For nine years, the Thessaloniki International Media Summer Academy never left home. This year, for its tenth year, it moved its opening stage to the lakeside city of
Kastoria is at some distance from the university that has run it since its inception. The move is being framed by organizers as an effort to broaden Aristotle University’s regional footprint across Macedonia. But it also sets the tone for an edition that intends to destabilize its own comfort zones, starting with the question at the center of this year’s theme: “Unveiling the Media of Tomorrow: Challenges and Tools in Communication.”
Organized by Professor Nicos Panagiotou and a consortium of 15 partner universities – among them Temple University, DW Academy, Concordia University and. hong kong Baptist University – The Academy this year attracted 71 participants from 19 countries: early-career journalists, scholars, NGO leaders and media executives, in Kastoria and Thessaloniki through July 10, with the student body alone stretching from Hong Kong to Montreal.
It follows the two-day “Global Media and Culture” conference on 1 and 2 July, and takes on a familiar academy format – keynote speeches, workshops, cross-border collaboration – applied to a less familiar set of concerns. The first day began with introductory remarks from Christos Frangonikolopoulos, dean of the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences at Aristotle University, before a keynote address on the future of media, a workshop on solutions journalism and rebuilding public trust led by Elira Kanga of Arizona State’s Cronkite School, a project-building session with faculty, and a two-hour deep dive into mindfulness in the digital age.
artificial intelligence has been on THISAM’s agenda since 2018, but this year the conversation has shifted from novelty to consequence: what generative AI does for automated reporting and fact-verification, what it takes away from newsroom decision-making, and where human oversight has to hold the line.
Organizers have also highlighted journalist safety as a growing concern this year, reflecting how often journalists around the world are now expected to work in dangerous conditions. There is also a more grassroots initiative – a media literacy pilot run in 35 Greek schools with the country’s Ministry of Education and the General Secretariat of Information, which is now recognized UNESCO As good practice, it aims to build critical thinking against misinformation at the point where it is most absorbing: adolescence.
attention question
The Academy’s inaugural day in Kastoria hosted its most talked-about session – a two-hour workshop titled “Meditating to Win in the Digital Media Age”, co-led by Avinash Mudaliar, Co-Founder and CEO of HT Labs and CEO of OTTPlay, along with Jatin Malhotra, whose background spans product strategy, innovation and go-to-market roles. Oraclemeta and Reliance Jio.
This pairing was created intentionally. Details from Mudaliar’s own career, taken from HT Media, OTTPlay, Caravan, Gaana and Slurrp, shaped the central premise of the session: that content, once the industry’s scarce resource, no longer is. (A less consumer-facing entry in the same portfolio: an AI search layer built on Hindustan Times’s own digital archive, turning the paper’s hundred years of reporting into something entirely searchable – another example of the pattern he was describing, even if it plays out behind the scenes rather than in front of an audience.) There is attention – and attention, in Sessions’s own account, increasingly follows the logic of algorithms, infinite scroll, streaming platforms and crumbling brand loyalty, not That of editorial merit. It’s worth noting that this framing largely comes from HT Labs’ own recap of the session, posted on company channels; It is difficult to have independent verification of how the room actually responded to the thesis.
However, even by that account, the room turned it into a genuine two-way exchange. Instead of a lecture, the session unfolded as a lively back-and-forth – participants and faculty We, Europe And Asia is testing with examples from its own media ecosystem whether a model built for streaming and audio apps is actually a good fit for news. The questions raised were: why do technologically superior products routinely lose out to products that understand human behavior better; Can the audience’s attention be captured without resorting to clickbait; What, if anything, should journalism borrow from gaming and streaming design; How recommendation engines are quietly redefining the lines of search, trust and choice; And why emotion, nostalgia, habit and cultural context often outperform raw technical edge.
Beneath the specific questions was a deeper question for the room full of journalists: In a world of infinite content, what really motivates a person to stop, care, remember, and come back? Depending on who you ask, that question can be read as a test of journalism’s claim to seriousness or as a fresh case for why it still matters.
Beyond the attention-grabbing sermon
The Mudaliar-Malhotra session may have been the liveliest exchange in the room, but it wasn’t the only place where the central question of the week came up. The first day’s proceedings seemed to begin with a keynote address by Hong Kong Baptist University film professor Shin D. Kim on the future of media and communications – the same question raised in the earlier, meditation session.
By the second day, the program had moved from theory to field, adding nuance to a purely attention-getting-thrifty reading of journalism while also giving tech optimists a chance to have their say. Ludovic Blecher, President of Whitebeard and CEO of IDation, gave a concrete case overview of AI implementation and the state of the broader AI ecosystem. Additionally, Temple University’s Sherry Hope Culver led sessions on pop culture, propaganda and media literacy, and ethics and responsibility in a digitally diverse media landscape – presenting the audience as a phenomenon with a long, complex history, not just a design challenge. Visual anthropologist and documentarian Dr Dimitrios Bouras taught two sessions on the representation of war, conflict and humanitarian crises and collective memory in conflict reporting – absolutely grassroots, high-stakes work that doesn’t neatly reduce to a scroll-and-engage model, no matter how sophisticated the algorithms behind it.
Later, in two sessions, the focus was on moving the conversation towards a more solid foundation. Nico Efstathiou, editor-in-chief of WIRED GreeceTaught a session on wildfire misinformation – challenges, case studies and lessons for journalists – transforming media literacy from an abstraction to a specific, high-risk local problem. Dejan Oblak of the University of Zagreb provided a complementary answer to the question that began in Mudaliar’s session, with a session titled “Reimagining News for the Visual Generation”, an experimental case study in visual storytelling aimed at rethinking the format rather than chasing algorithms based on how young audiences actually watch.
Those threads came together, at least on paper, only at the end of the ten-day run. In Thessaloniki, journalist and Concordia University professor Aphrodite Salas taught a session on oral history as documentary practice, extending the craft-focused thread that ran through Silcock and Parisin’s own workshops earlier in the week. Faculty including Silcock, Parisin, Culver, and Panagiotou then co-led a session explicitly titled “Trust and Democracy from the Agora to AI: America 250 and Fulbright Voices,” which placed the AI question within the framework of democratic trust rather than product design. Panagiotou personally closed the Academy with a session titled “The Future is Yours: Global Media, Leadership, and the Careers Students Must Build Now”, followed by a graduation ceremony in which she led a group that spent ten days discussing, in various registers, what their profession is really for.
What can’t AI do
The tension between efficiency and meaning ran through the rest of the day’s discussions. Panagiotou himself has suggested that public discussion often focuses on technological change at the expense of journalists in the field – real journalism is not about the speed of information, but about the slow work of understanding it, interpreting it and giving it meaning, something he maintains is irreplaceable even in the age of AI. It’s a familiar line for an industry that is under pressure to prove it still matters. Paired with a session that suggests that attention – not truth, not accuracy – is the currency that decides what survives, it feels less like a systematic answer and more like a voice in the broader, ongoing conversation that this 2026 is having with itself.
The academy runs until July 10.
