Community engagement and funding were also among the issues discussed the meeting organized by Press Forward on Oct. 4 at Carleton University Continue Reading Concern about newsroom AI covered at second Future of Independent Media Summit
AI is “unlikely” to help journalism, and AI-generated summaries will present yet another barrier for news publishers’ ability to reach their audiences, according to technology journalist Paris Marx.
Marx was one of several people gathered at Carleton University, the home of Canada’s first journalism school, where publishers, funders and others invested in the future of journalism shared their ideas and solutions to strengthen the sustainability of the…
Community engagement and funding were also among the issues discussed the meeting organized by Press Forward on Oct. 4 at Carleton University Continue Reading Concern about newsroom AI covered at second Future of Independent Media Summit
AI is “unlikely” to help journalism, and AI-generated summaries will present yet another barrier for news publishers’ ability to reach their audiences, according to technology journalist Paris Marx.
Marx was one of several people gathered at Carleton University, the home of Canada’s first journalism school, where publishers, funders and others invested in the future of journalism shared their ideas and solutions to strengthen the sustainability of the independent media ecosystem.
They called for stronger collaboration and policy support in the face of the surge of AI and tightening budgets.
The summit was meant as a space to confront the challenges of the field through sharing successes, failures and experiments, said Jeanette Ageson, chair of Press Forward’s board of directors. Allan Thompson, co-director of Carleton’s School of Journalism and Communication, followed with a blunt charge, setting the tone for the day: we must focus on saving journalism, not the industry.
Organized by Press Forward, a national association advocating for independent media, the summit pointed toward the future, while many of the concerns filling the room were anchored in the present: the misuses of artificial intelligence, the need to connect with communities and the urgent exploration of new funding avenues to sustain independent media.
Artificial Intelligence: Friend or foe?
“Last year, we were blocked on Facebook. We’re still blocked on Facebook,” Ageson exclaimed in a wry laugh when I asked her about how the context of the industry shifted since last year’s summit.
“This year, the big thing that everyone is concerned about is AI. In a lot of our newsrooms, we don’t know how we should be interacting with it at all,” she said.
“AI is doing language generation. We are the business of knowledge,” stressed panelist Nikita Roy, founder of Newsroom Robots Lab, who urged newsrooms to use AI in ways that benefit them, rather than waiting for companies to shape it “in a way that we may not like.” NRL is based at Harvard University and reports and consults on AI.
She cited Nordic outlets as leaders in AI infrastructure development, such as ITromsø, a Norwegian digital outlet that experiments with the DJINN AI system to scrape dense municipal databases to find investigative story leads.
Paris Marx (left) and Nikita Roy (right) discussing the use of artificial intelligence in newsrooms. Photo: Press Forward
Marx, author, technology critic and host of the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us, expressed more reservations, says AI is “rather unlikely” to support journalism and believes companies use it as a vague justification for what he thinks are ulterior goals.
Marx warned about uses of AI oriented towards exploiting journalism instead of supporting it. He spoke of Google Zero in particular, the search engine’s plan to stop directing traffic to third-party websites to instead provide AI-generated summaries.
Building communities in and outside of journalism
Other conversations offered a more hopeful tone for the future of independent media based on “partnerships, collaboration and community.”
Concordia journalism professor Magda Konieczna introduced Documenters Canada, the initiative she leads, which trains and pays citizens to document public meetings. Yara El Murr, managing editor of the Green Line, described the Toronto hyperlocal publication’s involvement in Documenters, as well as her publication’s various types of engagement activities, which include listening circles and co-hosted events with community partners as part of their Attention ↹ Action Journey.
During the “gallery walk,” attendees shared their thoughts on colourful sticky notes with ideas for building collaborations with organizations outside journalism and for strengthening ties with communities. Photos: Clément Lechat
Andre Goulet, executive director of progressive podcast network Harbinger and community director of nonprofit outlet collaboration Unrigged, called for “journalism that scales back the competition” and creates more community in its ranks. As trivial as it may sound, mingling and friendship-building are key to growing allyship and solidarity, said Goulet.
“It is very hard to succeed on your own, so we might as well be spending this time together and rolling in the same direction,” he said.
Funding: the core issue
Throughout the day, funding emerged as the urgent issue connecting the many overlapping challenges shared by attendees and panelists. Will Pearson, co-founder of the Peterborough Currents, which had to take a pause to reconsider their business planning, recounted how a lack of sustainable funding can strangle an organization delivering civic information that is otherwise hard to access.
Pearson developed a city council vote tracker for the 2025 municipal budget votes – and rapidly raised $2,500 from community members to support it – but future expansion of the tool and newsroom operations were put on hold last June due to the expiration of a one-time grant from Indiegraf Media. Peterborough Currents lost almost half of its funding when the grant ran out.
This situation was echoed in similar challenges faced by Lela Savić, editor-in-chief and founder of La Converse, a Montreal-based outlet practicing what she calls “dialogue journalism.”
Savić is challenging funders to commit to long-term disbursements, such as five-to 10-year, mission-focused funding plans, instead of sticking to current short-term funding cycles. She highlighted the risks of shifting funders’ priorities for a media outlet like La Converse, which had previously secured funding during a short-lived surge of interest in BIPOC media and now relies on foundations and government programs.
The presence of Allison MacLachlan, director of external relations and public engagement at the Rideau Hall Foundation, and Ana Sofía Hibon, program manager at the Inspirit Foundation, reflected the interest of certain foundations in supporting journalism.
“There is increasingly a number of foundations that are interested in funding journalism, but we haven’t seen that many dollars hit newsrooms’ bank accounts yet,” said Hibon.
Her foundation and three others recently launched the Journalism Futures Fund, the first of its kind in Canada, with an initial contribution of $3.15 million to be disbursed through 2029.
Press Forward is also stepping into the policy space to advocate for funding. On Oct. 3, just hours before opening the summit, its members met with Senator Andrew Cardozo, who launched an inquiry on funding news media in Canada.
Press Forward members attended a meeting with Senator Andrew Cardozo on Oct. 3, 2025. Photo: Press Forward
Amid all these challenges, and the many raised during panels and coffee-break conversations, it was hard to think about where to even begin fixing what isn’t working.
“If more and more content online is going to be produced by AI, the way publishers can make themselves stick out, honestly, is to go hard in the other direction and to lean into the humaneness of the work,” Ageson commented. “Fill out the bio pages of your reporters. Showcase who they are as people.”