AI x Journalism Summit Schedule

The Summit schedule includes practical workshops, real-world case studies and collaborative sessions, all aimed at showing participants how to use AI to strengthen reporting, streamline workflows, create more impactful stories and build innovative news products.

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AI x Journalism Summit Schedule

Journalists, technologists and innovators will spend two days exploring how AI can enhance journalism and information. We kick things off on Tuesday, May 6, with a pre-Summit reception (separate registration required).

Schedule by day:

Tuesday, May 6 | Wednesday, May 7 | Thursday, May 8

Tuesday May 6

Join us for a pre-Summit reception at The Baltimore Banner, with drinks and light snacks provided at their waterfront office. A separate registration is required for security, we will send you email once you register.

Wednesday May 7

9:00 am - 10:30 am

Checked in open at 9:00 and welcome from 10:00 am to 10:30 am

10:30 am - 11:45 pm

• Taking AGI Seriously: What's Happening at the Frontier of AI and What Journalists Can Do About It
  People working at frontier AI companies say they're trying to build computers that can do everything humans can do. While they may fail, journalists should take seriously the possibility that they may succeed. What would it mean for society if human-level AI was developed and deployed? From scrutinizing policy proposals, to focusing the public debate on important topics, to investigating the actions of AI companies, journalists have a critical role to play in making advanced AI go well.
  - Sawyer Bernath, Operations Director, Tarbell Center for AI Journalism
• Maslow’s toolbox: A framework for understanding and prioritizing problems that could—or shouldn’t—be solved by AI
  Maslow’s saying goes: “It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” 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.
  - Elite Truong, VP Product Strategy, American Press Institute
• 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
• Digital Democracy at CalMatters: Covering State Legislatures With the Help of AI
  What if you had an easy way to analyze every word, action, and dollar related to your local legislators? CalMatters, in partnership with the California Polytechnic State University, has built an AI enhanced system to glean vast amounts of data from legislative hearing videos, websites, third party sources and then generate ranked tip sheets for reporters to help identify newsworthy events. This session will explain the system which extracts legislative hearing data, how we use AI to turn that data into possible story ideas for reporters, and how LLMs can be used to safely generate AI tip sheets.
  - Thomas Gerrity, Digital Democracy Engineering Manager, CalMatters

1:15 pm - 2:30 pm

• 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
• Designing AI for Journalism: Understanding the Tech, Applying the Thinking
  Building with AI requires both technical understanding and thoughtful design. Nicole and Teo, decades-long Google veterans who have worked on Search and the Gemini API, will break down how generative AI works, introduce key design thinking principles, and explore how the two come together in AI-driven innovation. This session will provide a practical foundation for leveraging AI while keeping human needs at the center.
  - Teo Soares, Co-Founder, Collected Company
  - Nicole Bleuel, Co-Founder, Collected Company
• 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
• AI-Powered Audience Research: From Data to Insights
  Learn how Gazzetta's research team used AI tools to understand information needs in China, developing scalable methods for global audience research. Through practical examples, discover how AI can accelerate pattern recognition and enhance traditional research methods.
  - Patrick Boehler, Founder of Gazzetta

2:45 pm - 4:00 pm

• 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
• AI for Local Impact: Lessons from The Texas Tribune
  While many AI tools pitched to newsrooms miss the mark, The Texas Tribune's tech team has developed solutions that address real challenges in covering a large, complex state. This session explores how the Tribune creates practical, ethical AI tools to make journalism more accessible and impactful across Texas, sharing key lessons in building technology that enhances local journalism while maintaining trust and editorial standards.
  - Darla Cameron, Chief Product Officer, The Texas Tribune
  - Ryan Kim, Product Manager, The Texas Tribune
• 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.

4:15 pm - 5:30 pm

• AI Policies vs Practice: Mind the Global Gap
  From US AI executive orders to EU regulation, how do emerging policies shape AI practices worldwide? Experts examine regulatory impacts on innovation, cross-border challenges, and practical implementation realities and what does all of this mean for journalism?
  - Justin Hendrix, CEO & Editor, Tech Policy Press
  - Amy Mitchell, Executive Director, Center for News, Technology & Innovation
  - Megan Gray, Founder, GrayMatters Law & Policy
  - Niala Boodhoo, Founder, Glad You're Here
• 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
• How to hold AI accountable!
  AI is everywhere and reporters are finding new ways to hold AI tools accountable. This panel showcases original investigations into predictive and generative AI tools (and how we used AI in some cases to do this work). We will also make the case that our investigations should inform the procurement of AI products newsrooms buy for their own reporters. 
  - Hilke Schellmann, Assistant Professor of Journalism and AI Expert, NYU
  - Leon Yin, Investigative Data Journalists, Bloomberg News

