Our Program

“I don’t believe that this is encrypted so I think we’re OK": Protecting your devices from prying eyes

Facilitated by Davis Erin Anderson

While raids are extremely unlikely, the ones we’ve seen take place at a newsroom in Kansas in 2023 and at the home of a WaPo reporter earlier this year have proven to be deeply impactful to the lives and livelihoods of the journalists and publishers involved. Meanwhile, reporters, law enforcement officers, and everyone else uses phones to record one another’s activities. There’s a pressing need to make sure that mobile phones and laptops are set up to protect reporting materials, contact info for sources, and the list goes on.

Let’s take a moment to make sure that your device is prepared to meet the moment (even if that moment is a trip overseas this year! We can still dream). Join this session to implement concrete steps to protect your devices from unwanted incursions of various kinds. We will take time for you to investigate the settings on your laptops and phones to make sure they match your security needs and usability preferences, and perhaps even leave you with some helpful habits and routines that keep you set up for safety.

Build a better budget: A collaborative Airtable session

Facilitated by Ellery Jones

Building a newsroom editorial calendar is maybe the most un-glamorous job in a news organization. On the one hand, it’s absolutely critical to have a detailed database of all your content, from web stories to social media posts to podcast segments. It’s next to impossible to plan upcoming coverage without it (and it comes in handy for grant reporting!). On the other hand, it seems like no single system works for everyone. Getting editors and reporters to use it is like herding cats on the wide open prairie in the middle of a blizzard.

Airtable is a common tool for newsrooms trying to wrangle their content. In this session, we’ll look at a few examples of newsroom databases at Chicago Public Media and talk about how we got the newsroom to adopt them. We’ll talk a little bit about what issues are coming up in your newsrooms. Then, we’ll get hands-on and try to build a rudimentary task management tool together.

Can local news work as a consumer product?

Facilitated by Eric Ulken

Local journalism’s value as a public good is well documented. Its value to individual consumers — what makes them open their wallets in ongoing support — isn’t as well understood, much less deliberately designed for. During my year as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, I developed a thesis about that gap: what audience value actually means, how newsrooms often fail to create and communicate it, and what a more consumer-centered journalism might look like in the age of AI.

I want to use the first part of this session to share that thesis — briefly and as a provocation — and then turn the room loose on the harder questions: What would it take to make news function as a product people choose rather than a cause they support? What would have to change about how we make editorial decisions, how we design products, how we talk to audiences, how we price and package our journalism? This session is for anyone with thoughts about the relationship between journalism and the people it serves — no product experience needed!

Civic journalism, community organizing and how we build movement against the tide

Facilitated by William Lager

What happens when the community is the media? Let’s put our community organizer hats on and share what has worked to build up civic journalism with our communities. Were they pop-up newsrooms? A special newsletter? A zine, or was it something more? Showing up at every community event to create one on one relationships? Legacy media built itself on a separation from community with the idea that it would ensure objectivity and insulate power from informing the content, and we can see it has fallen short.

Community Journalism — Lessons from your local farmers market

Facilitated by Cirien Saadeh

Healthy and sustainable local food systems rely on relationships, collaborations, shared infrastructure, and community stewardship. These ecosystems are made up of interconnected nodes and connective tissue—farmers markets, distribution networks, farmers, education, community leadership, and more. Food systems scholars and food justice organizers have spent decades studying food systems resilience. Indicators often include diversity, redundancy, infrastructure, distribution networks, knowledge sharing, and community participation. If we can consider community journalism through a similar lens, these indicators may help us imagine and articulate healthier and more sustainable community journalism ecosystems.

Viewing community journalism as an ecosystem helps us understand the work we do and the roles we play — as tools for sustainability. It asks us—whether we are funders, educators, journalists, technologists, community members, etc—to imagine models for community journalism that prioritize relationships, shared infrastructure, and a collective resilience. By drawing from frameworks used in communities where work is being done to build more resilient food ecosystems, we can explore how we might cultivate healthier and more sustainable community journalism ecosystems.

This session draws on emerging research exploring how more resilient community journalism can be built by examining local news systems in St. Paul, MN and Prescott, AZ. Through examination of nodes and connective tissue, the project asks how lessons from resilient food systems might inform the development of sustainable community news ecosystems.

