| Anthony Adornato | Tamar Charney | David Cohn |
| Adam Harder | Robert Hernandez | Brant Houston |
| Damon Kiesow | Ben Kreimer | Kate Abbey-Lambertz |
| Dan Pacheco | Ryan Restivo | Subramaniam Vincent |
| Jason Webb |
Alphabetized by last name.
ANTHONY ADORNATO
Chair of Broadcast and Digital Journalism, Newhouse School, Syracuse University
“Changes in Models of Journalism” Panel Speaker
Anthony Adornato is chair of the Broadcast and Digital Journalism Department at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School. In 2013, he created and launched one of the first courses focused on the use of mobile and social media in journalism. That course became the basis of his textbook (third edition is forthcoming): “Mobile and Social Media Journalism: A Practical Guide for Multimedia Journalism” (Routledge). Adornato was named a Fulbright Scholar in recognition of his international expertise on the topic. He’s a former television reporter, anchor, and producer.
TAMAR CHARNEY
Charney, LLC
“Things All Journalists Should Know About Audio Storytelling”
With the rise of podcasting, voice platforms, and AI, all journalists should know the basics of audio storytelling. Generative AI has drastically improved the quality of synthetic speech meaning more people are consuming print stories by listening! We’ll take a look at why even print journalists could benefit from learning to write for the ear.
Tamar Charney is an editorial strategist and trainer specializing in how the public media network can work together to provide journalism on the platforms where people listen, read, and watch. As a Senior Editorial Director at National Public Radio (NPR) Charney worked on editorial strategy for emerging platforms such as NPR One and smart speakers, led the Collaborative Journalism Network, co-let podcast launches including Coronavirus Daily and the localization experiment with Consider This, and was the showrunner for Throughline. Prior to joining NPR in 2016, Charney was the Program Director at Michigan Radio where she managed on-air, online, news strategy, and operations.
DAVID COHN
Senior Director of Research & Development, Advance Local
“Engaging the Audience via SMS and AI”
In this talk, David Cohn will go over Subtext, a tool he helped build with Advance Local that news orgs across the country are using SMS to engage their audience on topics ranging from breaking news, fact checks, daily
headlines and more. He will also highlight how Generative AI can be used to sift through audience/social comments to help reporters with super listening.
David Cohn has worked at the intersection of technology and media for 20 years. He has cofounded startups (Spot.Us, Circa, Subtext) and currently is a Senior Director of R&D at Advance Local where he has helped build an SMS platform and spearheads their editorial AI products.
ADAM HARDER
CEO and Co-founder, InPress
“Making Media Literacy Sexy: How InPress is Using Journalism to Forge Deep Human Connection”
Factual information has been losing the attention battle to misinformation and recommender systems, but InPress is changing that by using media literacy as the conduit to deeper human connection. This session will explore how InPress leverages shared news consumption and trustworthy journalism as the foundation for a new type of online social ecosystem. Attendees will learn how news can act as a powerful social catalyst, helping people learn about their subconscious selves, everyone else, and their compatibility. Join us to see how InPress is not only making media literacy vogue but also creating a new revenue stream, with hyper-engaged younger audiences, for the journalism industry.
Adam Harder is the CEO and Co-Founder of InPress, the first news-based dating and friends app that is currently available in the DC area. Formerly, Adam was a video marketing team lead at numerous tech companies including Cisco, Isovalent, and DigitalOcean. Before tech, Adam was a broadcast journalist in the US Air Force in Guam, Korea, and Belgium.
During this journey, Adam completed a bachelor’s in Broadcast Journalism from Kent State University, a master’s in Journalism Innovation from Syracuse University, and a master’s in Integrated Marketing Communications from Georgetown University. Adam currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
ROBERT HERNANDEZ
Professor of Professional Practice, University of Southern California Annenberg
“[BLANK] is the Future of Journalism: Mobile Me&You Edition”
@webjournalist
This lively session mixes improv with what could be the next disruption to save journalism. Based on a game co-created by Prof. Robert Hernandez, attendees will hear quick takes on what could be the future of news.
Robert Hernandez, aka WebJournalist, has made a name for himself as a journalist of the Web, not just on the Web. His primary focus is exploring and developing the intersection of technology and journalism – to empower people, inform reporting and storytelling, engage community, improve distribution and, whenever possible, enhance revenue.
He is a Professor of Professional Practice at USC Annenberg, but he’s not an academic… he’s more of a “hackademic.” He and his students produce XR experiences under their brand: JOVRNALISM™. Their work has won awards from The Webby Awards, The Shorty Awards, the Online News Association, Society of Professional Journalists, among others, and can be seen in Al Jazeera, The New York Times, NBC, NPR, ProPublica, USA Today and across other platforms.
