CIJSummer Conference 2025 – feedback and reactions

A huge thank you to everyone who attended, taught and volunteered at #CIJSummer Conference 2025. For the second year in a row, Summer Conference was a sell-out success.

170 delegates, mainly from the UK, but also from countries such as Thailand, Peru, Poland, Lithuania, Norway and the USA, attended. We are always delighted to have people from all over the world and from all over the UK attending the event in London – not the cheapest city to come and visit. So this comment about the conference made us particularly happy: “So informative, so inspiring, worth dragging myself to London for.” 

45 speakers, mainly from the UK but also from the Netherlands, France, USA, Sweden, Portugal, Thailand, and Bulgaria spoke and trained at the Summer Conference: some for the first time, while others have been teaching with us for more than 10 years.

The vast majority of delegates gave us high marks of 5/5 and 4/5!

One delegate wrote: “Quality speakers and good opportunities to meet a really interesting bunch of like-minded people. Top work!”

 

We always say that #CIJSummer is a friendly and collaborative conference. This year’s keynote speakers brought a wealth of journalistic experience and generously shared their knowledge and insights.

Rianna Croxford “gave an excellent talk” and “described her investigation in detail, focusing on the specific techniques and skills she used to get the results.” She was “inspirational”.

 

Our 2025 Gavin MacFadyen memorial talk was delivered by Cathy Newman. She gave a great talk “about a long-running investigation, which took years to come off, but defined news agendas when published” – her work on the Church of England’s serial sex abuser John Smyth. (The video of the talk is now available on the CIJ YouTube channel).

Donal MacIntyre “was wonderfully affable and enthusiastic. He was a great final speaker as he was so passionate”. (The video of the talk will be available on the CIJ YouTube channel).

#CIJSummer is a small, friendly and practical conference for people who want to upgrade their investigative skills, be it by attending our hands-on classes such as data journalism training and OSINT, or learning about companies accounts or investigative methodology.

Like most journalistic conferences which focus on practical skills, #CIJSummer offers a variety of talks and classes which run simultaneously, allowing for smaller learning groups and a variety of skills covered. It is not a typical one-strand event where everyone sits in the same auditorium throughout the day.

Too much choice is the complaint we hear often, but it is the one we like best.

“So many things I wanted to attend, but clashed with many other options”

 

Each year we teach some core skills like spreadsheets, OSINT and FOI basics, investigative methodology as well as offering more niche and specialised training such as reading company accounts, SARS (Subject Access Requests), understanding right to reply or not-so-niche-anymore AI for journalists. We have been also focusing on climate investigations – from case studies to how to report COP. This allows returning delegates to choose something they may have not learned before, and for the new delegates to sample and learn different skills.

Some of the more popular talks are based on recent investigations: where delegates can meet the journalists who broke the stories and learn how they did it. This year the 2025 Paul Foot Award co-winner Patrick Butler talked about his investigative series with colleague Josh Halliday into the Carer’s Allowance Scandal. Gerald Flynn talked of being banned from Cambodia after investigating deforestation there. Hannah O’Grady and Joel Gunter spoke of a difficult investigation into alleged war crimes committed by the British Special Forces in Afghanistan. We always look into new ways of doing impactful journalism and Joshi Hermann of Mill Media focused on just that.

We always have different levels of journalistic knowledge in the audience, where sometimes people can be experts in one field of journalism but complete novices in another. So inevitably we hear that the very same session can be too basic or too advanced at the same time. We signpost the levels, especially for the hands-on sessions, to make people’s choices easier.

The good news this year is that we definitely had enough tea and coffee. If there’s one thing we know about journalism conferences, it’s that they run on coffee!

We hope that you all had a great time at the event and hope to see many of you again either at future CIJ Summer Conferences or at our online courses.

“It was a brilliant informative couple of days with lovely people and staff and I hope to attend again next year as it has been a great way to network and learn.”

Here are some longer LinkedIn posts by the delegates and speakers of #CIJSummer 2025.

Olena Kozii speaks about #CIJSummer being a safe space to think deeper and stay alert.

Speaker Tom Beal talks about the conference’s friendly and collaborative atmosphere and some great questions from the audience.

And the CIJ’s very own OCRI regional coordinator Alice de Souza shares her highlights of #CIJSummer 2025.

Photos from #CIJSummer 2025 can be found on the CIJ LinkedIn and Facebook accounts.

Videos will be posted in the next couple of weeks on the CIJ YouTube Channel.