Adriana Lacy to speak at ISOJ 2026 on reaching young audiences

Adriana Lacy, founder and CEO of Field Nine Group and Influencer Journalism, will join a panel on reaching young audiences at the 27th International Symposium on Journalism (ISOJ), held Sept. 17 and 18 at the University of Texas at Austin.

The session, "Reaching young audiences," runs from 9:45 to 10:45 a.m. on Friday, Sept. 18. It will be moderated by Jeremy Gilbert, professor and Knight Chair in Digital Media Strategy at Northwestern University's Medill School. Lacy will be joined on the panel by Ryan Kellett, co-founder of The Independent Journalism Atlas, and Sisi Wei, chief impact officer at CalMatters and The Markup.

The work behind the panel

Younger audiences are not avoiding news so much as encountering it somewhere other than the homepage, the newsletter, or the app. They meet it inside feeds, through individual creators they already follow and already trust. Influencer Journalism, the Field Nine Group practice Lacy founded, exists to help newsrooms operate in that environment without giving up the standards that make their reporting worth trusting in the first place.

That practice is organized around the STEPP Framework, a methodology Lacy developed to give creator-led journalism the same structure a newsroom would expect from any other editorial operation. Its five components are:

Standards. Reporting made for a feed is still reporting. Sourcing, verification, and correction practices travel with the story onto the platform rather than getting left behind at the CMS.

Transparency. Audiences who find journalism through a person rather than a masthead need to see how the work was made, who paid for it, and what the creator's relationship to the subject is. Disclosure becomes part of the content, not a line in a policy page.

Engagement. Comments, replies, and direct messages are treated as a reporting surface and a retention channel rather than moderation overhead.

Platform-native content. Vertical video, audio, and short-form formats are built for the platform they will live on. Repurposed desktop assets read as repurposed, and younger audiences are unforgiving about it.

Public service. Reach is measured against whether the work informs the community it claims to serve, which keeps creator strategy tethered to the mission it is meant to extend.

The framework has been cited in research, and Lacy has used it as the basis for newsroom training on vertical video, creator partnerships, and platform-native production. She teaches journalism at Brandeis University and writes the Influencer Journalism newsletter.

About ISOJ

Organized by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas since 1999, ISOJ brings together journalists, media executives, and scholars from around the world. Day two of the 2026 program is organized around innovation, AI, and the future of the field, with sessions on agentic AI in news consumption and the role of technology in exile journalism alongside the young audiences panel.

Last year's edition drew 422 in-person registrants and 455 virtual participants from 58 countries. This year the conference moved from its traditional April dates to September and dropped "Online" from its name. Sessions take place in the Shirley Bird Perry Ballroom at UT Austin, with a Virtual Experience offering full access for remote participants.

Full speaker details are available on the ISOJ speaker page, and the complete program is posted at isoj.org.

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