Existential Questions About Journalism and AI

This week, The Andrews met up in Baltimore for the Hacks/Hackers Journalism x AI Summit, which was a blast. (Even before the Mario Kart tournament got underway.)

For one, we got to see some good friends and hear them say smart stuff, like Patrick Swanson and his session on synthetic audience panels.

But it was also the first time we’ve seen a huge group of talented journalists grapple with the implications of AI together in one space — and boy, was it energizing.

At the national level, it can feel like media organizations only have one of two paths: either reaching licensing deals with companies like OpenAI (The Atlantic, Axel Springer) or suing them for copyright infringement (The New York Times).

But in Baltimore, we heard a lot of ideas for a third or fourth path (MCP micro-transactions! Chat client integrations!)… and of course, we’ve got some ideas of our own.

Thanks to Hacks/Hackers for organizing the conference. And BIG thanks to The Real News Network, our Baltimore hosts, for being amazing and gracious and literally opening up a restaurant next door so we could record this video.

Mentioned in the video:

• Hacks/Hackers

• Verso

• Synthetic audience panel research

  • Generative Agent Simulations of 1,000 People

  • The Art of Audience Engagement: LLM-Based Thin-Slicing of Scientific Talks

• The Real News Network

• Model Context Protocol

• The Atlantic adding two print issues to its yearly cycle