Ceuta was explained without asking Moroccans
When the Ceuta crossing was in the news at the end of July, I kept noticing who was doing the explaining: Spanish ministers, EU spokespeople, Finnish politicians warning of an invasion. Everyone except the people who had actually walked into the sea. So I wrote this for Journalisti about the question that went missing — not why Ceuta, or why now, but why leave. A humane angle doesn’t make journalism softer; it makes it more precise.
The greatest deception is the idea that photographs do not deceive
I interviewed visual-information scholar Yanai Toister for Tampere University about cameras that sense and decide without producing pictures for human eyes. Our conversation moved from robot vacuums and border systems to AI, photographic truth and the question that matters more than whether an image is ‘real’: what does it do, who built it and for whom?
The image that cracked Israel’s Christian story
The image of an Israeli soldier taking an axe to a crucified-Jesus statue in southern Lebanon spread faster than almost any photograph from that front, and I wanted to understand why this one, and not the bodies. My answer for Maailman Kuvalehti is that it broke a story Israel’s Christian supporters have spent decades building — and that symbolic harm still provokes more outrage than human harm. Which says something uncomfortable about how we look.
For young people, journalism is just another kind of content
In this Journalisti column, I wrote about young people encountering journalism in the same algorithmic feed as memes, propaganda, sponsored posts and AI slop. I argued that news organisations cannot demand inherited trust; they have to earn it by showing how evidence is checked, sources are weighed and uncertainty is handled.
Authoritarian regimes’ version of reality finds its way into newsrooms all too easily
After Khamenei’s death the pictures from Iran showed a nation in mourning – weeping crowds, portraits, flags. Every one of them was true. Together they were still less than the sum of their parts, because everything that cannot safely be photographed in Iran stayed outside the frame. I wrote this for Maailman Kuvalehti to argue that verifying a caption isn’t enough; a newsroom also has to ask who decides which pictures can be made at all.
In the post-truth age, getting caught twisting the truth is a win
I examined what happens when political actors publish manipulated images without embarrassment and a fact-check becomes part of the intended spectacle. Using a doctored White House image and the wider market for synthetic content, I wrote about the ‘liar’s dividend’ and why journalism must do more than simply announce that a fake is fake.
AI poverty porn erases the people it claims to protect
I make pictures for an aid organisation, and I’ve watched NGOs quietly start illustrating poverty and abuse with synthetic images of people who don’t exist. For Maailman Kuvalehti I argued that AI doesn’t fix humanitarian photography’s old problems — it distils them, removes the encounter and the consent, and tells real communities that their lives weren’t worth witnessing.