On 21 July, Alessandra Galloni, Editor-in-Chief of Reuters, delivered the 2026 Andrew Olle Media Lecture in Sydney, hosted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The lecture has been one of Australia’s principal public forums on journalism for thirty years. Galloni is the first representative of a news agency to give it. Reuters has published the full text.
The stated subject was artificial intelligence, and most of the coverage since has followed that line: the licensing of journalism to AI companies, the figures on public trust, the governance of AI tools inside a newsroom. Those parts of the lecture are important and we return to them below.
But the lecture also did something that is less common in public discussion of media policy. It described, in concrete terms, what original reporting actually consists of, what it costs, and what conditions it requires in order to happen at all. That description is the reason we are writing about it here.
Where the value comes from
Galloni did not locate the value of a news agency in its scale, its speed or its distribution. She located it in the origin of the reporting. Setting out three characteristics of news agencies that she considered relevant to the AI debate, the second was that “we are a font of factual, primary-source, first-hand reporting” that powers a large part of the news industry.
The same formulation returns much later in the lecture, in a different context. Describing two Reuters investigations that won Pulitzer Prizes, one into Meta’s handling of AI chatbots and fraudulent advertising, the other into the use of state and political power against opponents in the United States, she said both held power to account with “first-hand, primary-source, on the ground, painstaking original reporting”.
The first use describes an industry. The second describes a standard of work. Between them, they set out a definition: journalism whose authority comes from the reporter having been present, and from the information having been gathered directly rather than derived from something already published.
The same principles, described from inside a newsroom
This is the ground the Primary Source Journalism Framework occupies. The Framework, developed by the News Media Coalition with its members, sets out nine principles describing what professional, trustworthy newsgathering requires. It exists because this account of journalism is rarely the one that reaches legislators.
Galloni was not describing the Framework, and we make no suggestion that she was. She was describing Reuters, to an Australian audience, on the subject of AI. But the account she gave of why that reporting has value, and of what has to be true for it to be produced, follows the same reasoning that the Framework sets out. The convergence is worth recording precisely because it was arrived at independently, from inside a newsroom rather than from a policy document.
Four points in the lecture are directly relevant.
One: origination is the expensive part
Galloni was explicit that the costly element of the work is not distribution but the gathering itself. Reuters, she said, invests in “the hardest, most expensive part of the work — the origination”, and licenses it to organisations that have the audience.
For 175 years, she said, Reuters, alongside the Associated Press, AFP, AAP and other agencies, has been “in the business of being on the ground”. The network she described numbers around 2,600 journalists in 165 countries.
Two: presence requires access
The most significant phrase in the lecture, for our purposes, is a short one. Galloni described her journalists as having “the training, judgement, and access to report what is actually happening”.
Training, judgement and access. Not one of those three is guaranteed by law, and only the first two are within a news organisation’s own control. Access is granted, withheld, conditioned or withdrawn by others. It is the element that policy determines.
The lecture then gave a series of examples of access being closed off, though it did not use that vocabulary. The removal of the Associated Press from official White House briefings. Restrictions imposed by the Pentagon on journalists’ access. Changed rules on how federal prosecutors may treat journalists in leak investigations, making it easier to subpoena documents or testimony. The subpoena of New York Times journalists over a story about Air Force One.
She also set out three ways in which press freedom is curtailed by legal means: laws that criminalise reporting in the name of national security, investigations into journalists’ private affairs or non-existent crimes, and measures that punish journalists’ sources.
None of these is a safety measure in the conventional sense. No journalist is physically harmed by the withdrawal of an accreditation or the closure of a briefing room. But each one removes the ability to gather information at first hand. Each one moves the reporting further from the source.
Three: the cost, and the human cost
The lecture was unusually specific about money. “Original reporting, on the ground, costs money”, Galloni said, and then itemised it: armoured vehicles at US$250,000 each; ballistic protection at around US$1 million a year; generators for Kyiv and Baghdad at US$50,000 each; the charter of aircraft to evacuate more than a hundred staff and family members from Kabul; insurance for reporters in war zones. Seventy colleagues work in Ukraine and Russia. Reuters stayed in Moscow when others left.
She then set out the human cost, naming four Reuters colleagues killed in conflict zones over the past five years: Danish Siddiqui, Issam Abdallah, Ryan Evans and Hussam al-Masri. She cited 129 journalists and media workers killed worldwide last year and 330 imprisoned, and noted that three Reuters journalists have been detained for questioning in recent months for doing nothing other than reporting the news.
