Hacks/Hackers

@hackshackers.com

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Since 2009, Hacks/Hackers has united diverse communities to advance media innovation and foster public trust in the information ecosystem. https://www.hackshackers.com/

How to Become a Better Manager with AI Explore how AI is reshaping managerial roles and decision-making processes in newsrooms and media organizations. In this panel, instructors and participants in the AI Journalism Lab: Leadership will share the specific techniques and tools that helped them leverage AI effectively in their leadership with confidence and foresight. - Marie Gilot, Executive Director J+, ​​Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY - Rubina Fillion, Associate Director of A.I Initiative, The New York Times - Vania André, Chief Operating Officer and Editor-in-Chief, The Haitian Times - Paris M. Brown, Publisher, The Baltimore Times
Vibe Check: AI Focus Groups That Never Ghost You Traditional audience research is expensive, slow, and often limited—what if you could instantly test your stories with diverse reader perspectives? In this demo-driven session based on Stanford research, Patrick Swanson of Verso will show how AI personas react to headlines in real-time, revealing audience blind spots that other metrics miss. Learn how to create your own synthetic focus groups using basic tools like ChatGPT, and join a candid discussion about the potential and ethical boundaries of this emerging approach to audience understanding. - Patrick Swanson, Co-founder, Verso
Harnessing AI for Personalized News Experiences Everyone’s talking about AI and personalized content—but how do these systems actually work in practice? In this talk, I’ll share how Yahoo News is using generative AI to deliver tailored news experiences at scale. I’ll dive into real-world examples of AI-driven content personalization, structured data tagging, and how we measure success across launches. You’ll hear what’s working, what’s not, and where we see the future of AI in journalism headed. Spoiler: LLMs aren’t always the best answer. - Chi-Chi Zhang, Senior Director of Product for Machine Learning, Yahoo News
​Join pioneering journalists, technologists and innovators for two transformative days exploring how AI can enhance journalism and information. Through hands-on workshops, real-world case studies, and collaborative sessions, discover how to leverage AI to strengthen reporting, streamline workflows, create more impactful stories and build innovative new products. ​Three tracks: ​Reporting on AI: With AI being integrated into more parts of everyone’s lives, journalists will play an essential role in documenting the effects of algorithms on people’s lives and holding institutions accountable ​Using AI: Learn practical ways to incorporate leading AI tools into your workflow - from automated transcription and translation to using large language models for research and analysis. ​Building with AI: What do future media products look like when they leverage the power of generative AI? How will we reimagine user interfaces, discovery, distribution and monetization of news and information products? ​Whether you're a reporter, editor, product manager, or technologist, gain practical skills and insights to thrive in the evolving media landscape.
Watch Your Language: AI and Bias Detection Our research at the University of Florida focusing on language use in news coverage identified common word choices that can convey unintended bias. Based on this research, we've developed a machine-learning tool journalists can use to make more intentional, precise language choices. - Janet Coats, Managing Director, Consortium on Trust in Media and Technology, University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications
Lessons from The City: Using AI to Map Coverage Blind Spots Do your newsroom’s coverage choices reflect the diversity of the community you cover? Generative AI can help you answer that question better than ever before. In 2023, THE CITY used ChatGPT to analyze its entire archive of more than 4,000 stories and to identify the New York City neighborhoods it covers, and presented the results on a map of the city. In this session, two of the people who worked on the project will walk you through their process and share how you can apply the technique to your own archive. - Scott Klein, Entrepreneur in Residence, Automattic - Tazbia Fatima, Newsroom AI and Automation Engineer, Hearst Newspaper
Red Team: AI Threat Assessment for Modern Newsrooms Presented by News Product Alliance As newsrooms adopt AI-powered tools to enhance editorial workflows and better serve their audiences, they open themselves up to new risks around protecting sensitive user data and adhering to strong ethics policies. Understanding the potential ways these tools can impact news organization’s relationships with their users is crucial to ensure that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past: Relying on tech companies to protect the values of good journalism. This workshop will introduce the concept of 'red teaming' – a practice used in cybersecurity to find weaknesses in software before it is launched – and will guide participants through the process with a hands-on exercise to identify risks and help newsrooms of all kinds build more robust AI strategies and policies. - Greg Emerson, Product lead, NPA
Building AI Agents for Journalism: From Idea to Automated Workflow Learn to create your own AI monitoring system through a case study tracking presidential executive orders. This session shows how to combine Google AI Studio and Zapier to build an AI agent workflow that automatically scrapes government publications, analyzes their constitutional implications, and organizes findings into a Google Sheet—all without coding expertise. You'll see how to establish real-time connections between data sources, configure generative AI for document analysis, and create dynamic configurable workflows that free you to focus on reporting rather than routine monitoring. Whether you cover politics, courts, business, or any beat with recurring, time-sensitive documents and data, you'll leave with practical steps to build similar automated systems for your own reporting needs. - Hong Qu, Adjunct Lecturer, Harvard Kennedy School
Source Detective: Using LLMs to Analyze Journalistic Attribution Patterns Explore how large language models are revolutionizing the analysis of source attribution in journalism. This session demonstrates how advanced prompt engineering can help newsrooms systematically examine their sourcing practices, from expert citations to anonymous sources. Subbu Vincent, Director of Journalism and Media Ethics, Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics will share new research benchmarking different LLMs' abilities to extract and analyze attribution patterns, with practical applications for both individual reporters and newsroom-wide content analysis. Join us to see how this technology could transform source diversity tracking, ethical reporting practices, and the distinction between various forms of journalism through their sourcing patterns. - Subbu Vincent, Director of Journalism and Media Ethics, Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.
Maslow’s toolbox: A framework for understanding and prioritizing problems that could—or shouldn’t—be solved by AI Maslow’s saying goes: With all the excitement, emphasis and wariness around AI as a tool for journalists, it’s difficult to remember where to start to solve problems. Join VP of product strategy at American Press Institute and former emerging technologies editor at The Washington Post, Elite Truong, in this workshop, where you’ll think through your organization’s biggest problems and center them first. Then, you’ll learn a framework to evaluate how AI can and can’t help solve the most important your newsroom has, identify reporting, production and administrative bottlenecks without distracting from your newsroom’s top editorial and audience goals, and remember that you can benefit from having a robust toolbox that can solve those problems in many different ways, even when certain tools are highlighted.