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 our founding, 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:

• Newsroom AI Lab: In June 2025, Hacks/Hackers launched the Newsroom AI Lab to support smaller newsrooms in evaluating, adopting and implementing large language models and other recent technologies, supported by a $300,000 grant from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation. The Lab will build lasting technical capacity in participating newsrooms through hands-on collaboration, structured technical support and development of new AI tools and templates designed specifically for journalism that can be used by any newsroom.
• AI x Journalism Summit: Over 200 people from major U.S. newsrooms, local news outlets, tech companies and product teams gathered from May 7–8 for the first Hacks/Hackers AI x Journalism Summit in Baltimore. Over two days in meeting space provided by hosts The Real News Network, Summit participants explored how to tackle AI’s societal impact and apply its tools and practices to their own journalism as democratic institutions are under attack amid an AI revolution that will reshape the information ecosystem and economy.
• Analysis and Response Toolkit for Trust (ARTT): Hacks/Hackers, the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, and partner organizations were awarded $5 million to develop practical interventions to build trust and address vaccine hesitancy. After two years as a sponsored project, the intiative spun off in 2025 as its own non-profit organization, Discourse Labs.
• 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 help leads the development and execution of strategies that promote the adoption of emerging technologies like AI within the media industry. Cheung is a mission-driven executive with 25 years of expertise in media innovation, philanthropy, and nonprofit leadership. As President of Committee of 100, a nonprofit U.S. leadership organization of prominent Chinese Americans, he focuses on promoting the full participation of Chinese Americans in American society and advancing constructive dialogue between the United States and Greater China. His career spans leadership positions at the Center for Public Integrity, Knight Foundation, NBC News, The Associated Press, The Miami Herald and The Wall Street Journal, where he drove digital innovation and inclusive practices that amplify underrepresented voices. A NYU graduate with a Columbia University Sulzberger Fellowship, Paul serves on boards for The Literacy Lab and The Institute for Independent Journalists and is a member of the communications committee for The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

Jake Kara is a founding member and technical advisor of the Hacks/Hackers AI Newsroom Lab, helping newsrooms develop capacity to lead technical projects and leverage new technologies. Jake has been a journalist for 15 years and has spent the last decade building software systems to improve productivity and enable investigations with computational methods. Most recently, Jake was a senior engineer on a team at The Washington Post that built tools to support reporting and investigations. Jake has worked as a reporter, editor, and data editor in print and online news outlets in Connecticut, as well as a digital humanities developer at Yale University. Jake's software engineering master’s thesis focused on extending Jupyter Notebooks to enable modular software development.

Paige Moody is a technical advisor and founding member of the Hacks/Hackers Newsroom AI Lab, where she collaborates with partner newsrooms to experiment, build and thoughtfully integrate AI into reporting and editorial workflows. She is also a software developer for Big Local News in Stanford’s Computational Journalism Lab, where she draws on over a decade of experience in both tech and journalism to build data pipelines, open-source tools, and platforms that empower journalists to better cover their communities. Previously, Paige led The Washington Post’s Reporting Tools engineering team, where she worked closely with journalists to design and build applications that expand reporting capabilities, including Haystacker, the Post’s first AI-assisted reporting tool. Earlier in her career, Paige worked as a data engineer at Mapbox, developing large-scale data pipelines for geospatial visualization and analysis. Across her work, Paige focuses on developing practical, journalist-centered technical solutions that unlock new kinds of investigative and data-driven reporting, while guiding newsrooms in navigating emerging technologies with a strong emphasis on ethics, transparency, and impact.

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.

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.

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 technologist and author with nearly two decades of experience leading product development and strategy for everything from early-stage startups to global organizations. In newsrooms, she's worked for National Geographic and The Atlantic, on products such as online communities, privacy compliance, niche news verticals and more. She drew on her experiences leading online communities at newsrooms to research and write the book "How to Handle a Crowd," which offers recommendations for building and maintaining safe conversational spaces online. She started her career as a science and tech journalist and spent five years in New Delhi (where she helped start the New Delhi chapter of Hacks/Hackers). She has a Master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an bachelor's degree from Northwestern University.

Principals of Hacks/Hackers-affiliated projects

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.

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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.

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