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.

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.

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.

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.