Media Party New York @ Brown - 2026: Full Schedule

arrow_back View All Dates

10:00am EDT

What Is Independent Media, Anyway? How AI Is Changing Our Answer (Again).

Saturday May 9, 2026 10:00am - 10:15am EDT

Lecture Hall

Speakers

Harlan Mandel

CEO, Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF)

Harlan Mandel is CEO of Media Development Investment Fund, a mission-driven fund that offers debt and equity financing to independent media companies providing the news, information and debate that people need to build free, thriving societies. MDIF operates in countries across Africa... Read More →

Saturday May 9, 2026 10:00am - 10:15am EDT
Lecture Hall Pulitzer Hall

Keynote

10:18am EDT

Journalism First. What If AI Handled the Rest?

Saturday May 9, 2026 10:18am - 10:33am EDT

Lecture Hall

Independent newsrooms face a structural trap: the functions that sustain journalism - audience development, grant management, impact measurement, revenue operations - compete with journalism itself for budget and capacity. AI is changing that equation. This talk is an honest account of what that looks like in practice, and the potential for newsrooms to stop choosing between the two.

Speakers

Kathryn Kotze

Head of Operations and Impact, Daily Maverick

Saturday May 9, 2026 10:18am - 10:33am EDT
Lecture Hall Pulitzer Hall

Keynote

10:36am EDT

Africa Mining Watch: how to build a community around an environmental journalism tool

Saturday May 9, 2026 10:36am - 10:51am EDT

Lecture Hall

Code for Africa, the Pulitzer Center and Earth Genome have partnered to build Africa Mining Watch, a satellite imagery and machine learning platform that detects mining operations across the continent, adapted from Amazon Mining Watch. This talk walks through how the three organisations are structuring transnational investigative journalism projects around the tool, pairing continental data leads with targeted one-on-one mentorship for African journalists. It also covers the community-building model behind the platform, including a mapathon bringing together journalists from across Africa to interrogate the data and develop original story pitches.

Speakers

Jacopo Ottaviani

Chief Data Officer and Senior Strategist, Code for Africa

Saturday May 9, 2026 10:36am - 10:51am EDT
Lecture Hall Pulitzer Hall

Keynote

10:54am EDT

The Big Split: where news value lands in an agentic future

Saturday May 9, 2026 10:54am - 11:09am EDT

Lecture Hall

Speakers

Joanna Geary

Bloomberg

Joanna led the global Curation team at Twitter, which was responsible for editorial curation, content intelligence and uplifting credible information on the platform. The team assisted product teams with the expertise needed to solve content and context problems across the platform... Read More →

Saturday May 9, 2026 10:54am - 11:09am EDT
Lecture Hall Pulitzer Hall

Keynote

11:30am EDT

AI Tools That Won't Get You Fired

Saturday May 9, 2026 11:30am - 1:00pm EDT

World Room

In this hands-on workshop, we'll cover free and low-cost AI tools that are useful for journalists. Participants get a handout with links to all of the tools and a folder full of data and resources to test them with. We'll cover tools such as Visualping, Summarize.tech, LLMs and Custom GPTs, NotebookLM and many other tools. Mike also will introduce you to the Journalist's Toolbox (journaliststoolbox.ai) and the free resources it offers. He'll also cover privacy settings and preferences/custom instructions for LLMs. Bring a laptop for a fun-filled 90-minute workshop.

Speakers

Mike Reilley

Senior Lecturer | Newsroom Trainer, UIC - Journalist's Toolbox

Mike is the author of two books, "Data + Journalism" and "The Journalist's Toolbox: A Guide to Digital Reporting and AI". He is the lead trainer for the ONA/Microsoft AI in Journalism training program and the RTDNA-Google Election Fact-Checking program.

When he’s not doing trainings, he teaches data and multimedia journalism at the University of Illinois-Chicago, where he has been a full-time faculty member for eight years. A former reporter at the LA Times and a founding web editor at the Chicago Tribune, Mike served for 13 years... Read More →

Saturday May 9, 2026 11:30am - 1:00pm EDT
World Room

Workshop

11:30am EDT

Creator Providers: Who are you, What do you need & How can you become one?