Community skunk works (AI beyond capitalism)

Facilitated by Dan Schultz

What happens when communities, not venture capital, experiment with AI to create tools for themselves? Many communities have experts who want to volunteer their time and experience for the betterment of their neighbors. Let’s figure out how those people can use LLMs to create tools that honor accountability and create public good.

Join this session to help develop a set of guidelines and recipes that can be brought to physical communities to make it easy for them to turn needs and ideas into real initiatives through code, documentation, processes, and even new organizations.

Designing tools journalists actually use

Facilitated by Monica Williams

Journalists complain about and build tools all the time, but are we designing them with real newsroom constraints or user interest in mind?

We build:

• Databases and dashboards that aren’t updated
• Databases of names of journalists. Does anyone use them?
• AI tools no one trusts
• Tools that are replications of what’s already been done

This interactive session will examine how tools get built and how do we get people to adopt them? When should we not build?

Finding each other: A space for journalist-caregivers with young kids

Facilitated by Tasmiha Khan

Journalism is demanding. Caregiving is demanding. Doing both at the same time, especially with young kids, can feel isolating in ways that are hard to name out loud. This session is a space to do exactly that.

We’ll start by sharing honestly about what this juggle actually looks like: the missed deadlines, the conference logistics, the guilt, the joy, the creative fuel caregiving can unexpectedly provide. From there we’ll move into problem-solving together. What strategies, tools, and workarounds have actually helped? We’ll close by building something concrete: a small, ongoing community of journalist-caregivers who don’t want to lose each other after the conference ends. You’ll leave with people, not just ideas.

From vibes to signals: Using imperfect data to shape newsletter strategy

Facilitated by Emily Hood, Aditi Mukund

Newsletters are one of journalism’s most direct and owned relationships with audiences, making it crucial to have data on what’s working and what’s not. However, the data we rely on to make their decisions is increasingly incomplete, misleading or unavailable.

In this session, we’ll discuss how to use metrics to map out a newsletter strategy, from launching newsletters, determining a product/market fit and iterating on current newsletters. Participants will share the data they look at to shape their newsletter decisions, how their newsletters fit into their broader organization’s strategy, and discuss problems and pitfalls with the newsletter data they have access to. We don’t have all the answers! But we hope at the end of the session, participants will leave with more direction on how to use data to guide their newsletter strategy.

Front-line leadership: How newsrooms manage risk, safety, and law enforcement coverage

Facilitated by Juanita Islas

Newsroom leaders from cities experiencing heightened law-enforcement activity will discuss how they are assessing risk and fulfilling their responsibility to protect journalists in the field.

Drawing on real newsroom decision-making, panelists will explore how they prepare reporters for volatile assignments, establish safety protocols, respond to emergencies, and balance editorial imperatives with physical and legal risk. They’ll also discuss internal communication, legal coordination, community relationships, and how leadership decisions before and during an assignment directly affect reporter safety.

This moderated discussion, led by the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF), will offer practical guidance for editors and managers navigating unpredictable reporting conditions — with candid reflections on what has worked, what hasn’t, and what newsrooms must do differently going forward.

Hiring doesn't have to suck for everyone

Facilitated by Emma Carew Grovum, Jonah Newman

This is meant to be a candid conversation about how hiring processes can be so much better if we just try a little harder to be better. More clearly defined timelines and transparent communication between hiring team and candidates. Clarity from the hiring team about what they are looking for in their next hire and how candidates might be evaluated. NO GHOSTING (FROM BOTH SIDES!!!) And we can talk about best practices for an equitable and inclusive hiring process – candidate office hours, FAQ docs, short answer Qs vs a cover letter, etc. Ideally this is also a space to help folks who are new to hiring or accidentally involved in hiring to widen their toolkit while also learning how to balance hiring duties with day-to-day jobs.

How do we create a world where non-writing journalists don’t have to fight for co-bylines

Facilitated by Greg Linch

It’s 2026 (!!!), and many non-writing journalists still have to fight to be seen as full editorial partners. In too many newsrooms, people working in graphics, data, visuals, interactives, design, and other nontraditional roles are treated like support staff rather than journalists with editorial judgment, reporting value, and creative expertise. And credit is not about ego; it shapes power, trust, promotion, and retention. Who gets named is often a proxy for who gets valued.

