Our Strategies
Hacks/Hackers is dedicated to advancing media innovation and safeguarding information integrity through three primary strategies:
Convening for Innovation
To organize a series of symposiums, summits and hackathons, gathering over participants from diverse fields and sectors to
- Identify new and diverse talents and voices through targeted outreach and inclusive event planning.
- Initiate interdisciplinary collaboration by creating opportunities for journalists, technologists, designers, and researchers to work together.
- Synthesize conversations into actionable steps by distilling key discussions and insights into concrete, innovative solutions.
Strengthening Media Infrastructure
Boost the technological capabilities of local news organizations by providing on-demand C-suite evaluations, along with a comprehensive multi-year planning and implementation roadmap for product and technology development. Goals are to:
- Assess product infrastructure.
- Begin iteration of multi-year product strategy.
- Prototype new products that leverage advanced technology to enhance the consumer news experience and boost revenue.
Safeguarding Information integrity
Improving the veracity, quality, and credibility of online information, essential to a healthy civil society.
- Supporting teams with microgrants to research or test new tech tools that can advance global credibility in journalism.
- Supporting the Citation Watchlist initiative to build on the success of the NewsQ-WHO collaboration, enhancing citation integrity on Wikipedia and ensuring reliable information in our digital infrastructure.
- Facilitating community forums for Credibility Coalition participants, providing opportunities for journalists and technologists to refine and advance their ideas collaboratively.
15 Years of Impact
Over the past 15 years, Hacks/Hackers has made a significant impact by fostering media innovation and combating misinformation. Key achievements include:
- Spearheaded Misinfocon in 2017, uniting programmers, journalists, and academics to combat misinformation. This groundbreaking initiative led to the incubation of numerous projects.
- Inspire the creation of key industry events from Newsgeist and contributing to the establishment of a journalism track at SXSW
- Catalyzed 100+ meetups in cities around the world empowering journalists and technologist to connect with new jobs, meet co-founders for startups, spark new collaborations like Code for Africa, MisinfoCon India, and more.
- Incubated start ups and prototype projects such as News Detective, Reality Team, MisinfoSec/AMITT.
- Initiated industry-wide collaborations such as Credibility Coalition, a research community dedicated to enhancing the understanding of the veracity, quality, and credibility of online information, essential to a healthy civil society and WikiCred, a collaboration with Wikimedia Foundation and global Wikimedia communities that surfaces and incubates research and software projects that focus on improving information literacy and credibility on the internet.