BRANT HOUSTON
Knight Chair Professor in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting
“Changes in Models of Journalism” Panel Moderator/Speaker
Brant Houston holds the Knight Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting at the University of Illinois. He teaches investigative and advanced reporting in the Department of Journalism at UI. Houston also oversees the online newsroom at UI, CU-CitizenAccess.org, which serves as a lab for digital innovation and data journalism, and is an affiliated faculty member at UI’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Cline Center for Democracy and School of Information Sciences. Currently, Houston is working on projects involving nonprofit journalism and digital tools for news gathering.
Houston became Knight Chair in 2007 after serving for more than a decade as executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, and as professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Before joining IRE, he was an award-winning investigative reporter at daily newspapers for 17 years.
Houston wrote “Computer-Assisted Reporting: A Practical Guide,” and co-authored “The Investigative Reporter’s Handbook.” He co-founded the Global Investigative Journalism Network and chairs its board of directors. He also co-founded and serves on the board of the Institute for Nonprofit News, an association of more than 130 nonprofit newsrooms in North America. He has taught and spoken about investigative and computer-assisted reporting at newsrooms and universities in 25 countries.
DAMON KIESOW
Knight Chair in Journalism Innovation, Missouri School of Journalism
“Trust By Design: The Ethics of Technology in News”
@dkiesow
As journalists we are charged to “seek the truth and report it” but also to “minimize harm” to the communities we serve. Our use of technology to publish and monetize news can seem an abstract distance from those concerns. Every design choice, paywall adjustment, build/buy evaluation, or marketing campaign carries a potential risk of violating journalistic ethics or harming reader trust. We will explore this network of technical, business, and ethical decisions and impacts and try to develop a strategy for how best to foresee the unforeseen in such a complex system of cause-and-effect, and how to talk about and better navigate the risks.
Damon Kiesow is a digital media pioneer who specializes in aligning community information needs and business strategy in support of sustainable local journalism. He teaches a senior capstone in news product thinking, is authoring the first textbook in News Product Management and is a co-founder of the international News Product Alliance. Before joining Mizzou, he served as director of Product for McClatchy in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he reorganized the Product group and created the company’s first Product Design and User Experience Research teams.
BEN KREIMER
Creative Technologist, Collaborative Futures
“Making Collaborative Futures”
Ben Kreimer is a creative technologist using emerging and available technologies and platforms to reveal and tell stories and support mission-driven media work. Through collaborations with journalists, scholars, students, artists, human rights defenders, and mission-driven organizations, he focuses on democratizing access to hardware and software tools, including the use of open-source platforms and low-cost hacks and materials. A Forbes 30-Under-30 honoree, Ben has worked with Georgia Tech’s School of Building Construction, The Okavango Wilderness Project, Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, USC Annenberg, The Times of India, African Wildlife Foundation, the Antiochia ad Cragum Archaeological Research Project, Drone Journalism Lab, and he was the “Beta Fellow” at BuzzFeed’s Open Lab for Journalism, Technology, and the Arts.
Collaborative Futures is a people-centered practice of sharing/learning/making across disciplines, from journalism to archaeology and social justice, for revealing enduring and innovative collisions of media and technology. Collaborative Futures is also the name of an R&D network of journalists, technologists, digital creatives, and human rights defenders working in East Africa. In this presentation, Ben Kreimer will share examples of Collaborative Futures processes and projects, including WhatsApp chatbots for human rights abuse archiving and news distribution, and a one-of-a-kind 360-degree camera trap for nocturnal African wildlife.
KATE ABBEY-LAMBERTZ
Product Director, Outlier Media
“Just a text away: Building responsive — and responsible — relationships with readers”
Outlier Media began texting Detroiters nearly a decade ago, long before we had a website. The landscape and technology have changed drastically, but many of the problems are the same: how do we reach readers where they are, with the info they need? How do we earn trust and loyalty in an ecosystem filled with misinformation and generated content? How can a newsroom make itself a utility in its readers’ lives? We’ll look at the ways Outlier has oriented around responsiveness and filling information gaps and how texting can give newsrooms unique opportunities to form direct relationships with audiences.
With more than a decade in digital journalism focused on local news that serves Detroiters, Kate Abbey-Lambertz is the Product Director for Outlier Media, where she oversees the future of news tools. Previously, she served as co-founder and editorial director of Detour Detroit, where she launched distinct editorial products to meet local audience needs while steering coverage including award-winning coronavirus reporting.
As a 2021 Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow, Kate built the Detroit Development Tracker, an open-source platform to help Detroit residents better understand and influence real estate and development activity in their neighborhoods. She has collaborated extensively with other local news organizations to help them implement newsletter growth and engagement strategies she developed at Detour.
