Nearly 60 countries were represented by close to 900 participants of the 26th International Symposium on Online Journalism (ISOJ), which featured leading media executives, journalists, scholars and students coming together to explore the latest challenges–and opportunities– for journalism brought on by AI, threats to democracy, digital content creators and more.
Rosental Alves is founder and director of ISOJ and the Knight Center. (Photo: Patricia Lim/Knight Center)
ISOJ 2025, organized by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, took place online and at the University of Texas at Austin, March 27-28, 2025.
Coming from 58 countries, 422 people attended ISOJ 2025 in person in Austin, Texas, and another 455 people participated online as part of the ISOJ Virtual Experience.
“In the 26-year history of ISOJ, the topics have never been as urgent and timely as in 2025,” said Professor Rosental Alves, founder and director of ISOJ and the Knight Center. “For example, the CEO of NPR and AP’s executive editor came to ISOJ at the end of a week during which both organizations had to fight back and respond to serious attacks from the government. A couple of days before coming to Austin, the top executive of the U.S. public radio network was grilled in the U.S. Congress by hostile politicians, and a day before the Associated Press had its day in court to oppose the hostility of President Donald Trump’s White House.”
“But the focus on urgent topics was not only on the United States,” he continued. “We had brave journalists from around the world who told their stories of heroic resistance to increasing attacks on press freedom.”
The conference, which was held in English with simultaneous interpretation to Spanish, featured 71 speakers from 20 countries. The program included three keynote speakers, 1 keynote panel, 1 special guest session, 11 panels, three workshops, a theatrical presentation, and a research breakfast session that included a tribute honoring late UT Austin Professor Max McCombs, a pioneer in research on the agenda-setting role of mass communication.
This year’s keynote speakers were Katherine Maher, president and CEO of National Public Radio (NPR); Versha Sharma, editor in chief of Teen Vogue; and Terry Tang, executive editor of the Los Angeles Times. The conference opened with a keynote panel on funds created around the world to finance journalism chaired by Jim Brady, vice president of journalism at the Knight Foundation, and including Dale Anglin, director of Press Forward; Vanina Berghella, regional director for Latin America & the Caribbean, International Fund for Public Interest Media (IFPIM); Sarabeth Berman, CEO of the American Journalism Project (AJP); and Carolina Oms, director of partnerships and fundraising, Brazilian Journalism Support Fund.
Additionally, the conference featured a special session with Julie Pace, executive editor for the Associated Press, in conversation with Evan Smith, co-founder of The Texas Tribune and senior advisor of the Emerson Collective.
Sessions focused on the impact of artificial intelligence, doing journalism in democracies in decline, covering the second administration of Trump, changing definitions of who is a journalist, news avoidance, fact checking, and more.
Katherine Maher is CEO and president of NPR, which has come under attack by the federal government. (Photo: Patricia Lim/Knight Center)
All ISOJ participants, including remote attendees, were able to network, discuss sessions and ask questions of the speakers in the ISOJ Slack workspace. Online participants also had access to six exclusive 15-minute Meet and Greet sessions with select speakers. There were also giveaways for in-person and online participants.
Recordings of all panels, sessions and workshops are now available to ISOJ 2025 registrants and will soon be available to the public.
The Knight Center’s editorial team – made up of writers for the Knight Center’s digital magazine LatAm Journalism Review and student volunteers – is working to publish and translate articles about each session. Coverage can be found in English and Spanish at isoj.org/news and in Portuguese here.
Additionally, our social media team is still hard at work publishing first-hand accounts from the conference on Instagram, X/Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
The exciting post-ISOJ conference in Spanish, the 18th Iberoamerican Colloquium on Digital Journalism, took place March 29, 2025, the day after ISOJ ended. The colloquium, organized by the Knight Center and the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at UT Austin, featured 28 speakers from nine Latin American countries. Speakers touched on doing journalism in exile, press freedom, funding, sustainability, research on the journalism in the region and more.
The 18th Iberoamerican Colloquium on Digital Journalism, took place March 29, 2025, the day after ISOJ ended. (Photo: Patricia Lim/Knight Center)
A recording of the Colloquium is posted on our YouTube channel. Coverage of the Colloquium will be posted in English and Spanish at isoj.org/news in the coming days.
The Knight Center wants to thank the sponsors of the 26th ISOJ: Knight Foundation; Google News Initiative; International Fund for Public Interest Media (IFPIM); Texas Global; American Press Institute (API); John S. Knight (JSK) Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University; Moody College of Communication at UT Austin; Council on Foreign Relations (CFR); Uber/Waymo; and Yahoo News.
We also want to express gratitude to our media and organization partners: KUT; Inter-American Press Association; and The Texas Tribune.
ISOJ is also made possible thanks to the help of more than 50 volunteers, most of whom are students from UT Austin’s Moody College of Communication.
Dates for the 27th ISOJ will be announced shortly.
For all ISOJ updates, check out isoj.org or subscribe to the ISOJ newsletter in English or Spanish.
