Hacks/Hackers unites diverse communities to advance media innovation and foster public trust in the information ecosystem. 

We do this by:

Convening Diverse Talent: Hacks/Hackers host hackathons, ideathons, and workshops that bring together professionals from journalism, technology and academia to ideate and innovate.

Incubating Innovation: We support the development of promising media solutions, providing resources, mentorship and networking opportunities.

Scaling Solutions: We facilitate the widespread adoption of effective media solutions through comprehensive implementation guides and strategic consulting.

Our projects typically follow two broad themes: media innovation and information integrity.

Media Innovation

Hacks/Hackers brings together and collaborates with experts in emerging technologies to inform and train journalists how to better understand and optimize the use of AI when reporting and presenting news.

Empowering understanding of artificial intelligence

Hacks/Hackers collaborates with technologists and experts in the AI space to teach journalists how to better understand and optimize the use of new technologies when reporting and presenting news.

Our collaborators include Hugging Face, the Associated Press, Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas in Austin, Poynter, 

AI x Journalism training

To help address the challenge of AI and large language model (LLM) technologies that can potentially surface non-credible information online, Hacks/Hackers collaborated with Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas in Austin to offer a free online course aimed at journalists.

The four-week course entitled, How to use ChatGPT and other generative AI tools in your newsroom, was attended by 10,600 journalists from nearly 150 countries. The course was facilitated by Hacks/Hackers AI researcher-in-residence Sil Hamilton and Aimee Rineheart, who heads AI product initiatives for The Associated Press.

Following the completion of the course, nearly 1,500 participants completed a Hacks/Hackers survey about how they thought newsrooms might benefit from ChatGPT and other generative AI tools. 

Hackathons

AI x Journalism ideathon at Poynter Summit on AI, Ethics, and Journalism (June 2024)
More than 50 journalists, editors, and technologists attended Poynter’s summit to discuss and help develop Poynter’s new AI ethics framework while brainstorming ideas about how to introduce emerging technologies into newsroom workflows. Hacks/Hackers was invited to lead an ideathon that saw five teams prototype new generative AI tools. The ideas pushed the boundaries of AI use beyond traditional applications like translation, transcription, summarization and content automation, envisioning the future of news delivery and consumption.

Open Source AI Hackathon: Catalyzing new forms of journalism and civic information (May 2024)

Organized by Hacks/Hackers, together with Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia University, and with support from Hugging Face and Codingscape, the three-day event focused on experimenting and prototyping with open source AI to build tools for journalism and civic information. More than 100 journalists, coders, and product designers spent a weekend together in New York earlier in April to participate in the first of a series of regular hackathons convened designed to push the limits of the technology for journalism. Read an update here.

AI x Journalism House at SXSW 2024 (March 2024)

Hacks/Hackers hosted an AI x Journalism House in the heart of downtown Austin alongside SXSW, the annual mega-festival devoted to the convergence of technology, film and music. For two days, we organized presentations, discussions, and workshops attended by nearly 200 people with speakers and attendees from news and technology organizations including The New York Times, BBC, The Texas Tribune, American Journalism Project, Macarthur Foundation, Texas Monthly, Online News Association, Axel Springer, Der Spiegel, the Poynter Institute, Hugging Face, Cohere, Yahoo, Microsoft, Meta, and many others. Read an update here.

Media Party

Hacks/Hackers frequently supports and collaborates with Media Party, an ongoing series of international gatherings that regularly attracts thousands journalists, technologists, and media entrepreneurs who participate in workshops , lightning talks, and hackathons . Media Party’s convenings typically engage participants in the evolving realities of local newsrooms, the emerging influence of AI on media reliability and credibility, and the impacts of mis/disinformation on democracy.  Hacks/Hackers most recently helped convene Media Party Chicago in June 2023.

Information Integrity

Hacks/Hackers supports collaborations, projects, and initiatives that focus on improving quality information that fosters healthy democracies. We believe this is achieved through deep collaboration between journalists, technologists and others who are engaged in the media and technology sectors.

