Back in Baltimore, Back to the Future?

We’re home from the Hacks/Hackers AI x Journalism Summit in Baltimore, and things do feel different this time around.

First, the good news: This conference could grow to become an enduring institution. It feels like the Online News Association in the early days, or NICAR before it got big enough to commandeer entire hotels. We’re hoping the summit keeps its narrow focus (and restrained ticket sales) instead of ballooning into another vendor-driven mega-conference.

But let’s talk about the vibe shift. Last year’s summit combined practical workshops with bigger-picture panels, at least one of which questioned whether news orgs should tolerate AI at all. We remember an onstage debate that seemed to conclude that news orgs should pursue maximal legal damages against the LLM labs.

That … didn’t really come up this year. The hands-on workshops felt the same, just a bit more agent- and Claude-inflected. But the big debates this time were around integration. One of the main panels was titled “Build, Buy, or Ignore: A Framework for Prioritizing AI in News Organizations.” We feel the news industry moving from AI antagonism to … well, not always enthusiasm, but certainly resignation?

It’s also worth noting that with the exception of Google, a conference sponsor, no major AI companies were in attendance this time around. We wonder if that’ll be the case next year.

In this video, you’ll hear from:

• Kaveh Waddell on how audio and video analysis are the next undiscovered frontier for AI-powered journalism;

• Blake Eskin on how he’s using AI in a university classroom;

• Meenakshi Dalal on how she’s building AI tools to find guests for her podcast;

• …and us on everything else.