In March, the Society of Editors’ Media Freedom conference 2025 successfully served up the latest news on all the many threats, and more difficult to identify opportunities, facing journalism and freedom of the press in an increasingly turbulent world.
To name but a few: they ranged from artificial intelligence (AI), the missing under 35s, increasing news aversion by the public, continuing fraught relations with the police and the outright physical threats to journalists and on to attempts to achieve audience diversification and cross platform growth.
That was before the extraordinary events in the White House were taken into account.
There were two standout contributions — and one standout absentee.
Banging the drum
There was an inspirational introduction to stiffen the resolve of the troops from the Society of Editors president and head of operations and news gathering at Sky News, Sarah Whitehead.
She confronted problems such as news avoidance, misinformation and disinformation head on by appealing to journalists to shout much louder about what they do and the amazing journalism coming out of the UK media.
“We publish great journalism but we need to talk about the very best of it much more and over a longer period of time,” the Sky News executive said.
So far so rhetorical. But then Sarah Whitehead did something far more important. She read out a list — an impressively long list — of stories that had made a difference, that led to resignations or changes to the law in the UK alone.
They ranged from: Sky stories on over-priced baby formulae having to be locked up in supermarkets because mothers were so desperate, the PPE Medpro scandal during Covid, The Times exposing energy companies breaking into the homes of the poor to instal expensive meters. Then there was the FT coverage of the behaviour of hedge fund millionaire Crispin Odey that led to his banning from the City, the Sun exposing former BBC news supremo Huw Edwards and the Channel 4 reporting that led to the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, over his failure to deal with sexual abuse in the Church of England. And so it went on...
Just imagine, in reverse, said Whitehead, if those stories had never been covered and everything had gone on as if it was all entirely normal.
Trump: then and now
The other speaker in the right place at the right time was the quietly spoken London bureau chief of the New York Times, Mark Landler, who had been a White House correspondent for eight years including two years of the first presidency of Donald Trump.
Interestingly, as a young reporter, Landler had first interviewed Trump more than 30 years ago and thought nothing about him has changed.
“The braggadocio, the salesmanship, the historical revisionism, the relaxed relationship to the truth — none of this has changed at all in all the decades that Donald Trump has been in the public eye. He always says the quiet part out loud, and he generally always does what he says he is going to do. The things Trump is doing now were the ones he said he was going to do.
But there is a huge difference, Landler argued, between Trump’s first administration and his second.
First time round, he didn’t expect to win and had defaulted to a traditional cast of Republican characters to make up his cabinet. They acted as a kind of “guardrail” to prevent the administration breaking the law or trashing relationships with America’s allies.
This time round, Trump has hired “loyalists and true believers” which means that the guardrails no longer exist and the story is more difficult to cover because few are willing to speak off the record, let alone leak and Republicans in congress are reluctant to step out of line.
Ten days after the conference, Landler’s warning about the lack of guardrails could not have been more obvious as Trump launched a tariff war against the entire world — excluding Russia and North Korea.
Diary clash
The stand-out absentee was Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy.
As is well known, the Society of Editors usually attracts the senior minister responsible for the media to its annual conferences. When it was the Home Office, Home Secretary Teresa May turned up and later culture secretaries.
Last year, then Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer came to swear undying respect for a free press. But there was an additional surprise. Up popped Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in the flesh to strengthen the importance of the media message. And although it was obviously an election year his symbolic appearance was appreciated.
This year nothing — nobody. No prime minister. No culture secretary, not even a hastily arranged replacement from the lower ranks of the Culture, Sport and Media department.
Negotiations had been going on with Nandy’s department for six months and the schedule had even been rearranged to make it more convenient for her.
Three days before the conference, Nandy pulled out, citing an unexplained diary clash, and not even Sir Chris Bryant, who would have been a perfectly respectable replacement, appeared to represent the culture department.
A few days after the conference, a page lead appeared in the Mail on Sunday under the headline: “Nandy faces Cabinet axe as insiders claim she is not working hard enough.”
Somebody on the inside had clearly been deliberately briefing against her and went on to suggest she could go as part of a pre-summer government “reboot” reshuffle.
