There is a strange thing about hosting a panel on stage with five editors-in-chief. Five of them, one of me. I have a word for this emotion: absolute terror. Every one of these editors in chief has enough brainpower to fuel a mid-sized town, a ton of wit, Max Verstappen levels of speed, and a hefty side dish of opinion. They spend their days staring into the combustion engine of public life, yet they are usually the least theatrical people in the room. They know where the outrage comes from. They know which headline will explode. They know which story will be misunderstood before the second paragraph has even had time to put on trousers. They also know that, somewhere between the homepage, TikTok, Instagram, podcasts, newsletters, push notifications and the occasional paper edition still sitting heroically on a kitchen table, journalism is being rebuilt in public.
That was the setting on 21 May 2026 at the BPX event in Brussels, inside the Solvay Library, where I had the pleasure of moderating the editors-in-chief debate under the title It’s a Brand New World. On stage: Xavier Counasse from Le Soir (Rossel), Indra Dewitte from Mediahuis (Nieuwsblad, Belang van Limburg, Gazet van Antwerpen), Dorian de Meeûs from IPM (La Libre Belgique), Bert Bultinck from Roularta (Knack), and Dimitri Antonissen from DPG Media (Het Laatste Nieuws). A nicely Belgian table, in other words. Dutch-speaking and French-speaking. Popular press and opinion press. Daily news and weekly reflection. Five editors, one moderator, different business models, different tones, different audiences, and a weather system that is not exactly gentle.
Emotion is now infrastructure
The debate started where most media conversations now start: emotion. Some newsrooms still behave as if the human nervous system is an optional plugin, yet emotion has always been part of news. War, elections, injustice, health, migration, crime, climate, corruption, sport, grief, money, fear, hope, absurdity. News has never been a spreadsheet with a necktie. What has changed is the distribution architecture. Emotion is now accelerated, measured, rewarded, gamed, recycled and sold back to us with a dashboard attached. Frustration travels well. Anger travels very well. Fear is practically business class. A sober explanation of municipal finance reform, alas, tends to move through the feed with the elegance of a shopping trolley with one broken wheel.
The editors did not deny this. They were refreshingly honest about it. A newsroom cannot pretend emotion is invisible. It cannot write as if people are laboratory samples with voting rights. It also cannot surrender to emotional manipulation. That is the narrow ridge journalism now has to walk: recognize what people feel, while refusing to become a factory for reflexes.
Narrow ridge. Strong wind.
There was a useful distinction between journalism that merely adds weight to the panic and journalism that gives people oxygen. That word mattered to me. Oxygen. Audiences are tired of being informed as if every day is a controlled demolition of civilization. They have no use for fake cheerfulness. They have no use for “positive news” sprinkled on top of misery like parsley on institutional catering. They need proportion, explanation, usefulness, context and sometimes, yes, a reminder that the world contains more than collapse.
Constructive journalism came up in that spirit. Nobody on that stage was arguing for teddy-bear journalism or little scented candles around the facts. The point was sharper: if journalism only tells people what is broken, without giving them any way to understand agency, scale or consequence, it risks producing paralysis. People stop reading because the world feels too large, too dark and too stupid to process before breakfast.
One editor described the old habit of media as broadcasting. Sending. Pushing. Speaking from the tower. That model is dying, and it deserves a modest funeral. The more interesting move is toward listening. Questions from readers. Communities around topics. Explainers built from what audiences actually struggle to understand. Opening controlled doors through which readers can ask, challenge, correct and participate, while resisting the temptation to chase the comment section into hell.
Trust is rebuilt by showing the work
Trust in media is rebuilt by showing the work, especially now that “fake news” has become the lazy acid poured over every inconvenient fact. Saying “trust us” louder remains a popular strategy among institutions that have run out of ideas, and it remains as effective as shouting at a tide.
That phrase sat like a dark little cloud over the trust discussion. Since Trump weaponized it in 2016, “fake news” has become more than an insult. It is a tactic. A way to make journalism defend its legitimacy before it can even do its job. If the reporting is inconvenient, attack the reporter. If the question is precise, attack the questioner. If the institution still has credibility, drag it into the mud until everything looks equally dirty.
Belgium is not America, thankfully, although we do import plenty of bad habits with impressive enthusiasm. The anti-media reflex has not eaten the entire house here. Several editors rightly pointed out that Belgian news brands still enjoy meaningful levels of trust, and that this should be protected rather than taken for granted. In a country with the political architecture of a lasagne assembled during an earthquake, reliable journalism is part of the civic plumbing. You only notice how much it matters when it stops working.
Belgium is also a useful little stress test for this. We are several public spheres sharing weather, traffic jams, tax pain and the occasional national football illusion. Dutch-speaking, French-speaking, Brussels, local titles, national titles, quality press, popular press, public broadcasters, commercial players: the whole thing is messy by design. Yet that mess also makes trusted journalism more important. In a country where political reality already needs subtitles, the last thing we need is an information space where every fact has to fight its way through fog, tribal suspicion and algorithmic confetti.