Saturday May 9, 2026 11:30am - 1:00pm EDT

607B - 6th floor

Are you a creator provider? Indie info provider? Would you like to be or just to learn more about how they work? Come take part in am interative working session based on new findings from CNTI's recent research into these provider in the U.S. and South Africa. We will discuss the current landscape, business stragies, support needs, working along and more, Leave with tips, strategies, a new network of colleagues and more. I would run this with Justin Banks of Project C and the Independent Journalism Atlas as well as with a top creator.

Speakers

Justin Bank

Founder, Independent Journalism Atlas

Amy Mitchell

Executive Director, USA, Center for News, Technology and Innovation

Amy S. Mitchell is the founding Executive Director of the Center for News, Technology & Innovation. Prior to her role at CNTI, Mitchell served as Managing Director of news and Information Research at the Pew Research Center. In her 25 years with Pew Research, Mitchell helped launch... Read More →

Saturday May 9, 2026 11:30am - 1:00pm EDT
607B - 6th floor

Workshop

11:30am EDT

Enigma Government Archive

Saturday May 9, 2026 11:30am - 1:00pm EDT

Brown Institute Space - Ground Floor

Traditional journalism is losing distribution. Creators are winning it.
In this hands-on workshop, participants will transform journalistic content into creator-style formats optimized for reach, trust, and platform dynamics.
Drawing on real-world experience from Dieter von Holtzbrinck Medien (publisher of Handelsblatt, Tagesspiegel, and Die Zeit), we will show how AI-powered workflows can turn high-quality journalism into scalable creator formats without losing credibility.
Participants will analyze successful news influencers, extract repeatable patterns, and build their own format using AI tools (including secure enterprise AI and voice generation).
By the end of the session, every participant will leave with a fully developed, ready-to-publish news format tailored to their audience and platform.
This workshop is designed for journalists, creators, and editorial teams who want to compete in the creator economy without compromising journalistic standards.
Workshop Structure (120 minutes)
0–30 min | Context, Framing, Pattern Analysis
Why journalism is losing distributionAnatomy of successful news influencers (share insights of our whitepaper)Breakdown of real examplesPresent repeatable format patterns
30–60 min | Creation Sprint
Participants define:audiencetopicformat conceptAI-supported ideation and structuring
60–105 min | Prototyping
Vibe Coding
105–120 min | Share Results
Gallery WalkPeer feedback and refinementClosing
How is our session interactive?Participants actively build their own format throughout the sessionGroup work and peer feedback loopsAI-assisted co-creation with tech support (live)Real-time iteration and testingThis is a fully hands-on session, no passive listening.
What will participants leave with?Each participant will leave with:A fully defined news creator formatA structured content blueprint (hook, format, distribution logic)A ready-to-use prototypeA repeatable workflow for future content creation

Speakers

Charles Berret

Content Lead, Enigma Technologies

Saturday May 9, 2026 11:30am - 1:00pm EDT
Brown Institute Space - Ground Floor

Workshop

11:30am EDT

How Social Media Algorithms Amplify Hate Speech: Case Study of Sudanese Refugees in Cairo

Saturday May 9, 2026 11:30am - 1:00pm EDT

601B 6th floor

This 90-minute hands-on workshop explores how major social media algorithms (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X) actively amplify hate speech targeting Sudanese refugees in Cairo.

Speakers

Eslam Hamedan

Founder, Marketology Digitx Lab

Sudanese blogger Since 2007, E-marketing specializes and human rights activist, Co-founder of Sudanese bloggers network without borders, a member of Arab blogs and a founding member of the Arab Women's Parliament.
Bachelor's of Administrative Sciences from the Open University of S... Read More →

