Lessons From Perugia: Responding to the Big Tech Narrative

This analysis was shared with our AI Spotlight newsletter subscribers on April 28, 2026. Sign up to receive the next issue.

When it comes to Big Tech and media, there was a new tone to conversations in the Italian city of Perugia last week, where hundreds of journalists gathered for the annual International Journalism Festival.

Don’t get me wrong, AI hype fueled by Big Tech media funding is not going away any time soon. And tech accountability wasn’t a dominant topic of the official festival. But in cafés and trattorias, panels, and an energizing event by Brazil’s Agência Pública, the conversation about the responsibility of journalists to investigate and narrate the tectonic story of our time had the depth, nuance, and sense of urgency that signaled trouble. Good journalistic trouble.

Here are three quick highlights from those conversations:

• The quest for independence and community infrastructure: Google, OpenAI, and other tech giants are on a full charm and funding offensive in Latin America and other regions in an effort to expand AI media adoption and gain access to media archives for LLM training. In contrast, some independent outlets and investigative journalism networks are discussing what an alternative infrastructure for safer and more affordable data storage, independent of Big Tech, could look like. For more on this, keep an eye on the Journalism Cloud Alliance (disclaimer: Pulitzer Center is part of this effort).
• The quest for independence and community infrastructure: “Algorithmic audit work is not going to be impactful if we don’t work with journalists to bring the story to the broader public,” Abeba Birhane said, who founded the AI Accountability Lab at Trinity College Dublin. Cross-disciplinary collaboration was modeled in a panel about data centers where Julia Faustina Abad of the Brazilian Institute for Consumer Protection discussed how The Intercept reporter Laís Martins’ investigations about a TikTok data center in an Indigenous community in Caucaia, Brazil, helped her organization understand that this is not just a technology story but a story about people, territory, and political and economic power. Martins, a Pulitzer Center AI Accountability Fellow, said journalists have a responsibility to share what they know with the communities that have the most to lose from the AI boom.
• A global panel of tech users: Facing increased scrutiny, social media platforms are building taller digital walls to guard their data, making it harder for journalists to pursue data-driven algorithmic investigations. One workaround for journalists is to build on and globally scale the experiments pioneered by The Markup where reporters worked with panels of hundreds of platform users who agreed to temporarily share their social media feeds with reporters for deep algorithmic analysis.

Rejecting Big Tech’s inevitability ideology necessitates audacity and independent thinking. Expect it from reporters, not media owners, working creatively and collaboratively across borders and disciplines. As digital policy expert Max Schulze put it: “There is a great opportunity to narrate the need for an alternative.”