Belgium runs against the gloomy global average here. Roughly 60% of Belgians still say they trust the news brands they consume, a number that has wobbled and dipped a little but has refused to collapse. That figure deserves more respect than it usually gets. The danger is still real. Once “fake news” becomes a universal solvent, every difficult fact can be dissolved into suspicion. A professional investigation, a corrected article, a sourced explainer, a random Facebook post, a bot-amplified rumor and an AI-generated sludge bucket all start to look like “content”. And when everything is “content”, the strongest liar gets a very comfortable chair.
That is why the editors kept returning to transparency, reachability and visible craft. Show who wrote the article. Make journalists reachable. Explain how a story was built. Be clear about what is known and what is still uncertain. Correct properly. Use fact-checking before the lie becomes furniture. Let people see the machinery without forcing them to become mechanics.
The answer to the “fake news” attack cannot be wounded institutional pride. Nobody cares if editors feel underappreciated, except perhaps other editors and a few of us weirdos who still believe footnotes are sexy. The answer is proof of craft. Show the work. Explain the method. Make the journalist visible. Make correction normal. Make sourcing legible. Make the difference between reporting and shouting painfully obvious.
There is also an important humility in that. Newsrooms are fallible. They make mistakes. They frame too quickly. They sometimes miss what matters because the daily production cycle is a hungry little beast. But fallibility and bad faith live in different houses. A newsroom that corrects, explains, signs, sources and opens itself to criticism belongs to a different universe than a propaganda page, a bot farm, a synthetic content mill or some anonymous rage merchant with a flag emoji and too much free time.
That distinction needs to be repeated, calmly but relentlessly. Because the attack on journalism is never only an attack on journalists. It is an attack on the conditions under which a society can still agree that reality deserves inspection.
The kids are already there
Then came the part that stayed with me most: young people. The lazy cliché says young people have walked away from news. They scroll. They snack. They drift from meme to meme in a soft blue light while democracy quietly takes a shovel to the face. The editors were much less pessimistic, and frankly much more convincing.
One of the strongest ideas in the debate was a quiet rebuttal of that whole pessimist hymn: young audiences may actually be consuming more news than previous generations did at the same age. Digital did not unplug them. It rerouted them. They discover news through Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, newsletters, podcasts, explainers, creators, group chats and formats that would give a 1990s front-page editor a small but dignified stroke. The numbers cited were striking. Around 60% of young readers actively subscribe to news brands on social channels rather than letting the algorithm feed them whatever floats by. They look for news. They follow news brands. They expect clarity. They expect formats that fit the moment. They expect journalism to show up where they already live.
Twenty or thirty years ago, the proportion of teenagers who genuinely said, “I read the paper my parents read, and I also buy a second title,” was vanishingly small. By that measure, the kids are doing better, not worse. We have spent so long mourning the death of the front page that we forgot to look at the new doors.
This is where the conversation became properly interesting; the editors did not fall into the usual corporate youth trap. You know the one. A middle-aged institution discovers TikTok, says “Gen Z” three times in a meeting, and six weeks later publishes a video so painful that nearby phones try to switch themselves off. The point was less about becoming young and more about becoming present.
Presence, though, is something other than surrender. Being on TikTok does not mean letting TikTok define journalism. Being on Instagram does not mean turning every public issue into a pastel carousel with emotional support typography. Newsrooms have to learn the grammar of the platforms while refusing the worst incentives. They need to be native enough to be understood, and stubborn enough to remain recognizably themselves.
If a newsroom believes reliable information is a public good, it cannot wait politely on its own website and complain that the children are not typing the URL. Journalism has to go to the places where attention lives. TikTok. Instagram. YouTube. Podcasts. Social video. But it has to go there with standards intact. A platform strategy that throws away the brand to chase the algorithm is a very expensive identity crisis.
The podcast discussion was a useful antidote to another lazy assumption: that young people only want tiny things. Someone used the phrase “snackable creatures”, and that deserves to be framed and then lightly mocked. Young audiences do consume short formats, obviously. So does everyone else with a phone and a pulse. But look at podcasts. Look at long video. Look at young adult fiction (thousand-page series, devoured in a weekend). Look at Netflix binges. Give people something that speaks to them, in a shape they recognize, and they will spend time. Lots of it.
There was also a useful correction to the “short attention span” cliché. Yes, attention is fragmented. Yes, the phone has turned concentration into a competitive sport. Fragmented attention has been confused with shallow knowledge, and that confusion deserves a quiet retirement. Young people can be extremely well informed on the subjects that matter to them, through atomized routes: clips, explainers, creators, podcasts, screenshots, newsletters, group chats, long videos, comments, follow-ups. It may look chaotic from the outside. It often is chaotic. Chaos and absence are different animals. Sometimes chaos is a new map drawn by people who had no interest in our old one.
