Hacks/Hackers’ Newsroom AI Lab add three new partners

Hacks/Hackers’ Newsroom AI Lab is expanding to add three new partners: Bellingcat, Prison Journalism Project and Trusting News. The Lab helps participating small- and mid-sized news organizations build capacity in order to scope, evaluate and manage technical journalism projects involving AI. 

All three new Newsroom AI Lab partners already develop and share approaches, methodologies, tools and resources for reporters and newsrooms: 

• Founded in 2014, Bellingcat is an independent investigative collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists who have pioneered the use of open source research methods to investigate a variety of subjects of public interest.
• The Prison Journalism Project is an independent, national nonprofit organization that trains incarcerated writers to be journalists and publishes their stories.
• Trusting News is a nonprofit journalism support organization helping newsrooms and the communities they aim to serve understand each other. With research-backed, newsroom-tested strategies, they empower journalists to build a better relationship with their community.

“At Bellingcat we do not only conduct investigations based on publicly available online sources, we also build research tools and methods. We are of course looking into how AI can support this type of research. This is why we are happy to partner with Hacks/Hackers to explore new ideas on how to best build AI tools particularly for the growing number of journalists who are entering the field of open source research,” said Johanna Wild, Bellingcat’s Innovation Lead.

"We are a small organization that publishes incarcerated writers and trains them in the tools of journalism. AI tools have the potential to help us serve more writers, more effectively," said Dr. Clare Hammoor, Prison Journalism Project's director of learning. "We're particularly excited to be working with the Newsroom Innovation Lab to explore ways that training and publishing can support literacy and workforce readiness for incarcerated writers across the U.S."

“At Trusting News, we know journalists can build trust through transparency and engagement," Lynn Walsh. Assistant Director of Trusting News said. "Newsrooms want to do this work but too often, it becomes one more thing to add to the list, not something built into everyday workflows. I’ve been talking for a while about how technology and AI could help solve that problem. Can we use tech to embed transparency and community listening into the journalism process itself? Can AI help newsrooms more easily listen and engage? We think the answer is yes and we’re excited to explore how to make that happen through this Innovation Lab.”

Launched by Hacks/Hackers in June 2025 in partnership with the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, The Newsroom AI Lab supports smaller newsrooms in evaluating, adopting and implementing large language models and other recent technologies through hands-on collaboration, structured technical support and development of new AI tools and templates that can be used by any newsroom. The Lab’s curriculum guides partners through complete product development cycles, identifying real needs, defining success metrics and using decision-making frameworks to evaluate if AI tools might provide replicable, shareable approaches and solutions to common newsroom problems.

“We’re thrilled to expand this program to more partners, working directly with them to apply AI and also at the same time learn how to run a product development process,” said Burt Herman, Hacks/Hackers principal and co-founder. 

Get in touch

Hacks/Hackers will be working with more newsrooms throughout the initial term for the lab that runs through mid-2026, with more cohorts launching in the coming months. If you are interested in working with the Hacks/Hackers Newsroom AI Lab, please fill out this form.