Media Monitor: Hacks/Hackers Recaps AI and Investigative Journalism Forum at The New York Times

Hacks/Hackers is reporting that its AI x Investigative Journalism Forum at The New York Times drew about 150 journalists and technologists to examine how artificial intelligence is changing investigative reporting. It said speakers from The Times, The Associated Press, NPR, Reuters, ABC News and CNN shared what worked, what did not and how they test results before publishing a story.

The organization said AI is opening up stories that were too large to report by hand, citing millions of pages of Epstein files and hundreds of hours of podcasts as examples. It said the tools are prompting investigative reporters to rethink how they check their work.

Hacks/Hackers said The Times team that built an "Epstein Files Engine" wrote up its findings in a new paper. It said its AI Papers Explained breakdown covers why the team says its verification standard "worked precisely because most leads did not survive it."

The organization also said it will take part in two partner events this month. It said Paul Cheung and Burt Herman will lead a workshop titled "Stop Prompting, Start Managing AI" at the Press Forward Summit in San Antonio on Oct. 8, focused on applying agentic AI to real tasks for funders. It said Burt Herman will join Eve Bills Lacivita of City Bureau for "15 Minutes to Ship," a rapid prototyping workshop built around real newsroom problems, at the NPA Summit in Chicago on Oct. 22. It said both sessions are for registered attendees and that the NPA Summit is sold out.

Hacks/Hackers also pointed readers to several items, including a Digiday report that Conde Nast and Hearst are among 300 media executives pushing a federal "bad bots" bill on AI scraping, and a New York Times piece by Paul Ford on why easy-to-build software does not mean anyone uses it. It listed upcoming events including IRE AccessFest, the Trust Conference in London, the African Investigative Journalism Conference in Nairobi and NICAR27 in Denver, along with job openings at outlets including the Pulitzer Center, ProPublica, CNBC, Al Jazeera English and The New York Times.