Justin Schlosberg, CAMRI organise and host Media Democracy Festival 2025 at UoW

On 31 May, the University of Westminster played host to the 2025 Media Democracy Festival, the annual gathering of activists, independent media organisations, researchers and policymakers organised by the Media Reform Coalition. The festival aims to address the state the UK media landscape, build connections, and strengthen the movement for a different media.

This year’s event, which marks 10 years of the Media Democracy Festival, welcomed more than 150 people to Westminster’s Regent Street Campus. The panels and workshops explored debates on Big Tech, reporting on global conflict, building a media commons, and challenging the media’s failures. Leading these conversations were speakers from UK media and politics, including Ava Evans of PoliticsJOE, journalist Peter Oborne, Byline Times editor Hardeep Matharu, Declassified UK’s Mark Curtis, Bristol Cable journalist Priyanka Raval, and Novara Media’s Aaron Bastani. The event was bookended by inspiring keynotes from broadcaster Sangita Myska and Green Party deputy leader Zack Polanski.

As a former Chair and current member of the coordinating committee for the Media Reform Coalition, CAMRI’s  Prof. Justin Schlosberg played a lead role in organising the festival and bringing together activists, academics, students and policymakers for the all-day event. As well as doing a plenary welcome, he was a speaker on two panels during the day.

Prof. Schlosberg’s welcome talk paid tribute to Nick Garnham among others for injecting a ‘radical imaginary’ into media policy debates and for making the media classroom a laboratory for ideas on how the media should and could be better organised, owned and operated to serve the public interest. He suggested that the Media Democracy Festival was a fitting legacy, “insofar as the sessions tended to be alive with the possibility of real, progressive change in spite of the political headwinds.”

CAMRI’s Prof. Maria Michalis also presented on the “Big Tech vs. The People” panel in Fyvie Hall. Many other CAMRI members were also in attendance.

See the full programme and learn more about the Media Democracy Festival here.

Learn more and get involved with the Media Reform Coalition here.