Incubation

Hacks/Hackers provides incubation assistance in order to help facilitate community, foster cross-pollination, provide administrative services, and link successful projects to potential funders or larger initiatives for the next stage of growth.

Analysis and Response Toolkit for Trust (ARTT)

Building on National Science Foundation funding and support during Phase I, in October 2022, Hacks/Hackers, the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, and partner organizations received a $5 million award from the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator. The award supports Phase II development of the Analysis and Response Toolkit for Trust (ARTT). The project brings together insights from research fields such as computer science, social science, media literacy, conflict resolution, and psychology, in addition to practitioners from communities focusing on health-related communications in journalism, vaccine safety, and Wikipedia. The ARTT project will spin off from Hacks/Hackers in 2025.

WikiCred

In 2023, together with Wikimedia Foundation, Hacks/Hackers launched Phase II of the WikiCred initiative, funding 15 small-scale projects that focused on improving the trustworthiness of online information. First launched at WikiCredCon in 2019 at the Wikipedia community meetup at MIT, the WikiCred project supports research, software projects, convenings, and more so that the Wikimedia community can play a role in improving information literacy and credibility on the internet and beyond. 

Credibility Bot (CredBot)

Credibility Bot, a collaboration with the Wikipedia community, is aimed at making it easier for Wikipedians to increase the use of credible citations on Wikipedia articles in consistent ways. Currently, the project is focused on enabling Wikipedia editors to make more source ratings, have community reliability discussions, efficiently monitor sources, and automatically display source evaluations to readers and other editors.

News Quality Initiative (NewsQ)

Concluding in 2013, the NewsQ Initiative sought to elevate quality journalism when algorithms rank and recommend news articles online. An initiative of Hacks/Hackers, NewsQ grew out of a collaboration with the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. This initiative was formerly known as the Quality News Project and for a brief period of time as the NewsQA project.NewsQ approached this problem by engaging in design thinking activities in collaboration with technology, journalism, academia, and other communities.

Reality Team 

Realty Team is a non-profit working to push credible information into social media feeds, and supported with bridge funding by Hacks/Hackers and now under our fiscal sponsorship, focuses on disseminating credible information about elections and climate action across social media platforms.

News Detective

News Detective is a crowdsourced fact checking project that aims to fight misinformation at scale by increasing the pool of fact checkers, and in turn make fact checking more efficient. The startup, founded by Ilana Strauss, has received incubation support from MIT DesignX and Hacks/Hackers, 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. 

Convening

WikiConference North America
Hacks/Hackers was a sponsoring partner WikiConference North America in 2019 and 2023. Typically a  four-day meetup of Wikipedians from across North America and the Caribbean, the conference focuses on information reliability and credibility, and includes a WikiCred track devoted to credibility issues. Keynote speakers and presenters typically include representatives from Wikimedia Foundation, and major technology platforms such as Google, Microsoft, Meta, and others.

Credibility Coalition
Founded by Hacks/Hackers and Meedan in 2017, Credibility Coalition (CredCo) is a formal cross-disciplinary community committed to improving information ecosystems. With about 100 active members from academia, tech platforms, and journalism, since 2018 CredCo has incubated projects addressing health misinformation, the economics of misinformation, and other topics. 

MisinfoCon
MisinfoCon is a global movement focused on building solutions to online trust, verification, fact checking, and reader experience in the interest of addressing misinformation in all of its forms. MisinfoCon started as a large gathering at MIT in February 2017. That conference brought together ambassadors from technology platforms, news organizations, as well as experts in social science, media literacy, policy, advocacy and cybersecurity. Ever since then, MisinfoCon has focused on bringing people together in similar meetups, while facilitating online community and resource sharing.

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.

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

Hacks/Hackers712 H St NE PMB 96681Washington, DC 20002

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