Last week the Suwali team traveled to Perugia for the International Journalism Festival — one of the largest gatherings of journalists, technologists, and media executives in the world. We came to listen, and we left with a clearer picture of what newsrooms are actually struggling with.
The question everyone was asking
Across panels, hallway conversations, and late dinners, one topic kept coming up: how do you build a genuine relationship with your audience when attention is fragmenting across dozens of platforms and people trust institutions less than ever?
It’s a hard problem. And most of the tools on offer were either too generic (AI chatbots that hallucinate facts) or too complicated to deploy without a dedicated engineering team.
What we showed
We ran two sessions at the festival: one focused on how Suwali works technically, and one aimed at editors and audience engagement teams who wanted to understand the editorial implications.
The questions were sharp. Journalists wanted to know:
- What happens when the chatbot gets something wrong? (Suwali only draws from your content — if the answer isn’t in your archive, it says so.)
- Who owns the conversation data? (You do, always.)
- Can it handle languages other than English? (Yes — we currently support over 20 languages, and WhatsApp and Telegram both handle multilingual threads naturally.)
What we heard from the room
A few themes came up again and again from newsrooms we spoke to.
First, the appetite for audience feedback is enormous — but the infrastructure to actually capture and act on it isn’t there. Most newsrooms have no systematic way to know what their readers want to know next. Suwali’s dashboard changes that.
Second, trust is the product. Newsrooms in the room weren’t interested in a generic AI assistant. They wanted something that stayed inside the bounds of their own journalism. The fact that Suwali doesn’t hallucinate or pull from outside sources was the most important selling point for almost every editor we spoke to.
Third, simplicity wins. The teams that are most excited about Suwali are not the ones with the biggest tech budgets. They’re local newsrooms and CSOs with small teams who need a tool that works without a full-time engineer.
What’s next
We’re heading to RightsCon in June and the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in September. If you’re attending either and want to connect, reach out to our team.
And if you missed us in Perugia, you can always book a demo — we’d love to show you what Suwali can do for your organization.