This session is a chance to imagine something better together. We’ll compare how different newsrooms handle credit, talk through what has and has not worked when advocating for fair recognition, and identify the habits, language, and structures that keep non-writing journalists from being treated as equals. We’ll look for practical interventions at multiple levels: story planning, team communication, publication standards, and management expectations. We’ll also explore whether this community wants to build something tangible out of the conversation, such as shared language, practical guidance, or even an industry-facing document that journalists can bring back to colleagues and managers who “don’t get it” yet.

How to ask for help

Facilitated by Paul Schreiber

Many folks asking for help do themselves a disservice with poorly-formed questions. In this session, we’ll come up with examples of poorly- and well-formed queries, and frameworks, checklists and templates for asking better questions.

This is helpful

• as a journalist
• as a citizen
• dealing with legal, medical and technical professionals
• dealing with government
• providing bug reports and feature requests for software
• getting things fixed

How to build a successful consumer-owned media co-op

Facilitated by Mikki Morrissette

With the need to involve consumers as supporters of journalism — even as people are getting used to social media as a free outlet that might seem like journalism — 41-year-old Minnesota Women’s Press (womenspress.com) is in the process of transitioning into a consumer-owned media co-op, which is rare in media and has not generally worked when tried.

As a 2026 cohort member of both Advancing Democracy and Start Co-op, and publisher of a grassroots-oriented media platform that centers consumers, I will lead an interactive discussion about how to maintain editorial integrity in a journalism enterprise that is co-owned by at least 1,000 people (not by private equity or billionaires) — one member, one vote.

Join us to talk about how this new venture can work, what needs to be in place to make it work, and why it is important to the future of journalism. Minnesota has co-ops for groceries, agriculture, energy, arts, and childcare — for starters; how will it smartly set the stage for the first successful consumer-owned media co-op?

How we cover (and survive) federal immigration operations as immigrant journalists

Facilitated by Cynthia Tu, Chao Xiong, Mohamed Ibrahim

When federal immigration actions unfold — whether it’s a workplace raid, a federal-involved shooting, or protests in the streets — immigrant-led newsrooms are often covering the story while living it. In this session, journalists from Sahan Journal, a Minnesota newsroom reporting for immigrants by immigrants, will reflect on what they learned while reporting from the frontlines.

What does it mean to cover immigration enforcement when you or your loved ones have vulnerable immigration status? How do we prepare ourselves physically and mentally before stepping into uncertain situations? And how can newsroom leaders guide and protect their team under intense pressure? The panel will offer a candid look at what it means to report on immigration enforcement not as outsiders, but as members of the communities at stake.

How we investigated ethnic cleansing by the Sudanese Armed Forces

Facilitated by Sabrina Slipchenko

When journalists say it’s “hard to report on Sudan,” it can sometimes sound like an excuse not to engage. Granted, the obstacles are real: unreliable geospatial data, journalists in exile, communications blackouts, a media landscape fractured by information warfare, and access to the country controlled by the Sudanese Armed Forces — the same government we found responsible for the ethnic cleansing of non-Arab farming communities.

Our investigation mapped survivor testimony and reconstructed a massacre from one of the war’s key battles. To get there, we used whatever tools we could find and adapt: Telegram, TikTok, a patchwork of geospatial databases, and a lot of creative problem-solving. In this session, we’ll walk through how we built that reporting infrastructure under severe constraints, and what other journalists working in similarly difficult environments might borrow or build on.

How we remade a secure whistleblowing system to support remote work and protect you from malware

Facilitated by John Skinner, Kevin O'Gorman

SecureDrop is a whistleblowing system designed to help journalists and high-risk sources communicate while protecting the anonymity of sources and the confidentiality of their messages. It has been used by news organizations globally for over a decade as a key tool for investigative reporting. Our presentation will cover how recent changes we’ve made will make it easier and safer to work with leaks and sources, collaborate with your team on investigations, and use SecureDrop more easily when working remotely.

