Digital content creators and journalists: shaping the future of news together

In an era of information overload, the lines between digital content creators (or “influencers”) and traditional journalists are increasingly blurred. Both play pivotal roles in shaping public discourse, but their collaboration remains largely untapped. This session will explore how strengthening cooperation between content creators and journalists can help address key challenges in the digital information landscape, such as misinformation, disinformation, and the erosion of public trust in news media.
News organizations’ experiments in collaborating with content creators raise new challenges—and opportunities—that we only are just beginning to understand. This panel will bring together journalists, digital content creators, and other actors at the forefront of initiatives aimed at exploring the needs of creators, empowering them with new skills and fostering meaningful collaboration with journalists. Such efforts are crucial considering that the recent Behind the Screens study, which surveyed 500 influencers across 45 countries, found that two-thirds of content creators do not verify facts before sharing information, and four out of 10 assess the credibility of information based on the popularity of a source.
The encouraging news is that many content creators have expressed a strong desire for journalistic training, and journalists increasingly want to adopt the strategies that make content creators so relatable to audiences. Indeed, the recent trilingual ebook, Content Creators and Journalists: Redefining News and Credibility in the Digital Age, published by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin, highlights what journalists and content creators can learn from each other, and in just two months was downloaded more than 6,000 times. Also evidence of the demand for training and collaboration is the new online course, Digital Content Creators and Journalists: How to be a Trusted Voice Online, offered by the Knight Center in partnership with UNESCO, which attracted more than 10,000 participants from 178 countries. This course not only provides essential skills in sourcing and verifying information, but also promotes collaboration between journalists and content creators to harness their unique strengths: the reach and creativity of digital creators, combined with the rigorous fact-checking and professional standards of journalism.
This panel brings together journalists and creators to show how they can jointly create a more transparent, accountable, and trusted information ecosystem. Through this panel discussion, we will explore innovative models for collaboration, examine the opportunities for cross-pollination between these fields, and outline how working together can lead to safer, more responsible digital spaces that benefit creators and consumers of news. This session will inspire new ways to rethink the future of news and the role journalists and content creators play in shaping it.
Moderated by Summer Harlow.