Saturday May 9, 2026 11:30am - 1:00pm EDT
601B 6th floor

Workshop

11:30am EDT

Introduction to Codex for Newsroom Workflows - OpenAI

Saturday May 9, 2026 11:30am - 1:00pm EDT

Lecture Hall

Speakers

Christina Lim

Evan Hirsch

Saturday May 9, 2026 11:30am - 1:00pm EDT
Lecture Hall Pulitzer Hall

Workshop

2:00pm EDT

Beyond Search: Building BOTO, an AI News Bot for WhatsApp

Saturday May 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:30pm EDT

Lecture Hall

BOTO is an AI-powered WhatsApp bot created by InfoAmazonia to help people find trusted, relevant, and easy-to-understand news about the Amazon on the platform they already use every day. Built with large language models, BOTO responds to a simple but urgent problem: in much of the Brazilian Amazon, WhatsApp is a primary digital channel, while access to reliable journalism remains uneven and fragmented.
The project uses AI to deliver geolocated news, explain complex issues in simple language, summarize stories, personalize updates based on user interests, and collect audience input for future coverage. But BOTO is not limited to InfoAmazonia’s own reporting. It is being designed to include stories from other outlets selected through InfoAmazonia’s editorial curation process, based on reliability and relevance. The goal is to create a trusted entry point where users can find credible news about the places and issues they care about, regardless of which outlet produced it. Rather than asking people to navigate brands, websites, or search results, BOTO brings together trustworthy journalism in one conversational space. The product is being developed through an audience-centered process that includes testing, focus groups, and continuous feedback from real users across Amazon states.
In this keynote, I’ll share the core question behind BOTO: how do you distribute trustworthy journalism in places where platform habits, connectivity constraints, and local information needs do not match the assumptions of mainstream digital news products? Then I’ll show how we are using AI inside WhatsApp not as a gimmick, but as a practical layer for discovery, distribution, and engagement in public-interest journalism. Finally, I’ll reflect on what we are learning about accessibility, editorial trust, audience behavior, and the role of messaging platforms in the post-search era of news.

Speakers

Stefano Wrobleski

Executive Director, InfoAmazonia

Executive Director of InfoAmazonia, where he leads organizational strategy, coordinates multidisciplinary teams, develops partnerships, oversees funding and budgets, and guides data and technology initiatives. With degrees in Journalism and History and a master’s in Digital Journalism... Read More →

Saturday May 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:30pm EDT
Lecture Hall Pulitzer Hall

Keynote

2:00pm EDT

Partnering is Not Optional. Collaboration is a critical competency. Are we really treating it that way?

Saturday May 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:30pm EDT

Lecture Hall

Speakers

Lisa Gibbs

President and CEO, Pulitzer Center

Saturday May 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:30pm EDT
Lecture Hall Pulitzer Hall

Keynote

2:45pm EDT

Build a Gemini-Powered YouTube Summarizer

Saturday May 9, 2026 2:45pm - 4:15pm EDT

Pulitzer Hall

Google Lab

Speakers

Madona S Wambua

Expert & Adjunct Professor, Google Developer Expert

Saturday May 9, 2026 2:45pm - 4:15pm EDT
Pulitzer Hall 2950 Broadway, New York, NY 10027, Estados Unidos

Workshop

2:45pm EDT

How to use Wiki APIs for your news publication (Wikimedia)

Saturday May 9, 2026 2:45pm - 4:15pm EDT

Brown Institute Space - Ground Floor

we detail where and how of potential product solutions to solve common challenges that news websites currently have (SEO, AI, bounce rate, reading time) using content/data APIs hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation

Speakers

Hal Triedman

Wikimedia Foundation

Brandon Tracy

Product Lead, Wikimedia Foundation

Sucheta Salgaonkar

AI/ML Product Lead, Wikimedia Foundation

Saturday May 9, 2026 2:45pm - 4:15pm EDT
Brown Institute Space - Ground Floor

Workshop

2:45pm EDT

Turning the Funnel Sideways: The Modern Growth Playbook

Saturday May 9, 2026 2:45pm - 4:15pm EDT

World Room

Speakers

Justin Bank

Founder, Independent Journalism Atlas

Saturday May 9, 2026 2:45pm - 4:15pm EDT
World Room

Workshop

2:45pm EDT

Using satellite imagery for journalism: From the basics to AI

Saturday May 9, 2026 2:45pm - 4:15pm EDT

601B 6th floor

Using satellite imagery for journalism: From the basics to AI; Description: Satellite imagery is an increasingly important part of the journalistic process, especially when reporting resources on the ground are limited. However, it can feel technically and financially out of reach to small newsrooms. In this workshop, we introduce the basics of satellite imagery for journalism using free tools, and then experiment with AI tools that are changing how scientists and journalists use satellite imagery.

