CIRCOM Regional against disinformation

The Secretary General of CIRCOM Regional, Fernando Ojea, presented the developments of the regional public service media in the field against disinformation at the academic congress “Fakelocal, the globalisation of disinformation” hosted by the University of Malaga, in Andalucia, Spain. In the European scope Ojea mentioned the power of disinformation systems with pro-Russian propaganda. He highlighted that the CIRCOM Conferences shared best practice in verification and against disinformation since 2017, in discussions that were collected in the latest CIRCOM Reflections article “The Other info”. The Secretary General said: “The fast growth of IA is a new and strong tool that can multiply disinformation in the coming years and we need to bring together all our resources to fight it: technology, journalistic verification, fact-checkers, news traceability, media literacy and regulation too – like the new European Media Freedom Act”.

Training – What’s on the agenda for the second part of 2025

Just before the holiday season (and a summer recess:) we check out what’s on the autumn agenda of our Training programme. In September we plan to have a webinar on creativity and inspiration in journalism and getting in touch with wider audiences – worthy to keep an eye on future developments. Also we will continue with our now established training Stepping Up - workshop for women leaders. It will be held for a fourth consecutive year on 16 and 17 October in Strasbourg, France. The training is aimed to respond to needs of rising number of women who take leadership positions. Closer to the end of the year, in November, we will have another training oriented to sustaining high quality of journalism. The Solutions Journalism workshop will be organized jointly by CIRCOM Regional and the European Committee of the Regions. The training will be held on 13 - 14 November 2025 in Brussels.

CIRCOM Reflections - updated “AI shaping a new kind of journalism” article

CIRCOM Regional has been following closely developments in new technologies that implicate media. At the Annual Conference of the association a dedicated session dealt with thelatest in Artificial Intelligence and its impact on journalism. We had it all – from the historical perspective to new opportunities (and equally possible threats) to re-writing workflows in the newsrooms to adopting new culture at the workplace and to broadening the communications with audiences. David Caswell, a renowned innovation consultant drew several scenarios for the future of the duopoly “AI&Journalism”. Isaac Meers and Jan Gerits of Belgium's VRT showed how novelties can be effectively made part of newsroom’s daily operations despite busy news agenda. Sander Van Barneveld of Omroep Brabant, The Netherlands, outlined the positives of upgrading routine practices with AI and urged everybody not to be afraid to experiment ! Arantza Del Pozoof Spain's Vicomtech spoke about creating level playing field for non-major and minority languages. And Patrícia Ventura, the researcher and trainer in AI ethics, called upon responsible approach in using AI, while entering this brave new world.   For all these and other AI developments read the UPDATED CIRCOM Reflections article “AI Shaping a New Kind of Journalism”.