SecureDrop gives newsrooms a safe and secure way to receive leaks from sources, but historically did not solve the problem of how to safely work with leaked files after they’d been received. Reviewing submissions has also been slow and labour-intensive for journalists. We’ve built a new system for journalists, SecureDrop Workstation, that makes it faster and safer to review submissions. Pilot users have already reported review time going from several hours to minutes. It also makes it safer to work with the documents you receive while protecting you from malware.

Immigration inside the newsroom: How do we build better support networks for international journalists

Facilitated by Jasmine (Ye) Han, Kai Teoh

International journalists often face newsroom challenges that remain invisible to colleagues and managers: work authorization constraints, visa timelines, policy changes, and employers’ uncertainty around sponsorship. These pressures can shape not only who gets hired, but who feels able to stay in journalism at all.

In this session, we’d like to facilitate a practical conversation about what newsroom peers, managers, and community organizers can do to better support international journalists - and how to build stronger support systems around hiring, retention, and belonging. We’ll share context from our work with Journalism Jobs for Internationals - a grassroots initiative - then have participants work through concrete scenarios and brainstorm solutions they could bring back to their own organizations and communities. We’ll also bring some of our real unanswered questions to the room - around communication, capacity, sustainability, and community support - and invite participants to help us think through solutions that could also inform similar grassroots efforts elsewhere.

Joy Breaks: Making space for joy in journalism

Facilitated by Liz Worthington, Marita Pèrez Diaz

Journalists today are often at the front lines of crisis, whether that’s covering immigration raids, war, political polarization, corruption or trauma. It may not be your job all of the time but it can be depleting, for front-line reporters, editors who work with them and for communities who experience it. Without moments of joy, curiosity and creative renewal, burnout can become inevitable. This session explores the idea of “joy breaks”—intentional shifts in work or practice that help journalists reconnect with creativity, perspective and the reasons they got into the field in the first place. In this session, attendees will reflect on what brings them joy and how they can carve out regular joy breaks in their routine. Participants will walk out with a list of things to try for themselves or their newsrooms…and maybe with a new mini piece of art for their desk.

Let’s create a best practices guide for writing News Nerd documentation

Facilitated by Alexandra Kanik

Every news nerd team (even one-person teams) functions differently because we all work under such different pressures and environments. Part of what makes us unique is how nimble we are, and at the same time that speed of iteration and change also means we quickly learn what should or could be better.

We’re proposing coming together as a community to prototype a framework that news nerds today and in the future can use as their source - heh - and starting point for documentation about their teams, work, standards and processes.

Let’s talk about values

Facilitated by Amy Kovac-Ashley

We’ve got a problem in journalism that transcends business models, technology and trust. It’s the question of values. We talk about “journalistic values,” but what we mean by that varies. Our institutions inconsistently articulate their values or are opaque about how their values inform their decisions. People within these institutions often feel that value gap but aren’t positioned to do much about it.

In this session, we will take a deep dive into values, starting with our own personal values, and how we live them out in our lives and work. We’ll also look at what happens when our personal values are not aligned with our work. Together, we’ll create a resource of ideas for how journalists and journalism institutions can more clearly articulate their values and demonstrate their fidelity to them.

Make your data public (and usable)

Facilitated by Steven Rich

Too often in journalism, big data projects make a huge impact in communities across the country and world. And under the guise of competition, or just lack of resources, the raw data that could be useful for so many other things stays hidden on one person’s computer. Let’s talk about how to get more of our data available to the public and in a useful format (i.e. downloadable data in smaller chunks for people who don’t know how to use anything but Excel). And let’s talk about making it a part of our permanent workflows.

Managing our emotional selves

Facilitated by Kathy Lu

We are emotional creatures and cover highly emotional topics, but we often do not talk about emotions at work. This session, which includes an breakout activity for the room, will take participants through understanding where our emotions originate, how to be more attuned to them, and how to move through them so we lessen the chances of burnout.

News startup as laboratory: Transformative thinking and programming at AfroLA and Project Optimist

Facilitated by Nora Hertel, Dana Amihere

Share your experiences and hear from news startups that experiment with audience-rooted programs from an ownership campaign and printed ‘zines to solutions journalism. AfroLA covers Los Angeles with unapologetically Black storytelling. Project Optimist produces solution-focused news for rural Minnesota. They’ll share how they’ve transformed their thinking on how to run a newsroom and what has worked (or not worked) in practice.

