, studying, working, worrying, surviving.

The result was a portrait of a reality that often becomes abstract in international coverage.

Afterwards, Portuguese journalist and 2024 Nominee Ana Patrícia Silva spoke about reporting on women in prison, where overcrowding, separation from children and inadequate access to basic necessities create challenges that often remain invisible to the wider public.

In the closing session, Nidžara Ahmetašević and Andrew Connelly reflected on their work about Bosnia’s abandoned minefields and the lives that are still shaped by them. Their conversation served as a reminder that journalism can also work across timelines. It can help us return to places where the consequences of past decisions continue to shape people’s lives even long after the public attention has moved on.

What united these projects was not their subject matter but their commitment to staying with difficult stories long enough for complexity to emerge.

The future remains human

Across the day, speakers discussed algorithms, leaks, collaborations, prisons, migration routes and war. Yet, the conversations kept returning to people: the communities affected by reporting, the colleagues who make investigations possible, the sources who trust journalists with their stories and the audiences trying to make sense of an increasingly complex world.

If there was a shared lesson from Lisbon, it was that journalism’s future will almost certainly involve more technology, more collaboration and more complexity.

But the work itself remains remarkably familiar.

It still begins with curiosity. It still depends on trust. And it still asks journalists to look closely at realities others might prefer to ignore and help the rest of us understand why they matter.

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.