With media at a crossroads, the International Journalism Festival (IJF) 2025, held April 9 to 13 in the historic city of Perugia, Italy, brought together over 600 speakers and thousands of attendees from around the globe to explore the future of journalism in the digital age. You.com was excited to join and present critical insights into how AI is revolutionizing journalism.
During the festival, audiences were presented with modern challenges that publications currently face. Thought-provoking panel discussions and hands-on workshops showcased innovative solutions designed to enhance productivity, ensure accuracy, and foster trust.
Let’s take a closer look at you.com’s participation at IJF 2025. Here are highlights of two pivotal events designed to equip journalists with the knowledge and tools they need to thrive in the age of AI:
You.com Co-founder and CEO Richard Socher was part of a compelling panel titled "Journalism in the Age of AI: Agents, Answers, and Accuracy,” which was centered on the transformative role of AI in modern journalism. The discussion, moderated by Astrid Maier, deputy editor-in-chief at dpa, saw Socher sharing ideas alongside Charlie Beckett (director of Polis, the London School of Economics international journalism institute) and Gina Chua (executive editor of global news startup, Semafor).
“Everybody in this room has been using generative AI in the last year; even if you don't think you were, you have been,” Beckett stated. “All your readers or viewers or listeners will be using these tools to some degree, so it's kind of weird if journalism isn't.”
The panel explored how AI is being implemented in newsrooms, the challenges it presents, and the opportunities it unlocks.
Socher highlighted how you.com’s AI agents streamline research, fact-checking, and content generation, enabling journalists to produce high-quality work under tight deadlines. “[AI] can go through hundreds of different websites, find more and more facts, cite them properly, and then work for you to do research that used to take you days and now takes you hours,” he described. “In fact, we hear that exact quote: ‘Work that used to take me days now takes me hours,’ from some of our customers like Wort & Bild Verlag, a German pharmacy magazine with like 30 million readers or so."
With that need for efficiency also comes an increasing need for accuracy. One of today’s trending questions Maier posed was, “How can we harness AI, its tools, productively in our newsrooms while staying true to the core values of editorial integrity and accuracy?”
This is a big modern challenge: We’re living in an era where misinformation can spread rapidly, so it’s imperative to find the best AI that can give reliably accurate and trustworthy information. With you.com’s AI agents, journalists and media professionals gain LLM and search results that come with reliable citations and source trails for greater transparency and trust.
The panel ultimately walked through several exciting opportunities for AI in journalism and how job roles in the industry are evolving, and it offered clear strategies for how newsrooms can implement AI into their workflows today.
One of the most engaging sessions at the festival was the “Building AI for Newsrooms: AI Agents, RAG, Everything You Need to Know” workshop, led by Socher and Stephen Voss, head of verification at dpa (the largest press agency in Germany). The session highlighted cutting-edge technologies, practical use cases, and best practices for integrating AI into journalism while emphasizing the importance of human oversight as well as data security for enterprises.
Socher observed: "With every crisis, there's also an opportunity." He highlighted that news organizations now have the chance to build their own AI solutions that allow readers to ask follow-up questions directly on their websites, keeping audiences engaged with their content rather than turning to generic AI tools elsewhere.
RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) and query rewriters were presented as key technologies that prioritize accuracy by leveraging trusted sources and providing citations, aligning with you.com's commitment to factual answers and transparency. The workshop also showed the power of Custom AI Agents with real use cases.
Voss, a 40-year veteran of the industry, observed, "Journalism is multitasking—you have to do five things at the same time. These [AI] tools help you become better and faster."
He then shared how his dpa team of journalists has quickly learned how to leverage you.com: “At dpa, every journalist has access to the pro version, so we already have a lot of agents, around 100…I trained my people to build these, and here's another promise: I'm not a coder. If I'm able to build a special GPT or an agent, you are as well. This is definitely not difficult; it's not coding, it's just explaining to the bot what to do.”
The result? What took a dpa journalist 30 minutes to do in the past might now take a few minutes.
The workshop showed how AI technology can facilitate the rapid production of well-researched, accurate articles, making it a huge advancement for investigative journalism and in-depth reporting.
“Less time you spend on those iterative tasks,” Voss emphasized, “you get more time on being a journalist being creative.”
The discussions and workshops at IJF 2025 emphasized key benefits of integrating AI into journalism. With resources like you.com’s AI platform, journalists can focus more on creativity and critical thinking than on time-consuming, redundant tasks:
Enhanced productivity: By automating repetitive work, you.com’s AI tools free up journalists to allocate their time and energy toward storytelling and investigative work.
Accurate information: You.com’s commitment to transparency and factual accuracy ensures that its AI agents provide reliable, well-sourced information.
Trust and transparency: In an age of misinformation, you.com prioritizes ethical AI practices, ensuring that information is properly sourced and cited.
By combining cutting-edge technology with a commitment to trust and accuracy, you.com is not just transforming journalism—it’s inspiring a new era of human-AI collaboration.
Learn more about you.com's GenAI for the media industry here, and contact our team today to see how you can enhance your team’s capabilities.
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