It featured Dima Khatib from AJ +, Greg Barber from Washington Post, Pablo Mercado from Vox Media, among more than 200 sessions scheduled. The chapter of Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires exceeded the 9000-member barrier.
With more than 2500 participants, the Media Party, organized with the support of Hacks/Hackers Buenos Aires ended. For the sixth consecutive year, the productive conference that lasts three days in Ciudad Cultural Konex offered the possibility of listening to 24 keynote talks, participating in 60 workshops, touring the fair with about 48 projects, more than 50 lightning talks and producing 9 projects in the Hackathon. By the end of the event, the Hacks/Hackers user base had reached more than 9,000 members keeping the group as the most popular chapter globally over New York, London and San Francisco.
Among its most memorable moments was the presence of Dima Khatib, global leader of AJ +, the digital area of the Arab chain based in Qatar, and the meeting of five members of the Coral Project, a joint project to resolve the issue of Internet conversations of the Washington Post, New York Times, Mozilla Foundation and the support of Knight Foundation, which has three Argentine programmers involved. Andrew Losowski’s chats from Coral Project and Greg Barber’s from the Washington Post mesmerized the audiences and brought to light how to channel conversations and restore media reputation to its readers.
In addition, the productive conference had the invaluable presence of Jacqui Maher, who was in the New York Times, BBC and currently holds a place of innovation manager of Conde Nast in London; Pablo Mercado, the CTO of Vox Media, a reference and global media guru. And the brilliant talk of Albert Sun (The New York Times), within the interactive area, who told us how the prestigious media outlet was prepared to cover the last elections.
The format of the event consisted of talks during the mornings, afternoon workshops and a series of parallel activities such as lightning-fast talks, the media fair (the first day) and a hackathon, in a productive and collaborative space. Among the keynotes (talks featured during the morning) there were also three locals: Cristian Alarcón of Anfibia, Dan Zajdband for his work in Coral Project, and Juan Melano from Croma.io. Among the most popular workshops were How to create high-quality videos that work on social networks by Alba Mora Roca (AJ +), 10 Keys to Success by Janine Warner’s Digital Media Entrepreneurs in Latin America, Articles from Zero to Production from Facebook and Get Your Data, a scraping intro for Google News Lab journalists.
Eighty percent of the time, it was intended that both global and regional speakers had the opportunity to show how they work, to give workshops on new methodologies, recommendations on how to accelerate innovation, and spend some time on the hacking marathon, space collaborative work, for those who wanted to get their hands on the code, this time in parallel mode to the rest of the event. Among the outstanding projects of the hackathon was the Fachometer, a game to detect the level of intolerance in a society, MateEmoji, to propose to incorporate the Emoji of the mate in the global consortium of characters and the integration of the comment system Talk in Pagina/12.
As for the thematics, the main focus this year was trying to unravel the impact of fake news, in the Post-Truth Era. In that sense, there was a table with the presence of Jonathan Albright of Columbia University and Ed Bice of the brand new company Meedan, which develops software to help detect false news on the network, along with Olivia Sohr from Chequeado.
In addition, speakers were present from Google and Facebook, organizations that are central to the distribution of news and the fight for monetization. In the case of Facebook, Media Party featured Derek Silverman of Crowdtangle, a company recently acquired by the social network that serves to measure social media content performance and programmer Diego Moreno Quinteiro. From Google, it featured Marco Túlio Pires; who has a vast trajectory as a trainer in data journalism and Juan Manuel Lucero. Following the theme of content metrics was also Sonya Song of Chartbeat, a standard tool of news analysis, Pietro Passarelli author of a software that allows to improve video transcripts Autoedit.
The computer-aided investigation had as maximum representative Friedrich Lindenberg, a programmer and data journalist working in OCCRP, a network that investigates organized crime globally, in the same network as the Krik Belgrade site, which had the presence of Bojana Jovanovic, one of its founders. Between the data, at the close of the event, and with more than 50 volunteers on the stage, the organization revealed that 170 liters of coffee were consumed.
Media Party 2017 was supported by the Omidyar Network, Mozilla Foundation, Open News, Open Society Foundation, Facebook, Google News Labs, International Center for Journalism, Telecom, Kipus, Tea and many others. entrepreneurs under the Hacks/Hackers network throughout the world. In addition to an executive team, more than 50 volunteers participated in the organization.