Before founding Detour in 2018, she was a writer and editor at HuffPost, launching its Detroit vertical and working as a national reporter covering housing and urbanism. In her free time, she loves a good book, a long run and an elaborate cooking project.
DAN PACHECO
Professor & Peter A. Horvitz Chair in Journalism Innovation,
Syracuse University
“Ethical AI For Your Journalism Beat”
@pachecod
AI does much more than write. It’s like an eager intern in your pocket that can make you a better reporter. Learn how to create your own custom AI models to pore through mountains of documents, perform analysis on data to uncover stories, code up visual presentations of data, and more.
Pacheco has taught digital journalism courses for 12 years, including most recently Virtual Reality Storytelling, Foundations of Data and Digital Journalism, and AI for Media Professionals. These topics and more are covered in his recently published book, “Experimenting with Emerging Media Platforms: Field Testing the Future” (Routledge, 2023).
He co-produced the award-winning Harvest of Change VR project which earned an Edward R. Murrow Award in 2015. In 2020, Pacheco led the student-produced project, Visualizing 81, which won multiple industry awards. He serves on the Peabody Awards Interactive Board of Jurors to recognize storytelling innovation in immersive media, games and interactive documentaries. Prior to academia, Pacheco spent 20 years in digital journalism, tech companies and startups. He received a “20 Under 40” award in 2005 for social networking innovations in journalism, and a Knight News Challenge grant in 2007.
RYAN RESTIVO
YESEO
Ryan Restivo was a 2022-23 Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow who created the YESEO app, a free Slack app that has been installed in over 500 workspaces and helps journalists with SEO best practices. YESEO was a finalist for the 2024 Online Journalism Awards category Excellence in AI Innovation. YESEO’s goal is to reduce the time it takes to come up with that relevant headline, the right keywords and get your work seen and read. Ryan has over 15 years experience in digital media and is currently at Newsday as a Director, Product & Emerging Technologies.
SUBRAMANIAM VINCENT
Director of Journalism and Media Ethics, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University
“News and Journalistic Authenticity: How to Tackle the Generative AI Distribution Era”
@subbuvincent
With the arrival of sleek Answer UX-based LLM-powered summarization chatbots, the ethics of news distribution and news ingestion has only become murkier. Answer engines like Perplexity.ai are driving a different form of news discovery: summarizations and citations. But digesting news into summarized “knowledge” nuggets for power users is not ethically as straightforward as it seems. Some worry that Perplexity.Ai-type app companies will gain more from your hard journalistic work than give you and long-tail publishers back any real RoI. Meanwhile, search, social media, and a variety of news aggregator apps — Google News, Apple News, MSN, Yahoo News, Smart News, Seekr, Ground News, Inkl – continue their diverse approach to distributing your news stories to their users.
What can comparisons between the technologies tell us the media creators? How might your knowledge of journalism ethics best prepare you for what’s coming? Journalism ethics drives authenticity, and that is your strength for the LLMs era.
Subbu Vincent is Director of Journalism and Media Ethics at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. He specializes in journalistic sourcing policies and standards. He applies this into source diversity audit technology development, anti-disinformation efforts, and training and consulting on news algorithms design, open-source intelligence ethics, and political ads for local news organizations. His latest work involves benchmarking LLMs for journalistic sourcing data generation and evaluation. He also convenes the News Distribution Ethics Roundtable, a tech platform-focused virtual body.
Vincent writes about media ethics with a focus on democracy and technology at Forbes. His recent podcast interviews are on AI, Advertising and the Future of Journalism Ethics and AI and the Future of Local Journalism. He is a Top Journalism Voice on LinkedIn. His academic writing on journalism ethics, mitigating disinformation and misinformation, and community media are available in several book chapters and academic journal articles. Vincent received the Distinguished Service to Journalism award from the Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California in 2022, and was John S Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. He has graduate and undergraduate degrees in computer and electronics engineering.
JASON WEBB
Assistant Professor of Visual Communications, S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications
“Extending Your Mobile Reality”
Films like The Matrix and Minority Report have provided captivating glimpses into the power of immersive storytelling, blurring the lines between fiction and our everyday lives. We will dive into cutting-edge platforms and technologies that allow us to create stories that transcend traditional boundaries. We’ll explore tools that enable you to weave narratives directly into the fabric of reality, making your audience not just passive observers, but active participants. Through hands-on experimentation, you’ll discover how to leverage these exciting innovations to enhance immersion and elevate your storytelling.
Dr. Jason Webb is an Assistant Professor for the Visual Communications Department in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. He teaches classes in Motion Design, Character Animation, 2D and 3D Animation, Immersive Media (XR Design). Webb’s research focuses on XR in Education with the goal of creating educational content that is challenging and exciting for students to learn from. His work looks to push the boundaries of technology in storytelling.