I’ll be honest: The recent International Journalism Festival in its picturesque Umbrian setting can be genuinely overwhelming. So many people, so many connections, so many panels (besides sun, Aperol, and really good pasta, I admit).

Across conversations and sessions, three messages kept coming up:

1. Creators are no longer a niche topic — but there’s still a lot of explaining to do

This year’s festival included a dedicated programming strand for creator journalism. Sessions were packed. The vocabulary has shifted — “creator” no longer needs to be explained from scratch. Veteran editors are asking real questions — not what is this but how do we work with it?

And yet. Sitting through some of those panels, I was struck by how much foundational groundwork was still being laid.

Panelists who have spent years thinking about creator journalism found themselves explaining the basics: what is a creator, why do audiences trust individual voices over institutions, what does this actually mean for the newsroom floor. 

Progress, clearly. But not quite mainstream yet.

If you want to catch up on this topic, this Perugia panel is worth listening to.

2. Monetisation in the creator economy is a real challenge

A very interesting data point came from CNTI, the Center for News, Technology & Innovation, which presented a comprehensive study of the U.S. independent creator journalism landscape. They surveyed 43 independent information providers and conducted 90-minute interviews with 26 of them.

The headline finding: Just three of those 26 could fully fund their lives with this work.

I am not surprised by these numbers. The work as a news creator is tough. As Liz Kelly Nelson wrote in her newsletter (which I really do recommend): These weren’t people who set out to become entrepreneurs. The business model arrived uninvited because the journalism they wanted to do only existed if they built it themselves. 

After the report dropped, several people in the creator community told Nelson it felt like a gut punch. But Nelson underlines something I agree with: We need this data. 

As Nelson writes: “Up until now, most of what we’ve known about independent creator journalism has been anecdotal or focused on audience habits. We’ve read about or heard success stories and cautionary tales. What we haven’t had is rigorous research that tells us what the landscape actually looks like for the people doing this work every day.” 

What this research actually gives us is a map of the actual challenges these creators face. And knowing where the gaps are — business skills, community, shared infrastructure — changes what we can build and how we can collaborate with them.

If you want to catch up on this topic, two panels (here and here) are worth listening to.

3. Legacy media is missing the moment and the culture is the reason why

This is the one I keep turning over. I had several conversations in Perugia — with people still inside large legacy organisations and with talented journalists who had built their own formats and were telling me how much they’d been held back in their corporate lives.

All this made something very clear: The barrier isn’t interest, and it isn’t technology. It’s organisational culture.

The people inside legacy newsrooms who want to do things differently aren’t lacking ideas or skills. They’re lacking permission — structural, cultural, institutional. And the people who left aren’t gone because they stopped caring about journalism. They left because the institution couldn’t move fast enough.

I say this here regularly, but Perugia reminded me of something specific: You can put a young person in front of a camera, relaunch a newsletter, hire a social media manager, and still not have changed anything fundamental. Until the culture changes, the format changes won’t stick.

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Banner art: Adobe Stock By ArtEternal.

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