On 27 February 2026, the Association for Journalism Education (AJE) will host its Winter Conference online, focusing on “Trust, Truth and Ethics in Journalism Education.” The event brings together leading journalism educators and researchers to examine how teaching can respond to declining trust, misinformation and democratic challenges across Europe and beyond. The keynote will be delivered by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.
FuJo will be represented by Dr Irene Psychari, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Future Media Democracy and Society, working on the ReMed project. She will present:
Perceptions of toxic news among Irish citizens: How users define harmful content and adjust their everyday practices
Journalism educators can use the insights of our research at ReMeD to emphasise that news is not created, nor does it exist, in a vacuum, and that (future) journalists should consider audiences as agentic in their everyday encounters with the news. While we accept that the information environment is largely characterised by technology-driven mis- and disinformation, polarisation, and low levels of trust towards both journalism and other democratic institutions across Europe, our approach avoids techno-deterministic readings to put audiences and what they expect from the news at the centre of journalism production and education. By studying how audiences negotiate, filter, and deal with the current news environment, and treating them as active participants rather than passive users, we believe that both journalism production and education should focus on how to make news a shared, collaborative, and valuable experience in which audience needs and meaningful engagement are placed at the core of journalistic practice. These configurations, however, do not imply that audience perspectives are transactional or void of normative considerations. Rather, the Irish results show that audiences highly value news that is accountable and promotes democratic public debate.
This matters for journalism education as research challenges assumptions that audiences are passive recipients of “toxic” content. Instead, it demonstrates how citizens actively interpret, filter and negotiate news in their daily lives. For journalism educators, these findings reinforce the need to place audience expectations, democratic values and meaningful engagement at the centre of training future journalists. Trust-building, the study suggests, must be understood as relational and grounded in accountability, not simply as a technical response to misinformation.
