About 1,000 publishers, editors and chief executives from more than 60 countries packed the venue at the global news media association's 77th congress on Monday. The program moved through pre-Congress Deep Dives, partner showcases, a press freedom prize ceremony and the formal Congress opening, capped by an evening welcome reception.
The day's most urgent strand was the disruption of search.
A Deep Dive titled "Discovery: How to Rethink Search in the AI Era" examined the impact of Google's AI Overviews, AI Mode and chatbot-driven discovery on publisher traffic and audience behavior. Recent announcements from Google I/O 2026 were also dissected. Speakers said publisher business models built on search were now in structural transition, not merely facing another search-engine optimization tweak.
The crisis is backed by hard numbers.
A Pew Research Center study tracked 68,879 searches by 900 US adults. When an AI Overview appeared, the click-through rate on regular search results dropped to 8 percent, half the 15 percent recorded without one. Clicks on the source links inside the AI summary itself ran at just 1 percent. Chartbeat data covering more than 2,500 global news sites also showed Google search referrals down 33 percent last year.
In September, US media group Penske Media filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, arguing that AI Search has broken the reciprocal relationship between publishers and the search engine.
Equally pressing is the wave of disinformation generated by AI itself.
According to a European Parliamentary Research Service briefing, deepfake videos shared online surged from about 500,000 in 2023 to about 8 million in 2025 — a 16-fold rise. Europol estimates that up to 90 percent of online content could be synthetically generated by 2026.
Running in parallel was a session on the emerging market for licensing news content to AI companies.
"What Publishers Must Do to Take Advantage of the AI Content Market" walked publishers through bot management, content enhancement and monetization, drawing on WAN-IFRA's own market guidance. The association brought together vendors active in each area, framing the AI content market as both threat and opportunity for newsrooms trying to protect content and capture new revenue at the same time.
The newsroom's own response took center stage in "AI: What the Latest Developments Mean for Publishers and Newsrooms", a 90-minute session that worked through technical developments, accelerator lessons, governance and practical tools.
Florent Daudens, co-founder of Mizal AI and a former press lead at Hugging Face, opened the slot alongside OK Lab founder Christophe Israël with a survey of the latest AI technical developments.
The session closed with a demonstration of Sourcebase.ai, the US AI investigations and reporting platform led by CEO Ron Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.
Three back-to-back Partner Showcase sessions translated those themes into concrete tools.
DeeperDive opened the slot, demonstrating a generative AI answer engine for the open web designed to convert trusted publisher content into personalized conversations and lift user retention.
A subsequent session showcased how French newsrooms are deploying AI-driven semantic analysis combined with dynamic templates and auto-layout tools, with concrete return-on-investment data on both productivity and subscriber retention.
Google closed the slot with a session on NotebookLM, led by Google News Initiative trainer Luisa Fernau.
The tone then shifted with the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Prize ceremony, held in English. Awarded annually since 1992, the prize this year recognized 24 journalists and outlets across five categories.
These were the Courage, Impact and Independence prizes, alongside the Mohamed Maïga Prize for African Investigative Journalism and the Lucas Dolega-SAIF Photo Prize.
The international jury included Washington Post columnist Rana Ayyub, Pakistani editor-in-chief Hamid Mir and Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression president Mazen Darwish, among others.
Closing remarks came from Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission's Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy. Virkkunen oversees the bloc's AI policy and the enforcement of the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act. Her appearance pulled the morning's threads — search disruption, content licensing and platform power — onto regulatory ground.
The first Congress Keynote was titled "AI, Journalism and the Uncertain Future of the Public Square."
It was delivered by The New York Times Chairman and Publisher A.G. Sulzberger. The substance of his remarks will be covered in a separate article.
The "Plenary: In Conversation" that followed was hosted by Atkins and revisited the day's main threads in interview format.
The Golden Pen of Freedom Awarding Ceremony then took the stage, preceded by a keynote from Mariya Gabriel, UNESCO Assistant Director-General.
Established in 1961, the Golden Pen has on several occasions been credited with securing the release of imprisoned journalists, and remains WAN-IFRA's highest press freedom honor.
The formal day-one program closed with a Welcome Reception at R2:Reverso, a venue overlooking Marseille's Old Port. The setting framed the first evening of informal networking against the Mediterranean.
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