The largest of Media Party’s three editions this year returns to Buenos Aires from October 29 to 31, with The Guardian’s Chief AI Officer Caspar Llewellyn Smith as headline speaker.
More than 2,000 journalists, developers, designers and media entrepreneurs will gather at Ciudad Cultural Konex from October 29 to 31 for Media Party Buenos Aires 2026, the largest of the three editions the conference is holding this year, alongside Barcelona and New York. Over three days, participants will debate the questions reshaping the industry and build the technology tools that newsrooms will need to answer them.
This year’s theme, “Storytelling in the age of agents,” addresses a shift that is already underway. AI agents can now generate, curate and argue a narrative without human intervention, which means journalism is no longer competing only with other media outlets, but with systems that also tell stories. Organizers have placed cognitive sovereignty at the center of the program: the ability of journalists and editors to think, set priorities and make editorial decisions without delegating judgment to a machine. Without it, they argue, journalistic credibility cannot hold. The program also approaches agents from a more creative angle, exploring them as a tool for experimentation within what organizers describe as “liquid journalism.”
The headline speaker will be Caspar Llewellyn Smith, Chief AI Officer at The Guardian, who will present how one of the world’s most influential newsrooms is integrating artificial intelligence into its editorial strategy and technology infrastructure.
He will be joined on the main stage by Marina Walker Guevara, executive editor of the Pulitzer Center; Sevgil Musaieva, editor-in-chief of Ukrainian outlet Ukrainska Pravda; Andrew Fishman of The Intercept Brasil; Marco Túlio Pires of the Google News Initiative; Saša Vučinić, founding partner at North Base Media; and Tomás Escobar, co-founder of Shorta.
What Barcelona anticipated
The Buenos Aires agenda picks up the debates that surfaced in early September at Media Party Barcelona, the conference’s first European edition.
On the opening day at CaixaForum, more than 200 attendees heard executives from 3Cat, NPR, Cloudflare and PRISA Media discuss content independence in the era of AI search. Cloudflare’s Chema Alonso warned that the long-standing deal between search engines and publishers, in which crawling was tolerated in exchange for traffic, has broken down, while PRISA Media’s Olalla Novoa Ojea described how the group built a governance model to scale AI without losing editorial control.
The second day focused on how journalism survives when the relationship with audiences is increasingly mediated by AI. Nic Newman of the Reuters Institute presented data showing that search traffic to publishers fell by a third in the past year, Clara Jiménez Cruz of Maldita.es called for scrutiny of the platforms that now organize public conversation, and media advisor Dmitry Shishkin proposed a framework to test whether journalism can be retrieved, verified and credited by AI agents.
The event closed with a hackathon at BIT Habitat, sponsored by Cloudflare, where interdisciplinary teams built prototypes around workflow automation, agentic journalism and information integrity. The winner, AIdas, is a tool that detects bias by comparing how different large language models answer politically contested questions.
In Buenos Aires, those threads converge on a larger scale and around a single question: what happens to storytelling when agents become both the audience and the competition?
From debate to prototype
As in every edition, the program is structured around three stages designed to move from reflection to concrete projects.
Discover. International keynotes, lightning talks and the Media Feria, the region’s leading showcase of open-source projects and tools.
Learn. Hands-on workshops and sandbox-format sessions exploring workflows, data sovereignty and business models.
Create! The traditional closing hackathon, where interdisciplinary teams will develop and iterate on functional prototypes during the final day.
Registration
Registration for Media Party Buenos Aires 2026 is now open. Journalists, developers, designers, researchers and anyone working at the intersection of media and technology can secure their spot and join the conversation at Ciudad Cultural Konex from October 29 to 31.
