Starting tomorrow, May 8, Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation becomes the setting for three days of debate, prototyping, and collaboration on one of the most pressing questions facing the news industry: what happens to journalism when AI reshapes how people find and consume information.
Media Party New York 2026 brings together 300 journalists, technologists, researchers, and entrepreneurs from around the world. The event runs through May 10 and is organized around a premise that distinguishes it from traditional conferences — participants don’t just listen to panels, they build things. The program combines keynotes and workshops with a hackathon where teams develop functional prototypes, and the Brown Institute is extending support to the most promising projects for three months after the event closes.
This is the third time Media Party has come to the United States — previously at the University of Chicago in 2023 and Columbia in 2024 — and the third time the organizing team has asked why this event belongs in New York. The answer has only gotten clearer. Newsrooms around the world are making real decisions about AI tools right now, with uneven results and limited cross-industry knowledge-sharing. Buenos Aires, Nairobi, and New York are all navigating the same transition from very different positions, and understanding that variation matters.
What's on the agenda
The program is structured around four themes. The first examines how individual journalists have become primary distribution channels for news, building audiences on platforms optimized for personality over institution — and what that means for editorial standards and business sustainability. The second focuses on local news and AI: the tools that promise new capabilities for under-resourced newsrooms and the implementation challenges that technology alone can’t solve. The third brings practitioners together to compare AI workflows across newsrooms, share what hasn’t worked, and develop honest evaluation frameworks. The fourth looks at algorithmic distribution — how AI-driven systems mediate discovery and what strategies news organizations can deploy to reach fragmented audiences.
The speakers
The keynote lineup draws from across the industry’s geography and function. Eli Pariser, CEO of New Public. Lisa Gibbs, CEO of the Pulitzer Center. Laura Zommer from FactChequeado. Hope King, founder of Macro Talk News. Alexios Mantzarlis, co-founder of Indicator. Harlan Mandel, CEO of the Media Development Investment Fund. Joanna Geary, Head of Content and Audience at Bloomberg. Stefano Wrobleski, Executive Director of InfoAmazonia. Kathryn Kotze from Daily Maverick. Jacopo Ottaviani, Chief Data Officer at Code for Africa.
The broader speaker roster includes voices from OpenAI, ProPublica, Bellingcat, NPR, the Wikimedia Foundation, SembraMedia, LION Publishers, NowThis Media, Minority Africa, and others working at the intersection of journalism, technology, and civic infrastructure.
The partners behind it
The event is made possible through a partnership between Media Party and the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia University, which has spent years building and testing technical solutions for journalism. Knight Foundation is the Main Partner for this edition. Additional support comes from the World Bank, ICFJ, Pulitzer Center, North Base Media, Journalism AI, and the Media Development Investment Fund.
How to attend
Media Party New York 2026 runs May 8–10 at Columbia University. Registration and full agenda here.
