Europe's largest journalism conference is being held in Perugia, with nearly 150 seminars on themes including the consequences of AI for journalism, how local media should be financed, and how journalism should function in a world where it is often called the enemy of the people. The conference days began with a seminar on journalist safety, followed by offers of individual training sessions on personal protection. A Palestinian journalist working for the French news agency AFP reported that after covering and photographing a child killed in the war, he immediately received questioning calls from American newspapers that had received information from the Israeli army claiming the victim was actually a doll.
The Palestinian journalist's French boss, who also appeared in Perugia, stated that the central issue was therefore to get foreign journalists on the ground, because all Palestinian journalists' professional integrity was being questioned. An American journalist expressed anger that colleagues in the USA fall silent at White House press conferences when the American president openly mocks and ridicules individual reporters. Specific actions or strategies for addressing challenges like AI, financing, and safety were discussed, but outcomes from the seminars on safety and the questioning of Palestinian journalists' integrity remain unclear.
The exact number of journalists, media scholars, and students attending the conference has not been confirmed.