Speakers

Logan Williams

Technology Officer, Bellingcat

Saturday May 9, 2026 2:45pm - 4:15pm EDT
601B 6th floor

Workshop

4:30pm EDT

AI in the Newsroom: Practical Workflows for Editors

Saturday May 9, 2026 4:30pm - 6:00pm EDT

World Room

The session will focus on how small and mid-sized news organizations can leverage tools like ChatGPT, NotebookLM, and Google Pinpoint to strengthen reporting, streamline editorial operations, and extend the capacity of lean teams—without compromising journalistic standards.
Leading this workshop is Vania André, the Publisher and Editor in Chief of The Haitian Times. Vania will draw on her direct experience implementing AI at every step of The Haitian Times’ editorial workflow, from editing, to data visualizations, to producing scripts for social media videos.
The workshop’s co-presenter, Natalie Van Hoozer, will provide additional case studies of other independent, local digital news organizations across the country utilizing AI in their editorial and operations processes. In Natalie’s work with independent, digital news around the U.S. and Canada, she sees firsthand how these news organizations maintain trust with the local communities they serve while implementing new tech and AI workflows. One example Natalie will highlight is Mat-Su Sentinel, a local publication serving a rural Alaska community.

Speakers

Natalie Van Hoozer

Community Manager, LION Publishers

Vania André

Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, The Haitian Times

Saturday May 9, 2026 4:30pm - 6:00pm EDT
World Room

Workshop

4:30pm EDT

Local Models to search through (Epstein) files

Saturday May 9, 2026 4:30pm - 6:00pm EDT

Lecture Hall

"Local Models to search through (Epstein) files" will cover tool building and data analysis methods using local models, with Epstein files as the case study, but applicable to any big data set a newsroom might have. The purpose is leave the workshop with the tools to go through a simple set up of local models and an llm-based analysis that can power an internal tool interface that can be vibe-coded. All these tools, techniques and frameworks can later be applied to the prototyping process that teams will need to go through for the hackathon part of the event.

Speakers

Teresa Mondría Terol

Senior Product Manager, AI Labs, NPR

Saturday May 9, 2026 4:30pm - 6:00pm EDT
Lecture Hall Pulitzer Hall

Workshop

4:30pm EDT

Making Vertical Video: A Hands-on Workshop

Saturday May 9, 2026 4:30pm - 6:00pm EDT

601B 6th floor

A 90 minute workshop on getting started with vertical video from writing, to shooting and publishing.

Speakers

Lauren Saks

Executive Editor, LNI Media

I make social news videos for audiences that may not get their news from traditional sources. I work with Dave Jorgenson and Micah Gelman to deliver the news to YouTube, TikTok and Instagram through daily shorts. We also help newsrooms and non-profits develop their social video strategies... Read More →

Micah Gelman

CEO, Local News International

Micah Gelman is a media executive with more than 25 years’ experience in online video and cable and broadcast television.

For the last decade, Micah was Head of Video for The Washington Post, where he is responsible for all editorial and business functions. Micah led a 75-person team publishing long and short-form video. He created Washington Post Universe, the open-source based Visual Investigations... Read More →

Saturday May 9, 2026 4:30pm - 6:00pm EDT
601B 6th floor

Workshop

4:30pm EDT

Reaching the Audience That Gave Up on News: What We Learned from 200 Classrooms and 25 Campuses