6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

Reception

Thursday, May 8

9:00 am - 10:30 am

Check in opens at 9:00 and welcome session from 10:00 am to 10:30 am

10:30 am - 11:45 pm

• The Economics of AI Content: Building Sustainable Models for Journalism
  As artificial intelligence reshapes the media landscape, one of the most pressing questions facing journalism is how to build sustainable economic models that fairly compensate news organizations and journalists while enabling AI innovation. This panel brings together leaders from both traditional media and AI technology to explore the challenges and opportunities in creating viable business models for AI-powered journalism.
  - Courtney Radsch, Co-Director, Center for Journalism & Liberty at Open Markets Institute
  - Virginia Fletcher, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Product Officer, Lee Enterprises
  - Aimee Rinehart, Senior Product Manager AI strategy, Associated Press 
• Building AI Agents for Journalism with Open Source Tools
  Learn to design and deploy AI agents that support reporting through a hands-on case study focused on Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. This workshop walks you through the process of building an agent that can help draft, track, and analyze FOI disclosures—using tools like smolagents, LlamaIndex, and LangGraph. You’ll explore core concepts in agent design, work with open source libraries, and learn how to publish and reuse agents on Hugging Face. 
  - Florent Daudens, Press Lead, Hugging Face
• Participatory Civic Journalism - Documenters with AI support
  Across the country, thousands of residents are trained and paid to attend local public meetings, take notes and contribute to civic journalism in partnership with nonprofit news organizations, libraries, universities and civic organizations. Join us to learn how City Bureau and our network of partners are supporting local civic reporting with AI tools and leave with a set of tools you can use to begin mapping your local government meetings and planning for introducing participatory civic journalism to your community
  - Max Resnik, Director of Network Services, City Bureau
• 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

1:15 pm - 2:30 pm

• From Pilots to Performance: Measuring AI's Real Impact in Newsrooms
  Leading AI researchers Nicholas Diakopoulos and Nikita Roy present evidence-based approaches for evaluating AI in journalism. Drawing from extensive newsroom studies, learn actionable frameworks for measuring AI effectiveness, identifying success metrics, and addressing key challenges.
  - Nicholas Diakopoulos, Professor, Northwestern University
  - Nikita Roy, ICFJ Knight Fellow & Founder of Newsroom Robots Labs
• Making an AI tool that people will actually use 
  In January 2025, The Inquirer began a project to build a Gen AI-powered archive search tool to support our reporters’ and editors’ research needs. While the project is in its early stages, we have already delivered tools that significantly shorten archival research timelines, identify photos from descriptions and story relationships, and automatically update as our report evolves. Along the way we have learned several lessons about how Generative AI interactions differ from search and retrieval techniques users have been trained on. We need to break from our existing UI habits and patterns, and establish trust in a system when it might inherently create errors. With Kevin Hoffman, AI Engineer for the Inquirer, we will demonstrate the tool, show how the user experience was iterated and improved upon, discuss the ways that researchers will use AI tools differently than traditional workflows, and preview next steps and open questions we still have yet to tackle.
  - Matt Boggie, Chief Technology & Product Officer, The Philadelphia Inquirer
  - Kevin Hoffman, AI Engineer, The Philadelphia Inquirer
• Guardrails & Guidelines: Building AI Systems the Audience Can Trust
  Join Ben Toff, associate professor at the University of Minnesota's Hubbard School of Journalism, and Alex Mahadevan, director of MediaWise at Poynter, for a workshop on building trust and safety guardrails in AI systems for journalism. This hands-on workshop will explore practical approaches to content moderation, preventing misuse, and establishing ethical guidelines for AI in newsrooms. Learn from their research and experience in creating responsible AI frameworks while maintaining journalistic integrity and public trust. 
  - Alex Mahadevan, Director of MediaWise, Poynter
  - Ben Toff, Associate Professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication and Director of the Minnesota Journalism Center
• Building an Open-Source AI Agent for World Wide Knowledge
  Based on research from Stanford University's Monica Lam, this session explores how an open-source, public assistant for World Wide Knowledge can elevate AI applications in journalism. Through live demonstrations and practical discussion, learn how this open-source approach to AI creates a sustainable infrastructure for local news organizations.
  - Cheryl Phillips, Founder/co-director, Stanford University’s Big Local News
  - Shicheng Liu, Doctor of Philosophy, Computer Science, Stanford University

2:45 pm - 4:00 pm

• 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
• Request For Comment: HTML Markup for LLM Crawlers, Tracking Provenance in the Age of AI
  LLMs, AI chatbots, and agents are poised to disrupt how readers interact with content written stories, potentially making websites obsolete as information gets mediated through AI interfaces. This mirrors how online advertising unbundled editorial packaging and presentation content and eroded publisher value. How can journalists protect their voice and receive compensation payment when their work flows through AI systems? We need methods to track content usage across these new ecosystems and create viable information marketplaces. Join this group discussion drawing on past lessons to build better systems for the future to explore practical solutions that embrace technological change rather than resist it.
  - Ian Kennedy, VP, Partner Success, SimpleFeed
• AI Tools for News
  Learn how NotebookLM, Gemini, Pinpoint and other Google AI tools can enhance many aspects of journalists' work, from research and reporting to audience engagement, content creation and revenue generation. This session will provide both demonstrations of how the tools work as well as practical examples of how journalists and news organizations can start using them today. 
  - Etan Horowitz, Global Innovation Programs Manager, News Partnerships, Google