“There is little accountability from authorities for these acts against journalists.”
She added that she has repeatedly asked for explanations and accountability for the deaths of colleagues, and has received none.
Four: safety is necessary, and it is not the whole account
The Framework places the physical safety of journalists ninth among its nine principles. The ordering is deliberate and is sometimes misread. It does not say that safety matters less. It says that safety is where policy discussion usually begins and ends, and that the eight principles preceding it describe the conditions without which there is no reporting left to protect.
The lecture makes that case better than a policy document can, because it holds both halves together. The passage on colleagues killed sits a few paragraphs from the passage on subpoenas and briefing rooms. Both are treated as attacks on the same thing: the capacity to report at first hand.
Trust falls with distance from the source
Galloni also offered evidence for the argument, drawn from the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026. Global trust in news stands at 37 per cent. Trust in news reached through search falls to 32 per cent. Through social media, 22 per cent. Through AI-generated answers, 20 per cent.
“The further news travels from a human reporter, the less people believe it.”
This reverses the usual order of argument. The case for primary source journalism is normally made as a professional or ethical claim. Here it is made as a claim about public confidence, measurable and falling in proportion to distance from the original reporting.
Responsibility, and standards set by the industry
On AI itself, Galloni was neither dismissive nor uncritical. She described its use at Reuters in some detail: building databases of thousands of media posts for one investigation; converting 20,000 pages of photographed documents into searchable text for an investigation into mass graves in Syria; producing headlines, first paragraphs, translations and summaries. In this kind of work, she said, “AI is now one of many tools in a journalist’s toolbox”.
The limits were set out just as plainly. A third-party tool tested at Reuters mistook a spacecraft for a missile. Her conclusion: “we do not publish without human checks”. And the reason, she said, is not only accuracy. AI tools are “great at finding news, but struggle with context, nuance, prioritisation”, which is to say with news judgement.
Three principles govern the use of AI in the Reuters newsroom, as she described them: journalists remain fully accountable for everything published; where AI plays a foundational or defining role it is disclosed; and errors are corrected quickly and openly, as they always have been. Three levels of oversight sit behind this, ending with a governance committee she chairs, which can pause, change or scrap tools that do not meet the standard.
On the commercial question, she argued that there is no reason in principle why verified reporting cannot be sold to AI companies, provided it is “properly represented”, “properly attributed” and “properly compensated”. The underlying principle was put in six words: “our journalism should be licensed, not taken”. She traced this to the Reuters Trust Principles of 1941, written when the British government pressed the agency into service and its owners refused: “Integrity. Independence. Freedom from bias.”
Her closing proposal was that news organisations share openly what they are learning about responsible AI use, in the way the industry already shares information about journalist safety rather than treating it as a competitive advantage. “We do not compete over the safety of our journalists”, she said, describing security teams from rival organisations exchanging information about threats, safe corridors and medical evacuation.
That is a standard set by the industry rather than imposed on it. It is the position the Coalition has consistently argued for, and it is the more durable of the two.
Why this matters in Brussels
The lecture was not addressed to European legislators and made no reference to European law. But the gap it identifies is the gap we work on.
Galloni said she has often been struck, in conversations with technology companies, by “how little they understand about what original, first-hand, on the ground journalism is” and what it takes to produce it. Our experience is that the same gap exists in policy, for reasons that are not bad faith.
European instruments address important things. The European Media Freedom Act addresses independence, ownership transparency and the protection of sources. The Anti-SLAPP Directive addresses abusive litigation. The European Parliament’s report on the European Democracy Shield is strong on independence and on the safety of journalists.
None of them addresses the conditions of newsgathering itself: access to places and events, accreditation that works in practice, the ability to report from public spaces, and a legal environment that does not treat the act of gathering information as suspect. That is the omission the Framework was written to correct.
What we take from it
Galloni ended by saying that many of the challenges facing news organisations are legal, regulatory and technological, but that “this is also a challenge of imagination”. That is right, and it applies to policymaking as much as to newsrooms. The instruments now in force were imagined around the risks of the previous decade. They protect journalism from interference well. They say very little about what journalism needs in order to be done.
The Primary Source Journalism Framework is an attempt to supply that account. The News Media Coalition will launch it formally in Brussels on 13 and 14 October, with a first day at the European Parliament and a second at the Residence Palace, under the title “Primary Source Journalism: the pursuit of truth and upholding trust in democratic societies”.
We are grateful to Alessandra Galloni for setting out the case so clearly, and from a platform well beyond our own.