Saturday May 9, 2026 4:30pm - 6:00pm EDT

Brown Institute Space - Ground Floor

Most news organizations know they're losing young audiences. Few have real data on what actually brings them back. I do. Over the past year, Newsreel has been deployed in 200+ classrooms and libraries, with 41 student fellows running peer-to-peer news engagement programs across 25 universities including UNC, NYU, Northwestern, UC Berkeley, and Cambridge. Our month-one retention is 35%, which is 3-5x the news app industry average. A study of 277 Penn State students found 65% planned to keep using the platform after course requirements ended.
In this workshop, I'll share the raw data behind what worked and what didn't, then participants will build their own audience strategy using the frameworks we developed. We'll work through three exercises: (1) mapping your current audience gap by analyzing who you're reaching vs. who you're missing, (2) designing an institutional distribution channel (schools, libraries, community orgs) that creates habitual use without paid acquisition, and (3) building a peer ambassador program modeled on our campus fellows playbook.
This is not a panel about "reaching Gen Z." It is a working session where you leave with a concrete distribution plan built on real engagement data from real young readers.

Speakers

Brijesh

Co-Founder/CTO, Newsreel

Jack Brewster

CEO and founder, Newsreel

Saturday May 9, 2026 4:30pm - 6:00pm EDT
Brown Institute Space - Ground Floor

Workshop

6:15pm EDT

A new era of open source audience tools

Saturday May 9, 2026 6:15pm - 7:00pm EDT

Lecture Hall

At Alley, we're working on an open-source audience toolkit for publishers. We observe that mid-sized and larger media organizations have fewer and worse options for payment acceptance, customer data and identity management, and authentication than do startup and indie publishers. We launched our tools on LAist.com, a major public radio digital platform in Southern California, and are soon to launch them with Chicago Public Media. I'll show our work, describe the project, and discuss the mandate to a new era of open source technology in the LLM era of news product development.

Speakers

Austin Smith

President of Alley / Adjunct Asst. Professor of Journalism, Alley Interactive / CUNY Newmark

Saturday May 9, 2026 6:15pm - 7:00pm EDT
Lecture Hall Pulitzer Hall

Lightning Talk

6:15pm EDT

Build For Creators

Saturday May 9, 2026 6:15pm - 7:00pm EDT

Lecture Hall

At NowThis, we don't have a big engineering team. So I built AI tools myself to solve the problems our newsroom actually has.
In 5 minutes, I'll walk through three internal tools I shipped:- A synthetic audience panel: AI-generated Gen Z personas that simulate focus group feedback on content before we publish, helping us catch tone and framing issues early.- An AI ad ops assistant: a Slack bot that manages paid campaigns across Meta and TikTok, pulls real-time analytics from API and data warehouse, and saves our team hours of manual reporting.- An AI pilot tool: lets our team generate AI-powered pre-pilots to visualize new show concepts before committing resources
I'll share what actually worked, what flopped, and the practical lessons for any lean media team thinking about building (not buying) AI tools. No massive budget required.

Speakers

Sirui Hua

Head of Audience and Analytics, NowThis Media

Saturday May 9, 2026 6:15pm - 7:00pm EDT
Lecture Hall Pulitzer Hall

Lightning Talk

6:15pm EDT

Can AI Triage a Pitch? A Case Study in Editorial Evaluation

Saturday May 9, 2026 6:15pm - 7:00pm EDT

Lecture Hall

Small, mission-driven newsrooms face a persistent editorial bottleneck: too many pitches, too few editors, and a set of editorial values around representation, framing, and sourcing that resist easy automation. At Minority Africa, a Uganda based publication covering minorities on the continent, we wanted to know whether AI could help triage our now too many pitches without flattening the judgment behind it.
In 2025, we built Iraka, a custom GPT-based tool trained on a structured dataset of over 400 de-identified historical pitches paired with editorial decisions, reviewer comments, and outcome labels. The system prompt encodes Minority Africa's editorial criteria (including originality, representational depth, feasibility, and alignment with the publication's justice-oriented mission) and the tool returns a decision prediction (accept, develop, or reject), a score out of five, and written feedback designed to mirror the developmental tone of our editorial process.
In phase one, we benchmarked Iraka against real pitches it had not previously seen. It matched editorial decisions about 70% of the time, but feedback alignment was significantly lower at around 30%, showing that while decision replication is achievable, generating the kind of nuanced, contextual feedback editors actually give remains a major gap. We also tried to build it across different models with varied outcomes.
Phase two, now underway, targets the feedback layer directly. We are building synthetic and counterfactual pitch sets — controlled variations where elements like framing, sourcing, or representation are intentionally altered — to stress-test the tool on edge cases and ethical dilemmas absent from our historical data.
This talk shares what we built, what it got right, where it broke down, and the harder question underneath: what does it mean to encode editorial values into AI when those values center justice and representation?