People don't care about "local government." They care about their street.

Facilitated by Maggie McGuire

Local news treats every story like a hit of spot news. A zoning fight isn’t one article — it’s a filing, three commission meetings, a public comment period, a legal challenge, and a resolution eighteen months later. Stories have lifecycles, but we publish them as isolated events, and the civic knowledge that would help people follow along — how to search public databases, file records requests, read a zoning decision — is siloed inside journalism and government. Nobody’s teaching it.

At the Moab Sun News, we’ve been experimenting with lifecycle projects that use the whole animal: wiki-style reference sites where coverage accumulates by subject, searchable meeting archives, subject-based alerts, public-facing trainings with experts who’ve never taught the public before, and tools that turn readers into contributors. In this session, we’ll explore a toolkit of these models, then you’ll design your own: pick an issue your community cares about, figure out what tools fit, how each piece feeds the others, and what makes it sustainable for a small team. You’ll leave with a concrete sketch you can start building next month.

Print goes underground: Developing, designing, and distributing journalism zines

Facilitated by Sarah Bennett

When digital platforms fail communities — through paywalls, algorithmic suppression, language barriers or distrust — how can local journalists distribute reliable information? Zine makers have had an answer for decades: print it, fold it, put it in people’s hands.

This session is a practitioner (and practitioner-curious) conversation about small-batch, alternative print as an emerging and legitimate tool for informing and engaging communities. We’ll talk through our experiences and ideas for the three phases of zine production — develop, design, and distribute — using examples from recent journalism zines, student work, and entries from the SPJ’s first-ever Zine Prize as jumping-off points. We’ll start a shared best practices document together, and I’ll try to turn our notes into a physical zine, printed overnight and in your hands on day two.

Putting the Open back in Source: How can we make it as easy as 1-2-3, open source-ame?

Facilitated by Emilia Ruzicka, Tiff Fehr

The number of open source projects produced by journalists is shrinking. News organizations are innovating behind closed doors, producing awesome work, but without clear insight into the technical process that led to the final product. This setup makes it more difficult to learn from others and is a missed opportunity to document data and processes that could be useful in the future. However, keeping information off the web prevents it from being processed by AI tools itching to take even more data from journalism.

How can we revive open source journalism as reporters, editors, newsroom leaders, and more? What might incentivize news organizations to get on board with more widespread open source efforts? What can we do to share amongst ourselves to uplift and iterate journalistic work without feeding that information directly back to private AI tech companies? These questions and more will be on the table for discussion!

Reporting solutions when the world Is on fire

Facilitated by Jaisal Noor

By most accounts, the media’s current approach is neither creating a well-informed public nor truly holding the powerful to account. The industry’s relentless focus on crisis and spectacle has driven away news consumers, fueled deep distrust in institutions and the media itself, and left many journalists burned out or leaving the profession altogether. Audiences are left overwhelmed, disengaged and without the information they need to address the biggest problems facing their communities.

This workshop will create space for journalists to reflect on how to report on solutions at a time when many feel overwhelmed by the state of the world. We’ll explore how to cover responses without minimizing harm or injustice, and how to build trust with communities by working in partnership with them. The goal is for participants to leave with actionable ideas, practical approaches and a renewed sense of possibility for reporting constructively toward a better future.

Response, retrieval & resistance: Auditing how AI models handle politically contested information environments

Facilitated by Madison Karas, Aaron Zou, David Kuszmar

When someone asks an AI model about a breaking news event, how much does the way they ask shape what they get back? Our team at Gazzetta has been running structured audits testing how leading LLMs respond to politically cued and framed prompts in authoritarian information ecosystems, specifically in Iran and China. What we’ve found is striking: models differ meaningfully in how they mirror or resist state-aligned framing, with real implications for how users distinguish between journalism and propaganda.

