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Hacks/Hackers AI x Journalism Day in Austin (March 16)

This year, we'll take a deep dive into how artificial intelligence is changing how we create and distribute news and information.

Hacks/Hackers AI x Journalism Day in Austin (March 16)

AI x Journalism House in Austin returns on Monday March 16, 2026. Join Hacks/Hackers for a full day of discussions, workshops, and networking at The Texas Tribune on Congress Avenue, in heart of SXSW festivities.

Registration (free!)

Schedule

9:45 am - 10:45 am | Keep Your Spark: Using AI Without Losing What Makes Your Work Yours

AI can help you create faster — but what happens when everything starts to sound the same? As AI-generated content floods the internet, audiences are growing fatigued and skeptical. At the same time, creators and journalists face more pressure than ever to produce at speed. This is a fireside chat focused on finding the balance: how to use AI to accelerate your creative process without sacrificing the integrity and originality that make your work worth reading.

Presenter:

  • Bree Hall, Senior Developer Advocate & Content Creator

11:00 am - 12:00 pm | Media and AI: Lessons From the Field

NPR, Nebraska Public Radio, and KQED have each taken different paths experimenting with AI under real public-media constraints. This session moves past strategy talk into a candid field report on what these teams actually built, what stalled, and what failed. Leaders share lessons on tooling, workflows, newsroom buy-in, governance, and audience trust, along with the tradeoffs they faced along the way. The focus is on practical insights and decisions they would revisit if starting today, offering guidance other newsrooms can apply without repeating the same mistakes.

Presenters:

1:00 pm - 1:30 pm | How AI Holds Trolls Accountable

Platforms profit from engagement but leave newsrooms to manage abuse, threats and hate on their own. This session shows how one newsroom tests AI to identify racist, violent and legally relevant comments at scale, allowing faster moderation and escalation under EU law. The speaker walks through how AI could support community protection, improve discussion quality, and speed coordination with legal teams, while keeping human judgment firmly in control. Attendees gain a practical view of how AI could help newsrooms enforce standards when platforms do not.

Presenters:

1:35 pm - 2:05 pm | Building FUNKE AI: A European Newsroom's Agent Platform

FUNKE built its own AI platform instead of buying one off the shelf. This talk will explain how FUNKE AI evolved from a centralized tool into an agent platform where any team can access or build AI agents, while maintaining GDPR compliance using open-source technology and models from major AI labs and European providers.

Presenter:

2:15 pm - 3:15 pm | Pew and PolitiFact Put Humans in the Loop: Creating a Generative AI Strategy Audiences Trust

AI can help organizations reach wider audiences, personalize content and release reporters from the doldrums of boring manual tasks. This session goes inside two very different organizations doing two very different things using AI right now: One transforming how millions encounter research, and the other using custom tools to turn archives into fact-checks. The speakers get specific about the tools they're using, the guardrails they've built,and the moments where automation has to stop and a human has to decide. judgment or public trust.

Presenters:

3:30 pm - 4:15 pm | Fix the Feed: Designing Local Spaces That Inform Instead of Inflame

Most local social platforms optimize for engagement and end up full of spam, scammers and bickering. Roundabout, a startup from New_ Public, designed a different kind of local platform that prioritizes useful information and meaningful connection — including thoughtful uses of AI to help communities surface what matters. This session shows how Roundabout works, why local stewardship matters, and what newsrooms can learn about building community infrastructure that serves local life instead of extracting attention.

Presenter:

4:30 pm - 5:30 pm | Title TBA

Presenter:

Registration (free!)