Speakers

Caleb Okereke

Executive Director, Minority Africa

Caleb Okereke is the Founder and Executive Editor of Minority Africa, and a Nigerian journalist who has reported across Africa for CNN, Aljazeera, BBC, Foreign Policy, VICE News, The Guardian, Deutsche Welle and NPR. Currently, he’s a PhD student in Interdisciplinary Design and... Read More →

Saturday May 9, 2026 6:15pm - 7:00pm EDT
Lecture Hall Pulitzer Hall

Lightning Talk

6:15pm EDT

Global Index of Responsible AI

Saturday May 9, 2026 6:15pm - 7:00pm EDT

Lecture Hall

The Global Index of Responsible AI measures how countries are honoring their international commitments on AI governance and responsible AI, especially those tied to UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. The project tracks 17 responsible AI topics, assessing whether countries have relevant laws, regulations, and real-world implementation, using a global network of 135 researchers—one in each country—who contribute data every two years. Beyond serving as a diagnostic tool for international organizations, the project also has strong value for journalists because it offers open, comparable data that helps contextualize public debates on AI, identify regulatory gaps, and bring a globally informed but locally grounded perspective led by a South African organization.

Speakers

Nicolás Grossman

Saturday May 9, 2026 6:15pm - 7:00pm EDT
Lecture Hall Pulitzer Hall

Lightning Talk

6:15pm EDT

Pivot to Profit: Audience-driven sustainability or expensive delusion?

Saturday May 9, 2026 6:15pm - 7:00pm EDT

Lecture Hall

Stop chasing the latest viral distractions and consider the insights from three real-world case studies that demonstrate how building engaged audiences with journalistic impact can lead to long-term success. SembraMedia’s co-founder Janine Warner draws on research on more than 3,000 media organizations and news creators in the Project Oasis global media initiative to share a few innovative gems, and one cautionary tale.

Speakers

Janine Warner

Co-founder and Executive Director, SembraMedia

Janine Warner es co-fundadora de SembraMedia, una organización sin fines de lucro dedicada a incrementar la diversidad de voces y calidad del contenido en español, ayudando a emprendedores de medios digitales a ser más exitosos y sostenibles. Es pionera en periodismo digital y... Read More →

Saturday May 9, 2026 6:15pm - 7:00pm EDT
Lecture Hall Pulitzer Hall

Lightning Talk

6:15pm EDT

Spreadsheet Inference: What is it? How did it get here? Where will it go?

Saturday May 9, 2026 6:15pm - 7:00pm EDT

Lecture Hall

What happens when you embed an AI engineer inside a newsroom and tell them to help wherever needed? At ProPublica, it led to “Spreadsheet Inference,” a method that combines the rigor of spreadsheet reporting with the scale of AI. This lightning talk will give a brief overview of how real investigations became product iterations, not the other way around. You'll see how the team turned iteration and empty into documentation, then code notebooks and eventually a fully featured Google Sheets plugin.

Speakers

Aaron Brezel

AI Engineering Fellow, ProPublica

Saturday May 9, 2026 6:15pm - 7:00pm EDT
Lecture Hall Pulitzer Hall

Lightning Talk

10:00am EDT

10:18am EDT

10:36am EDT

10:54am EDT

11:30am EDT

11:30am EDT

11:30am EDT

11:30am EDT

11:30am EDT

2:00pm EDT

2:00pm EDT

2:45pm EDT

2:45pm EDT

2:45pm EDT

2:45pm EDT

4:30pm EDT

4:30pm EDT

4:30pm EDT

4:30pm EDT

6:15pm EDT

6:15pm EDT

6:15pm EDT

6:15pm EDT

6:15pm EDT

6:15pm EDT

Get help with the event