By Sandra Ruiz — Volunteer Journalist for Media Party 2024
The 12th edition of Media Party Buenos Aires 2024 arrived with a schedule change, and the main Keynotes took place on Thursday afternoon, the 29th, to a full house at Konex. The Keynotes were hosted by technology journalist Melisa Avolio and the Head of Products for Newsrooms, Nico Russo. Various media experts shared their experiences, focusing on artificial intelligence, audiences, sustainability, data journalism, neuroscience, among others.
Sam Guzik was in charge of opening the day. The product director for New York Public Radio and the Future Today Institute explained why hope, dreams, and AI should not be confused with strategy. Regarding AI, Guzik emphasized that it is a tool already embedded in our daily lives and that we must take ownership of the future by focusing on our audience and community. At the close of his Keynote, the expert asked, “What will happen in the future? It depends on the decisions we make; we can think big to build and not just wait for the world to be better, but produce it.”
The second presentation was by Caio Almeida, a software engineer from Meedan, a non-profit organization that presented Check, an app that fights misinformation through an instant messaging service. Five years ago, Caio had presented the project, which would later have a high impact on election coverage in Brazil (2022), Argentina (2023), Mexico, and India (2024).
The third Keynote covered the experience of OlimpIA, a joint project between La Nación Data and the Google News Initiative for Olympic Games coverage. The first speaker was María José Iriarte (Strategic Partner Manager at Google), who spoke about the wide variety of tools Google develops for media workers and the different support programs and alliances. To talk about OlimpIA, the duo of Florencia Rodríguez Altube and Martín Pascua from La Nación Data took the stage. They shared the development experience of this chatbot, which provided real-time information about the Olympic Games, and the difficulties they had to overcome, especially regarding containing the “hallucinations” generated by artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is heavily impacting the industry, and to understand how to incorporate it, one must start by asking a few questions. Along those lines, in his Keynote, Andrés Cotton reflected on AI ethics and the importance of multidisciplinary teams: “The AI models we use the most do not follow laws or rules, but probabilities. They reflect the data they were trained on. For them to work well, we need teams of people who possess cognitive diversity. AI developments involve enormous opportunities and challenges. Therefore, being able to form cognitively diverse teams is the way to approach this greater good.”
The spirit of the Keynotes was reflected in the diverse ways of working with intelligences, exploring tools, and how to incorporate them in an ethical and responsible manner. Other participants included Annemarie Dooling (Audience Experiences, USA Today Network) with “The Intuitive Reader Experience: The Influence of Serotonin on News Consumption”; Mattia Peretti (ICFJ Knight Fellow) with “Reinventing Journalism: New Ideas for a Sustainable and Human-Centered Future”; and Anna Vissens, Head of Data Science at The Guardian, who spoke about “Recognizing Malicious Actors in Data Leaks with AI.” Day one of the largest media conference in Latin America culminated in something completely unprecedented: the traditional photo on the stairs was taken at night.
