Perugia Testimonies

Media and Global Development Students Visit the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy  

In April 2026, several students on the MA in Media, Communication and Global Development attended the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy – along with the course director, Prof Martin Scott. 

The annual festival brings together journalists, editors, policymakers and researchers from around the world to discuss the challenges, ethics, and innovations shaping contemporary journalism. The festival’s venues include grand auditoriums, historic churches and smaller theatres dotted around the city centre.

Below, three students reflect on their experiences of the festival.   

Kazuki Fujiwara  

Perugia is a fantastic city. The venues for the sessions are stunning, and simply moving from one venue to another feels like experiencing the history of the city. The sessions provided not only insights into current journalistic trends but also a deeper understanding of the challenge journalists face, including processes of trial and error and a sense of solidarity. In this sense, the festival strongly resonated with the modules I have taken at UEA, which help me understand the gap between academic knowledge and practice.  

The range of topics was also very diverse, and I felt that if you attend with a clear purpose, you can definitely achieve it. My own aim was to learn about safety practices in conflict reporting, and I was able to meet someone who established a safety team at Thomson Reuters. Speaking with him was particularly inspiring and relevant to my research. 

At the same time, I sometimes felt like an outsider as a Japanese participant. The festival presents itself as “international,” but it seems mostly centred on Western journalism, with few spaces for perspectives from East Asia. This made me reflect on whose voices are prioritized and whose are marginalised. The fact that one of my fellows could not come to Perugia due to visa issues might also reflect inequality between countries. These findings strengthened my motivation to amplify voices that are excluded from such spaces.

If I had attended simply as a Japanese journalist, I might have ended up merely   
admiring the event. Instead, it encouraged me to reflect on what I can contribute. It is an unforgettable experience and motivates me to move forward.  

Nida Adil Abbas 

It was an amazing experience to engage with sensitive topics such as the wars in Gaza, Ukraine, Lebanon, and Afghanistan, and gender inequality. There were real survivors who shared their lived experiences, which left everyone in the hall speechless. After attending sessions for three days, my personal experience is that although journalism is a very powerful way to stop war or spread awareness, it involves many risks, including threats to life and safety. A journalist may work freely, but sometimes they pay a heavy price. This festival made world news feel very small, as people were gathered from all around the world.  

The event was also one of the best platforms for making contacts. As a media student, I learned how journalists work under pressure and constant threat. Most   
of the sessions were held inside church auditoriums, which elevated the spirit of the discussions. For me, the most memorable moment was giving a standing ovation and recognition to the survivors, which created a powerful feeling of solidarity, as if we were all standing with them. Overall, it was a truly memorable experience that I will cherish for a lifetime.  

Juan Francisco Osorio Acero

Being an international master's student, I have been encouraged to develop a critical approach to everything. But critical thinking can feel ineffective when it stays far from the spaces where decisions are made. For that reason, attending the International Journalism Festival in Perugia alongside my course director and classmates gave me a clearer picture of the media development landscape and where our ideas can travel.  

Throughout our course, we have explored why strong media ecosystems matter for healthy democracies. These ideas sound clear in theory. But arriving at a festival billed as international, I found myself asking: who is leading the conversation, what counts as relevant, and what should we do about it? Noticing that voices from regions like Africa and Latin America were not visible enough was something that concerned me and my classmates, and it became one of the richest discussions of the trip.

That kind of critical engagement cannot happen in a classroom alone. This experience connected us not only to the current debates around media development but also to organisations and journalists from a wide range of backgrounds, and it made the ideas we study feel real, urgent, and worth acting on.