Sign in Sign Up
newsletter

What we learned working with the Newsroom AI Lab’s first cohort

Plus, register for the AI x Journalism Summit in Baltimore, May 13-14

What we learned working with the Newsroom AI Lab’s first cohort

Slow Down First. That’s How Newsrooms Move Faster With AI.

Most newsrooms assume they need an army of engineers or a big tech budget to experiment with AI. They don't. What they need is a repeatable process, the right collaborators and time to understand their problems before reaching for tools, AI or otherwise.

Connecticut Mirror and Wisconsin Watch formed the first cohort of the Hacks/Hackers Newsroom AI Lab.

That's one of the takeaways from the first cohort of our Newsroom AI Lab. We partnered with Wisconsin Watch and The Connecticut Mirror to guide their teams through the process of beginning not with technology, but with conversations, interviewing colleagues across roles to surface the friction in – and opportunities to expand – their daily work.

From there, they each picked one problem to solve. We kept the scope tight and the timeline short. The goal wasn't to showcase AI, but to see what would actually help.

Read more

Sign up for the AI x Journalism Summit (May 13–14)

The Hacks/Hackers AI x Journalism Summit returns to Baltimore on May 13-14, 2026. Registration is now open and we hope you'll send us your pitches (use this submission form and see below for more details) for focused sessions and other programming at the summit led by experts who can go deep.

Get tickets

New research explores how "mental vaccine" social media posts can help people spot misinformation

RealityTeam, a non-profit working to push credible information into social media feeds that is fiscally sponsored by Hacks/Hackers, has a new article in Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review that examines whether short videos can help people spot manipulation online before they are fooled by it.

To address the problem of misinformation, the team tested prebunking as a potential "mental vaccine" – explaining common tricks used to mislead and misinform. In a real-world experiment, the team targeted a 19-second video ad to more than 375,000 Instagram users in the UK. Some users later saw a quiz asking them to identify a manipulative headline. Those who saw the video were about 21 percentage points better at spotting manipulation, and the effect lasted five months.

Read the article

AI x journalism news

Upcoming events

Journalism jobs

Read next