Who we are and what we do

15+ years of convening diverse talent, sparking innovation in media and fostering public trust

Hacks/Hackers is an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit originally founded in 2009 as a meetup for journalists and technologists to improve the quality of the information ecosystem. We are committed to advancing media innovation and safeguarding information integrity by convening events that bring together people from diverse backgrounds, sparking and incubating innovative media projects and scaling media solutions.

Since then, Hacks/Hackers has hosted hundreds of local meetups, and facilitated dozens of hackathons, convenings and gatherings across the United States and around the world.

Key achievements:

• Analysis and Response Toolkit for Trust (ARTT): Hacks/Hackers, the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, and partner organizations were awarded over $5 million to develop practical interventions to build trust and address vaccine hesitancy. This project will spin-off from Hacks/Hackers in 2025.
• MisinfoCon: Following concerns about information integrity after the 2016 general election, Hacks/Hackers brought together journalists, technologists and researchers for a regular series of “MisinfoCons” around the world. These meetups focus on exploring solutions to online trust, verification, fact checking, and reader experience in the interest of addressing misinformation in all its forms.
• Credibility Coalition (CredCo): Cofounded with Meedan and other partners at a 2017 MisinfoCon gathering, Credibility Coalition is a research community dedicated to enhancing the understanding of the veracity, quality, and credibility of online information, essential to a healthy civil society. 
• WikiCred: In collaboration with Wikimedia Foundation and global Wikimedia communities, WikiCred surfaces and incubates research and software projects that focus on improving information literacy and credibility on the internet.
• Incubation and prototyping: News Detective, Reality Team, MisinfoSec/AMITT.

Our Network:

Hacks/Hackers has grown a global community of over 6,000+ journalists, technologists, designers, academics, researchers and civic leaders.

Our Funders and Partners:

• Collaborations with major institutions including the World Economic Forum, Wikimedia Foundation, Google, Mozilla, Meta, Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia University, JournalismAI at the London School of Economics, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Hugging Face, Online News Association and others.
• Funders and sponsors include MacArthur Foundation, Argosy Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Codingscape, Google News Initiative, National Science Foundation, Newton & Rochelle Becker Charitable Trust, The Annie E. Casey Foundation and more.

Our Team

Burt Herman is the co-founder and principal of Hacks/Hackers, guiding the organization’s strategy, partnerships, managing events and overseeing operations. He is a journalist, entrepreneur, and technologist who has worked in startups, large media companies and non-profit organizations focused on advancing journalism innovation through adoption of new technologies. He previously co-founded Storify, a social media curation platform that was acquired by Livefyre and eventually Adobe. Burt began his career as a journalist, working for The Associated Press for over a decade around the world as a bureau chief and correspondent in Asia, Europe, the former Soviet Union and the U.S. He also was on the founding team of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and worked as a product director at Condé Nast, among other roles. Burt was a JSK fellow at Stanford University, which he also attended as an undergraduate and was editor in chief of The Stanford Daily

Paul Cheung is the Strategic Advisor for Hacks/Hackers. He leads the development and execution of strategies that promote the adoption of emerging technologies like AI within the media industry. Cheung is a mission-focused leader dedicated to driving innovation and progress in the media industry. He has spearheaded transformative initiatives focused on technology adoption, combating misinformation, ensuring business sustainability, and fostering organizational culture change Previously, Cheung held key leadership roles at notable organizations including the Center for Public Integrity, Knight Foundation, NBC News Digital, The Associated Press, The Miami Herald, and The Wall Street Journal. His work has been crucial in developing innovative models and partnerships that have greatly diversified news organizations and enhanced their sustainability. Cheung has also held board positions at organizations such as Asian American Journalists Association, News Leaders Association, the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, First Draft News and more.

Deb Rotman is the Director of Operations, overseeing finance and administration for Hacks/Hackers. For more than three decades, she has been in various leadership roles in academic, cultural resource management, and non-profit organizations. She enjoys working with the community of journalists and technologists who make up the Hacks/Hackers Universe and shares their love of storytelling. As a scholar, she is fascinated by the ways in which human experiences are shaped by the social, political, cultural, and economic contexts within which people live, particularly at the intersection of class, gender, and ethnicity. She was a Fulbright US Scholar (2015-2016) to the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology (now Atlantic Technological University) in Castlebar, County Mayo, where she studied Irish life in the small rural settlements, known as clachans, from which so many immigrants came. Deb has published many books and articles, including Grandpa the Cowboy: A Young Man’s Journey through the American West (2022) and The Archaeology of Gender in Historic America (2018).

Nevin Thompson is Marketing and Communications Lead for Hacks/Hackers. Nevin edits the MisinfoCon blog and the Hacks/Hackers newsletter, and provides marketing support to the Analysis, Response, and Toolkit for Trust (ARTT) initiative and other affiliated projects. Nevin is a past Project Fellow with the World Economic Forum’s Global Coalition for Digital Safety, and served as Japan News Editor and News Distribution Manager for Global Voices from 2014 to 2022. As a translator, writer, and journalist, Nevin has been connected to Japan for nearly 30 years.

Samantha Sunne is the Director of Community for Hacks/Hackers, providing support to chapter organizers and maintaining the monthly global open call. She is a freelance journalist based in New Orleans, Louisiana and recently published “Data + Journalism: A story-driven approach to learning data reporting.” She is a recipient of two national awards and three national grants for investigative reporting. She speaks at conferences, universities and newsrooms around the world, teaching digital tools and tech literacy for journalists, and publishes the Tools for Reporters newsletter. Her work has been published by the Washington Post, NPR and Reuters, and recommended by the Poynter Institute and the Harvard Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. If you have any questions about Hacks/Hackers, you can reach her at samantha[at]hackshackers.com.