An unnamed source, the Mail on Sunday reported, claimed that, “Lisa seems to work about two days a week on her portfolio.”
Speaker’s lament
The nearest the 2025 SoE conference came to a senior politician was the politically neutral speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, although it was a performance for the cognoscenti.
Sir Lindsay lamented the decline of regional press representation during his 28 years in the commons.
“When I was first elected to parliament in 1997, the place was teeming with regional lobby correspondents. Not so anymore,” said Sir Lindsay who added that as local newspapers shrink or shut down, court cases and council meetings go unreported.
The speaker of the House of Commons vowed to defend the rights of the press to hold power to account.
“We are beyond lucky to have a free press, even if we politicians are sometimes at the sharp end of it. I will forever defend your right to free speech and to do what you do,” said Sir Lindsay with a lot of graciousness in the circumstances.
Readers of the Daily Mail would know that the speaker of the House of Commons has indeed been at the “sharp end of it” recently.
According to the Mail, Sir Lindsay has “splurged more than £250,000 in little over two years on 19 foreign jaunts” and “racked up” a bill of more than £180,000 on first and business class plane tickets with thousands more spent on “stays at luxury five-star resorts and dining out in top restaurants”.
Which is probably why Sir Lindsay, without ever mentioning the Daily Mail, went into great detail about the importance of his travels as an ambassador for the House of Commons representing the house on the international stage at such venues as the G7 and G10 conferences.
It fell short of a rebuke but the message was clear. This was Sir Lindsay’s response to the attack, although perhaps unsurprisingly, he did not take questions.
Mitali Mukherjee, acting director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism noted that there was a huge overlap between news avoidance and lack of trust in the media.
“The news industry is missing its audience but the audience is not missing the news industry,” Mukherjee warned.
Debbie Ramsay, editor of 5 News, told the conference that by “really leaning in to our audience” and paying attention to getting the tone of the news right, 5 News had managed to increase its linear audiences over the past six years.
Small steps
There are some signs that relations between the media and the police are improving but at a glacial pace. At least, dealing with journalists is no longer considered an automatic corruption risk and relations with the media are now an important part of training for senior officers. But too many police organisations do not provide contact numbers for press officers or are willing to brief off the record.
As Martin Evans, crime editor of the Daily Telegraph put it, when there is a major incident such as the Southport murders, there is a tendency to circle the waggons and a nervousness about dealing with the media.
At a time when the number of journalists killed is rising, partly because of deaths in Gaza, there was also concern that online abuse, particularly of women, could lead to further deaths.
Investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr argued that all news organisations should have safety officers and feared that if nothing is done, there would be a death before we understand the full gravity of online abuse.
AI appears at all journalistic conferences these days and the growing consensus is that if properly understood, it can be more of a help than a threat by carrying out mundane tasks — suggesting headlines perhaps - freeing journalists to dig out original material and exclusives.
SoE Fellowship
And finally, a popular choice for the Fellowship of the Society of Editors was Jeremy Bowen, the international editor of the BBC who has been at the corporation for 41 years, and now regularly reports on the crises in Gaza and Ukraine.
On the whole, he had a rather uncomfortable message to tell — that he couldn’t think of a more challenging time to be doing decent journalism when journalists are more of a target than when he started.
“We just have to keep doing what we can,” said Bowen who added, “we have to get people through the disinformation and lies and point a path to the truth.”
He confessed to being a professional pessimist about the chances for peace anytime soon in Gaza or Ukraine.
He also spoke of days of long ago as a trainee at BBC Northern Ireland when he was advised not to sit down or he might fall foul of the “Ulster martinet”.
He told the conference he barely sat down for three weeks just in case. Bowen did not name the “Ulster martinet”.
In a tiny note from history, InPublishing has done some digging and can reveal that the person Bowen was talking about was the otherwise distinguished journalist and head of BBC Radio News in Northern Ireland, the late Graham McKenzie.
- For more pictures and a highlights video, go to: https://www.societyofeditors.org/events/2025-future-of-news-conference
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
