Media Party New York @ Brown - 2026

How to transition from reporting for traditional newsrooms to running your own media company.

This talk walks through my existential crisis engaging with AI. I left Google because I didn't believe nor respected the direction we were taking with Gemini, especially as a former fact-checker. I co-founded Indicator to cover digital deception and have repeatedly documented how AI has made it easier to harass people at scale and pump out sloppy engagement-bait. But over the past few months, I have found that Claude Code is a tool I can trust to have a transformative effect on my data collection, analysis, and representation. I'll walk through some (basic) examples of how my work has changed over the past year and lay out some open questions that my co-founder Craig Silverman and I are navigating as we build our AI policy.

How Media Party has evolved over time, and how is creating a global laboratory for media innovation

I propose a lightning talk length case study of Bellingcat's work and our unique "audience engagement" strategy via an open-source investigative story about an oil spill in the Caribbean. This project started as a comment in our public Discord chatroom, and became a sprawling collaboration with multiple newsrooms across multiple continents. Along the way, it remained transparent and community-led. Our audience are more than passive consumers of our content. Through our public gathering spaces and volunteer programs, they can become co-creators of our research. By building this community, Bellingcat promotes ethical and responsible open source investigation skills, critical for media literacy and democratic participation in the misinformation age.

I will give quick take highlights on why this emerging field of creator priovders matters, who they are, their brackgrounds, business strategies, audience relationships, support structures and more. Data comes from long-form interviews with creators info providers in the U.S. and South Africa. The U.S. findings will be realeased April 13 with South Africa following soon after. 

Women on Wikipedia