Sil Hamilton is the AI Researcher-in-Residence at Hacks/Hackers. A machine learning researcher at McGill University exploring the intersection of AI and culture, Sil has published research at NLP conferences like ACL, AAAI, and COLING. His work exploring the limits of language models has been discussed by Wired, The Financial Times, and Le Devoir. Sil has given talks on AI in the newsroom at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard; the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia; the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California; and The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin. Sil has consulted for The Associated Press on AI policies and serves as technology advisor at Health Tech Without Borders, a non-profit seeking to mitigate healthcare crises with digital tools.

Anna Nirmala is an advisor to Hacks/Hackers. She brings over a decade of business strategy and operations experience. Most recently, she was one of the first hires and founding team members for The American Journalism Project (AJP), the country’s first venture philanthropy fund dedicated to nonprofit local news. As Vice President, she led due diligence and investment efforts, as well as serving as Success Partner for the largest portfolio of nonprofit newsrooms within the organization, where she provided strategic, technological and operational guidance to award-winning newsrooms spanning 11 regions and markets throughout the country. Prior to AJP, Anna was the first business leader hired at Hearken, a SaaS and consultancy business that was integral in bringing audience engagement philosophies and engagement strategies to the forefront of the news and media sector internationally. Anna started her career in management consulting at PricewaterhouseCoopers, where she worked across leading Fortune 500 companies spanning sectors such as Retail, Consumer Product Goods, Private Equity, Financial Services, Telecommunications, and Technology.

Hacks/Hackers Board

Burt Herman is board chair and co-founder of Hacks/Hackers. Additional bio above.

Jennifer 8. Lee is an author and a journalist focused on the evolv­ing infra­struc­ture of news and information, specifically thinking about the business models. She started her journalism career at The New York Times at age 24 and worked for nine years. NPR has called her a “conceptual scoop artist” for her feature stories. She also authored The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, a book on how Chinese food is all-American, which was featured on The Colbert Report and TED.com. She has made dumplings with Martha Steward and on the Today Show during the Beijing Olympics. She has played a lead role with the Knight News Challenge, News Foo, and the SXSW news events. She serves on the advisory board for the Nieman Foundation, the board of the Center for Public Integrity, the Young Lions Committee of the New York Public Library, and the executive committee of the Asian American Writers Workshop. She is also co-producer of a documentary-in-progress called The Search for General Tso with the folks at Wicked Delicate.

Anika Gupta is a business and product strategist with more than ten years' experience in media, fashion and journalism. She works with clients - mainly news and social media startups - on building sustainable businesses and communities online. From 2009 to 2014, she worked as a journalist in New Delhi, India, where she helped start Hacks Hackers India. She studied journalism at Northwestern University and has a graduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She studies online culture and communities, and has worked as a product manager for media organizations like the Atlantic and National Geographic. Her first book, “How to Handle a Crowd,” was published by Simon & Schuster in 2019. For the book, she interviewed online moderators from spaces as diverse as community listservs and video games.

Principals of Hacks/Hackers-Affiliated Projects

Analysis, Response, and Toolkit for Trust (ARTT) project

Connie Moon Sehat is the Principal Investigator of the Analysis, Response, and Toolkit for Trust (ARTT) project, with Hacks/Hackers as the lead organization. For the past twenty years, Connie has focused on the intersections of technology and democratic life, including the direction of projects such as the News Quality Initiative, the New Orleans Research Collaborative, and ELMO (election, human rights, and health monitoring). Her doctorate from Rice University specialized in twentieth century German history, with minor fields in Enlightenment Europe and Modern Japan. Connie’s first job out of college allowed her to develop software for the International Space Station. Most recently, she served as a Senior Fellow for Media, Entertainment and Sport Industries at the World Economic Forum and also has previously worked for The Carter Center, Emory University, and The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

Reality Team

Deb Lavoy is executive director of Reality Team, which uses the tools and techniques of digital marketing to make credible information more visible and influential.

Her experience in software engineering and marketing, gave her a unique perspective on the rise of disinformation in 2016: the perpetrators were maliciously appropriating tried and tested digital marketing techniques. Deb founded the nonprofit Reality Team in response. The organization builds campaigns that change the ratio of truthful to untruthful information on social media feeds and provides tools and techniques to make it easier to tell the difference. She holds a bachelor’s of science in both computer science and neurobiology.

News Detective

Ilana Strauss is founder of News Detective, a crowdsourced fact checking project incubated by Hacks/Hackers that aims to fight misinformation at scale by increasing the pool of fact checkers, and in turn make fact checking more efficient. News Detective is currently developing a Reddit bot for an 80,000-person climate change online community and is in early discussions with BlueSky, a 5 million-user social media platform interested in using News Detective for fact checking on their platform. The startup, founded by Ilana Strauss, has received incubation support from MIT DesignX and Hacks/Hackers.

Donate to Hacks/Hackers

Help increase Hacks/Hackers capacity to support emerging and impactful projects. Your financial support will strengthen the trustworthiness of information at every level of the media ecosystem: journalism, platforms, communities, verification, fact checking, and reader experience.

Your gift will increase Hacks/Hackers capacity to support emerging and impactful projects. Thank you for helping to strengthen the trustworthiness of information at every level of the media ecosystem: journalism, platforms, communities, verification, fact checking, and reader experience.

Mail a Check

Please make your check payable to “Hacks/Hackers” and mail it to:

Hacks/Hackers
712 H St NE PMB 96681
Washington, DC 20002

All checks received will be used wherever the need is greatest. If you would like to give to a specific project, please contact donate@hackshackers.com.

Send a Wire Transfer

If you would like to donate via wire transfer, please contact donate@hackshackers.com.