That should make editors braver. The challenge is relevance, rhythm, clarity and trust. A weak twenty-second video is still weak. A strong one-hour podcast can be intimate, deep and habit-forming. The format is the wrapper. The relationship is the strategy.
This also changes the business question. Social platforms and podcasts are something more than little outreach experiments run by the youngest person in the newsroom because “she understands the internet”. They are discovery engines. They are brand contact points. They are the new version of growing up with the family newspaper on the table. Except the table is now a feed, the family is a WhatsApp group, and the dog may also have an Instagram account.
The old ritual created familiarity. Young people saw the newspaper at home, heard the radio in the car, watched the evening news because someone else controlled the remote. Today that ambient familiarity has to be rebuilt. Deliberately. Format by format. Habit by habit. The good news is that it is being rebuilt, in places we are only starting to map.
AI as amplifier, craft as scarcity
Then, inevitably, came AI. AI is already entering production, distribution and packaging. It can help journalists reformat stories, generate headline options, prepare newsletters, suggest social angles, support translation, organize archives, create summaries and speed up repetitive tasks. The reader now expects the same piece of journalism to exist in several shapes. Article, short post, video, newsletter, push alert, podcast segment, explainer. AI can help with that industrial pressure.
The editors also circled the line that cannot be crossed. Journalism cannot become synthetic authority wrapped around borrowed facts. Audiences are already developing a new reflex: who made this, how was it made, can I trust the source, is this human, is this checked? In a world of AI-generated sludge, the signature of a real journalist may become more valuable, more legible, more sellable. The newsroom brand may become less like a logo and more like a seal of craft.
AI will amplify whatever culture already exists in the newsroom. In a disciplined newsroom, it can help with access, speed, formats and distribution. In a desperate newsroom, it will produce more filler, more sameness, more sludge and more reasons for readers to leave. The tool will never save the institution from its instincts.
What came through, underneath the talk of formats and platforms, was something older and sturdier: journalism as métier. Craft. Judgment. People who know the difference between a rumor and a lead, between a strong angle and a cheap angle, between urgency and panic. That may sound almost quaint in a room full of AI talk, and yet it is exactly the point. When machines can produce infinite plausible language, the scarce resource becomes editorial judgment. Someone still has to decide what deserves attention, what needs checking, what should wait, what must be published now, and what smells funny enough to call twice.
The darker version is obvious.
If publishers use AI to produce more low-value content, faster, cheaper and thinner, they will help poison the very information environment they depend on. If they use AI to support reporting, clarity, accessibility and distribution, it becomes a tool. If they use it as a substitute for editorial judgment, they deserve the subscription cancellations that will follow.
What I liked about the debate was that nobody sounded drunk on technology. There was experimentation, yes. Curiosity, yes. Pressure, absolutely. And caution. Journalism remains a strange, battered, necessary craft, performed by people who have to make decisions under time pressure while half the internet thinks their job is either propaganda or magic.
What I took home
The media world is being pulled apart and recombined. Emotion is now infrastructure. Trust is now a product feature and a democratic necessity. Young audiences are present, just allergic to lazy formats and institutional whining. AI will speed up the useful and the useless with equal enthusiasm. Platforms will remain both essential and dangerous. Journalism will have to travel further while holding its center.
That is difficult work.
I left the BPX debate noticeably less depressed than I had walked in, which in 2026 counts as a minor medical miracle. The editors on stage did not sound like people guarding a museum. They sounded like people running a critical service inside a machine that was never built for public service at all, and finding ways to keep it alive anyway.
The best line of the afternoon was not really a line. It was a shared attitude: the kids are not lost. They are reading, listening, subscribing, often more than we did at their age, just through doors we did not build. Digital did not remove their curiosity. It scattered it. The job is to follow the curiosity, without losing the discipline.
That may be the brand new world in one sentence. The kids are there. The news is there. The trust is up for grabs, and these people on stage clearly intend to grab some of it back.
I came home with something close to optimism, which is a strange thing to write in a year that has trained us into the opposite reflex. If Belgian news and opinion-making sits in hands as capable, as self-critical, and as quietly passionate as the five who sat on that stage, then we are, frankly, going to be fine. Better than fine. We have editors who can name the trap of emotion without falling into it. We have editors who treat young audiences as readers rather than as a problem. We have editors who refuse to confuse AI excitement with editorial wisdom. We have editors who still believe, audibly, that journalism is a craft worth defending in public.
Reality still needs a second look. Preferably from people who know what they are looking at. That afternoon, in the Solvay Library, I had the very pleasant feeling that the second look is in good hands.
