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Looking ahead: What we're planning for 2025

In 2024, our events generated dozens of project ideas and engaged more than 1,000 journalism and technology professionals. We're planning to do even more in 2025.

Looking ahead: What we're planning for 2025
Photo by Nevin Thompson.

With 2025 now in full swing, Hacks/Hackers is looking back on what we did in 2024, and sharing our plans for the year ahead.

Over the past year, Hacks/Hackers has focused on two program streams, media innovation and information integrity.

Our Media Innovation Activities

Our media innovation efforts have been at the forefront of integrating AI into journalism through several high-impact initiatives:

Our AI x Journalism House at SXSW drew some 200 participants from major organizations including The New York Times, BBC, Texas Tribune and Hugging Face, along with participants from around the world. These in-person events sparked critical discussions about AI's role in newsroom innovation and audience engagement. 

Key partnerships included:

We also launched the Hacks/Hackers AI Real Talk series that tackled crucial industry issues like AI partnerships, emerging interfaces, legal challenges and AI's impact on democracy with audiences of 100+ industry leaders per session.

Together, our events generated dozens of project ideas and engaged more than 1,000 journalism and technology professionals. Notable outcomes include concepts such as Curious GeorgePT bias detection, the CityLens local news platform and the DocImpact Toolkit for independent filmmakers.

Looking to 2025, we're building on this momentum with four strategic initiatives:

The inaugural Hacks/Hackers AI x Journalism Conference will be the first national gathering focused exclusively on AI's impact on journalism. With three tracks – AI coverage strategies, newsroom AI implementation and AI-powered engagement and product development – this conference addresses the critical need for practical guidance as newsrooms navigate the AI revolution. 

The Hacks/Hackers Hackathon Series will continue to bring together  journalists, technologists and civic leaders to collaboratively shape AI's role in public information. Through five events across the U.S. and internationally in 2025, kicking off at the University of Minnesota in late January then moving on to AI x Journalism House at SXSW, Hacks/Hackers will continue to create spaces where diverse perspectives tackle shared challenges and spark innovative solutions.

The AI Real Talk web series bridges journalism, technology, and civic sectors by examining critical issues like content ownership, emerging interfaces, and legal frameworks. By bringing together AI researchers, civil society leaders, and newsroom innovators, we foster dialogue essential for developing AI solutions that serve the public good.

The Hacks/Hackers News + AI Accelerator Program will address an urgent industry need as smaller, regional and/or BIPOC news outlets risk falling behind in AI adoption. While major newsrooms rapidly integrate AI tools, many independent news organizations lack technical infrastructure to experiment. Our accelerator will support cohorts of newsrooms through structured implementation of existing solutions, co-building AI tools and individual coaching to ensure local journalism remains competitive and relevant.

Our Information Integrity Activities

Starting with the launch of MisinfoCon at MIT in 2017, Hacks/Hackers has supported journalists, technologists and researchers to collaborate on projects aimed at addressing information integrity. Our efforts have helped launch a World Wide Web Consortium working group, incubate a variety of successful projects focused on improving online credibility, and convene an ongoing monthly Slack meetup. Our information integrity events have taken place all over the world, including London, Kyiv, Washington, D.C., Italy and India, and now include deep ties with the Wikimedia and WikiCred communities.

Key information integrity activities in 2024 included:

  • A monthly Credibility Coalition (CredCo) online meetup of approximately 100 active members who discuss new tools and approaches to information integrity.
  • Incubating credibility projects, including News Detective, Reality Team and the Analysis and Response Toolkit for Trust. Notably, News Detective has partnered with Bluesky to help with content moderation and labeling.
  • Refinement of Wikipedia Credibility Bot, a collaboration with the Wikipedia community aimed at making it easier for Wikipedians to increase the use of credible citations on Wikipedia articles in consistent ways.
  • Support for WikiConference North America, the annual gathering of Wikimedians, institutions, and professionals where tools, tactics and techniques for addressing and improving information integrity are surfaced.

In 2025, Hacks/Hackers information integrity initiatives will include:

Convening WikiCredCon 2025: Reliable Sources in collaboration with WikiCred and the Internet Archive in San Francisco. Supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, the Internet Archive and Hacks/Hackers, this 3-day event in February will build on the success of the 2019 WikiCredCon at MIT. WikiCredCon 2025: Reliable Sources will feature talks and hackathon aimed at developing tools and refining techniques for shaping critical media literacy and source reliability on Wikipedia.

Continuing the WikiCredCon discussion in monthly CredCo meetups. Following the February conference, Hacks/Hackers will provide a space for support and collaboration in our regular series of online meetups devoted to information integrity.

Organizing information integrity talks at SXSW, and a WikiCred track at Wikipedia North America 2025. We’ll build on the information integrity work sparked at WikiCredCon by facilitating information integrity talks at SXSW, and by providing updates at the annual gathering Wikiconference North America conference, which will be held this coming year in New York City.

Exploring how to incubate information integrity projects. Cite Unseen, incubated by Hacks/Hackers since a 2018 hackathon, is a tool for Wikipedia editors, adds icons to citations on articles to denote the nature and reliability of sources at a glance. The tool has so far categorized 3,400 domains, largely through human effort and some automation. However, there are nearly 30 million citations on English Wikipedia alone. Cite Unseen recently received a grant from Wikipedia Switzerland in order to explore how LLMs such as ChatGPT can help categorize sources at scale.

Conclusion

We did a lot in 2024, and we have even bigger plans in 2025! We hope you'll join us in San Francisco in February, at SXSW in March, in Baltimore in May, or at one of the online events we have planned. What are your plans for the coming year? Let us know – we'd love to hear from you.