The Big Apple Conversation: CommPRO Talks With Sharon Moshavi

One word from Sharon Moshavi’s remarks at the 2026 PRSA-NY Big Apple Awards stayed with me: disorientation.

Sharon, president of the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) and recipient of the 2026 PRSA-NY President’s Award, was talking about what happens when we are surrounded by more information than ever before, but increasingly uncertain about what we can believe. It struck me because this isn't only a journalism issue. It is something all of us in communications are confronting, whether we're working with the media, advising a CEO, protecting an organization's reputation or simply trying to communicate clearly in an environment where trust has become harder to earn.

So when Sharon and I sat down to continue the conversation after the Big Apple Awards, I wanted to start there.

“We have so much coming at us. Information is a fire hose,” she told me. The problem isn't simply the volume. “We don't know what to believe anymore.”

That uncertainty, Sharon believes, is leaving people searching for what she calls “a port in the storm,” trying to separate what is real from what isn't. People are trying, she said, but they need help, and that help has to come from across the information ecosystem.

This is where the conversation became especially relevant to the CommPRO and PRSA-NY communities because Sharon doesn't believe journalists can or should carry that responsibility alone. Communicators have a role, too, and she was very clear about it.

“Communicators have a big responsibility for reliable information.” It's a simple statement, but there is a lot behind it. The lines separating journalism, communications, research and content creation aren't what they once were. Journalists need communicators and communicators need journalists. Freelance journalists are finding new ways to create and distribute news, researchers are producing work that deserves a larger audience, and organizations themselves have become important sources of information. All of this is happening while the economic model that has traditionally supported journalism is under enormous pressure.

Instead of retreating into our respective corners, Sharon believes this is the moment to build bridges among the different groups that contribute to what she calls a healthier information ecosystem. She pointed to initiatives that bring together journalism, communications and research as examples of what can happen when we stop thinking in silos.

That idea of shared responsibility ran through much of our conversation, particularly when we turned to AI.

Sharon sees artificial intelligence as both an extraordinary tool and a very real threat. For journalism, where quality reporting is expensive and resources are often limited, AI can help analyze large amounts of information, translate content, support verification and forensic work, and speed up workflows. Those are meaningful opportunities, particularly for journalists trying to do more with fewer resources.

At the same time, AI raises questions that go directly to the future of journalism. If people increasingly receive news through AI-generated summaries rather than going to the original reporting, how does that journalism get paid for? What happens to the organizations investing in reporters and investigations? And what happens to storytelling when the audience may never actually encounter the original story?

Sharon doesn't believe the answer is to stand on the sidelines worrying about what AI is going to do to us. She wants the journalism and communications communities to start thinking about how we operate in this new environment, including a question I hadn't thought about quite that way before: “How do we treat AI as an audience?”

That stayed with me because it changes the conversation. Instead of focusing only on how we can use AI to do our existing jobs faster, it asks us to think about how information itself may need to evolve when AI becomes one of the ways people discover, interpret and consume it.

Sharon believes we are only at the beginning. The changes ahead, she told me, could make the disruption created by the internet “look like a walk in the park.” AI is, in her words, both “transformative” and “terrifying,” and figuring out how to navigate that tension may be one of the defining challenges for everyone working in journalism and communications.

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Sharon a question I often like to ask: What should I be asking you?

Her answer brought everything we had been talking about together. The bigger question, she suggested, is how we change the way we work.

ICFJ was founded 40 years ago by journalists for journalists, but its work has evolved as the information environment has changed. Sharon talked about bringing together organizations with different skills, geographic perspectives and expertise, including through the new Plus Alliance, and she sees that kind of collaboration as more than an organizational strategy. It is a model for how people throughout communications and the information world may need to start thinking.

“We do need to be thinking dramatically differently for anybody in the communications and information space,” she said. Her advice is worth remembering: “Forget what you did yesterday, think about what you can do tomorrow, and who you can be doing it with.”

For me, that may be one of the most important takeaways from our conversation. We spend a lot of time talking about what AI will change, what is happening to journalism, why trust is declining and where communications fits into all of it. Sharon's point is that these issues aren't separate. 

There was also something she doesn't believe should change as everything around us does: our commitment to values.

Sharon has spent her career in journalism, and her commitment to journalistic ethics remains at the center of how she thinks about the future. In fact, she believes those values are becoming more important and that they have relevance far beyond the newsroom. In a world increasingly filled with disinformation, manipulated content and deepfakes, the principles journalists have long relied upon to verify information and establish credibility have something to offer all of us.

That brings us back to where our conversation started: disorientation.

Technology will continue to change journalism and communications, probably in ways none of us can fully anticipate today. The business models will change, the platforms will change and the ways people find information will change. But our responsibility to communicate credible information doesn't disappear because the environment becomes more complicated. If anything, it becomes greater.

Perhaps the most encouraging part of my conversation with Sharon was that she doesn't see this as a responsibility any one profession has to shoulder alone. Journalists, communicators, researchers, technologists and others all have a stake in creating a healthier information ecosystem.

And at a moment when so many people are searching for that “port in the storm,” working together may be one of the best places to start.