In this session, we’ll briefly share our research findings and methodology, then put the tools directly in participants’ hands. Using cases from our conference home of Minneapolis, including recent ICE enforcement actions, shootings, and historical police killings, we’ll work together in real time to design prompts, run tests across multiple models, and compare what comes back. You’ll leave with a reproducible methodology and the confidence to apply it in your own work, whether you’re a journalist covering AI, a researcher using LLMs to investigate, or navigating something in between.

Sound play and rebellious human-made craft

Facilitated by Aura Walmer

In this workshop, we will explore how to craft short form audio documentaries, sound art, and podcasts that break the mold of standard podcast production, but which honor the techniques of sound design. In the spirit of movements like Audio Flux, this session will provide attendees with tools to layer and capture sound, and to craft a rebellious, human-made piece of journalism that could be bizarre, refreshing, or simply a much needed change from the manufactured norm. Playful story craft is important now more than ever. We are bombarded with a surplus of cookie-cutter produced audio formats, but what would it be like to integrate playfulness and sound art into our storytelling?

We will consider whether there is space for DIY audio montages as a form of storytelling or if nontraditional methods such as sonification are worth pursuing. We will discuss the dance between the human-made craft and the AI-generated alternative, and what might fall between. Attendees will have a chance to express what is most important to them in how they consume stories and information sonically, and brainstorm new formats that would go against the grain of overused methods.

Still here: Why journalists stay in a profession in crisis

Facilitated by Luisa Ortiz Pérez, Joe Ruiz

Journalism is widely described as a profession in crisis—marked by layoffs, burnout, hostility, shrinking autonomy, and rapid technological disruption. Yet journalists are not leaving at the rate many expect. Drawing on findings from Stay Tuned: A U.S. Journalism Mental Health Survey (MDRnet, 2026), this session asks a simple but urgent question: why do we stay? We’ll explore three forces shaping journalists’ decisions to remain in the field: the fear and identity shifts tied to leaving journalism, the normalization of uncertainty in an industry defined by constant change, and the enduring belief that journalism still matters. Together, these tensions reveal something deeper about the profession — how resilience, care, and crisis management have become essential not just for individual survival, but for the future of the field itself.

Teach newsletters, not wire stories

Facilitated by Blake Eskin

Teaching AP Style and the inverted pyramid made sense in an era where entry-level reporting and editing jobs at newspapers of any size required this knowledge. Those jobs are mostly gone, and the newsroom’s division of labor — writer vs. photographer, editorial vs. business — has dissolved. Yet most journalism education puts a priority on the isolated craft of writing voiceless news reports (or voicey feature stories).

Putting together a newsletter gives aspiring journalists the chance to practice a much wider range of skills than writing an article: not only reporting and writing but audience research and engagement, information design, visual communication, aggregation, linking to and attributing prior knowledge, proofreading, publishing on a schedule…

What’s the first project you’d give an aspiring journalist? What other forms work better than the article for teaching the skills aspiring journalists need today to meet the information needs of their audiences?

The biggest lessons I learned while reporting on art and art crime

Facilitated by Karen Ho

For nearly three years, I covered art and art crime for ARTnews. I didn’t have a background in either beat, but successfully used my previous experience reporting on finance and economics to produce distinctive features, data and investigative coverage. This included reports on artworks and historical artifacts stolen from galleries, homes, and museums; museums repatriating stolen and looted items; art dealers accused of breaking US sanctions; NFT scams; the British Museum theft scandal; federal legislation about Nazi-looted artworks and unreturned Native ancestral remains; as well as a range of lawsuits about art loans, accusations of wrongful dismissals, copyright infringement, intellectual property, class-action cases against AI image generators, and high-profile art insurance claims.

It turns out that art and art crime aren’t as niche as many people think. This presentation will explain how I was able to find “local” art angles for national and international news stories, the tools I used and developed to cover these beats, and the simple secrets behind some of my biggest scoops.

The future of news is accessible

Facilitated by Stacy Kess

As journalism becomes more digital and more directed to social media, news is leaving out millions of people. Disability is more common that most realize: 1 in 4 American adults identify as disabled; 1 in 5 American adults are on the spectrum of blindness or low vision; 1 in 20 American adults are Deaf or hard of hearing; and 1 in 100 American adults have a cognitive disability, but the digital journalism industry isn’t reaching these potential news consumers — meaning potential lost readers, listeners, and watchers; potential lost revenue; and eventually, potential lost jobs. But it’s more than these missing new audience member’s dollars. Bringing in more readers, listeners, and watchers strengthens democracy, community, and civic participation. The future of news must be accessible.

Understanding what gets tracked about your audience and their behavior in your product

Facilitated by Julia Haslanger

Where does all that data about how many people read/watched your story come from? This session will be a little bit of web analytics 101 (including going into the browser console and spying on how your favorite news site is logging everything you do), but we’ll also have conversations about the limitations of tracking (both technical and philosophical), the ethics involved, the legal landscape, and more. If there’s interest, we’ll dive into how tracking is different within a mobile app, how the social platforms share the data they track, and more. And, if people in the rooms have opinions they want to share, we could also do a vent/praise session about various analytics vendors.

What I learned building a newsroom tech stack without knowing how to code

Facilitated by Nina Ignaczak

What does it actually look like to build production journalism tools without an engineering background, or an engineering budget? Nina Ignaczak, founder and executive director of Planet Detroit, will share real examples from her newsroom’s experience shipping a civic engagement tool, a RAG-powered search API, an interactive directory of 600+ Michigan environmental organizations, and more, all through conversational AI development. But what surprised her most wasn’t how much AI could do. It was how much results improved once she started thinking like a software engineer. Adopting a spec-driven process, defining who a tool is for, what working correctly looks like, and what broken looks like before touching any code, made everything better.

Understanding basic architecture concepts meant more useful conversations with AI tools, fewer late-stage surprises, and tools that actually held up in production. The second half of the session turns it over to participants. In small groups, attendees will take a real problem from their own newsroom and work through the first steps of building a solution, drafting a spec, scoping the problem, thinking through edge cases. Everyone leaves with something concrete they can actually use, and a better sense of what’s within reach when you pair curiosity with a little engineering discipline.

Where stories actually live: Understanding cultural memory and community storytelling

Facilitated by Anneshia Hardy

Journalists are often trained to focus on events, sources, and facts. But the communities they cover interpret those events through something deeper: cultural memory, storytelling traditions, and inherited narratives about place, identity, and power. This session explores how cultural memory shapes the way communities understand news, respond to journalism, and decide which stories matter. Drawing from community narrative research across the Deep South, this session introduces the Applied Cultural Meaning & Memory Framework™, created by cultural narrative strategist and researcher Anneshia Hardy, a PhD student in Communication at Georgia State University, through years of working alongside storytellers, organizers, journalists, and culture keepers across the region. The framework explores how cultural memory and community storytelling traditions shape how people understand news, power, and the stories told about their lives.

Participants will explore how journalists can better understand the narrative environments that shape public interpretation of news, particularly in communities with strong oral storytelling traditions and deep historical memory. The session will also highlight emerging models of community-rooted journalism, including initiatives connected to the Southern Narrative Project and the People’s Press Institute, which support local storytellers and help strengthen narrative ecosystems outside traditional newsrooms. Participants will leave with practical strategies for recognizing community storytelling systems and for building deeper relationships with the places and people their reporting serves.

You don’t need to be an artist to do artistic journalism (and how not to use AI)

Facilitated by Jakub Górnicki

Journalism is drowning in a sea of perfectly structured, frictionless, AI-generated content. But this isn’t the first time a new technology has forced a medium to evolve. When photography arrived, painting was freed from strict realism and became art. When radio broke news faster, print had to dig deeper. When dry facts weren’t enough, Truman Capote and the New Journalism movement brought literary artistry to reportage. AI is simply our newest catalyst. It is forcing journalism to find its new purpose: deep, visceral, un-automatable emotion.

In this 75-minute interactive workshop, we will explore how to apply artistic methods to our daily reporting to create an antidote to shallow media. We’ll look at real examples of how to borrow frameworks from theater, street art, and sound design. Then, we’ll break into groups for a rapid-fire design sprint using your own upcoming stories. You don’t need a fine arts degree to do this. You’ll leave with concrete tools and a blueprint to transform a standard pitch into a bold, artistic experience that no algorithm can replicate.