On Thursday, October 29, Ciudad Cultural Konex welcomed leaders from The Guardian, Google DeepMind, Chequeado, The Intercept Brasil, the Pulitzer Center, Ukrainska Pravda, MediaWise and Shorta. Here is a look at their talks.
Media Party Buenos Aires 2026 opened on Thursday, October 29, with a block of international keynotes that put this edition’s central question on the table: “Storytelling in the age of agents.” Speaking from very different newsrooms, organizations and platforms, eight speakers agreed on an idea that speaks to the theme of cognitive sovereignty: artificial intelligence can expand journalistic work, but judgment, verification and independence remain human.
AI in the newsroom, without giving up editorial control
Caspar Llewellyn Smith, The Guardian
The Guardian’s Chief AI Officer explained how the British outlet brings artificial intelligence into its newsroom, with clear rules and without giving up editorial control. He argued that, as in every information revolution, AI could increase the demand for trustworthy information, but warned of a scenario in which AI assistants concentrate the flows of synthetic content in the hands of a few corporations. In response, he highlighted the work of the SPUR coalition (Standards for Publisher Usage Rights), which negotiates ethical standards and fair compensation with big tech companies. The Guardian is a founding member alongside the BBC, the Financial Times, The Telegraph and Sky News, and The New York Times and Argentina’s ADEPA have since joined. “The future is not inevitable; to a significant degree, it is still ours to try to shape,” he said.
Marco Túlio Pires, Google DeepMind
The Program Lead at Google DeepMind, who shared the morning keynote block with Llewellyn Smith, showed how to build AI agents with Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM) to verify information and create products that are useful to readers. He identified three risks of handing everything over to the machine: cognitive atrophy, the flattening of complexity and hallucinations. That is why he proposed building “a harness, an environment where you can trace your claims.” He also presented what he called “the reader utility formula” and listed outlets already using the tool, including The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Mediahuis and Daily Maverick.
Franco Piccato, Chequeado
From the Gran Sala at Konex, Chequeado’s executive director presented two tools developed in-house. Datilia, whose prototype won the Data360 Global Challenge run by Media Party and the World Bank, takes a claim, checks it against the World Bank’s database and returns indicators, a narrative summary and an interactive chart. Nunchi is an audience intelligence agent that reads comments on the website, Instagram and Facebook around the clock and, according to Piccato, saves 260 hours of human reading per month. “Technology does not replace human judgment, but it does give us a lot of superpowers,” he said.
Independent journalism in the face of power
Andrew Fishman, The Intercept Brasil
The president and co-founder of The Intercept Brasil opened the keynote block with the story of how the outlet overcame its 2024 crisis, when the reach of its main stories fell by 90% and recurring member revenue dropped by 30%. The response was to shift from newsletters to paid advertising on Meta and to bring in technical profiles, such as social media strategists, CRM specialists and frontend developers, to raise more donations with fewer staff. His advice for the age of agents: “Report like a journalist, think like a journalist, but when you’re communicating with the public, you have to think like a marketer.”
Marina Walker Guevara, Pulitzer Center
The Pulitzer Center’s executive editor, who led the collaborations behind the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers, proposed a shift in focus: journalists should investigate AI itself to find out who builds it, who funds it and for what purposes. “Just like with the Panama Papers, we believe it takes a network to investigate a network,” she said, presenting the AI Accountability Network, launched in 2022, which now brings together 4,000 journalists in more than 100 countries. She also warned about the biases built into the algorithms that decide on subsidies, social assistance and school support, and called for cultivating two things that never change in journalism: curiosity and independence.
Sevgil Musaieva, Ukrainska Pravda
The editor-in-chief of Ukrainska Pravda, who took over the outlet at just 27, spoke about the values that helped independent journalism survive in wartime. She recalled that when Russia launched its full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, the newsroom set three goals: publish fast, verified news, document war crimes and investigate those who finance the war. She argued that patriotism is not loyalty to power, and that courage needs concrete protection: lawyers, digital security and resources. “Our greatest responsibility is not only to publish the truth today, but to build an institution that can still publish the truth tomorrow,” she concluded.
New audiences, new formats
Brittani Kollar, MediaWise (Poynter)
MediaWise’s deputy director presented a Poynter Institute project that pairs five newsrooms with five independent content creators, one per continent, including Todo Noticias (Argentina) with Ellen Deich. Each pair will co-create a social media video, and the initiative, supported by Microsoft, will publish a toolkit in spring 2027. Her message for creators who are just starting out: “You don’t need to have the largest number of followers to be identified by a newsroom as a potential partner.” Newsrooms look at a channel’s character, its ethics and the quality of its content.
Ariel Arrieta, Shorta
Shorta’s co-founder and president explained how fiction has moved to the phone screen through vertical micro-series with episodes of 1 to 3 minutes. He noted that the industry started in China, where it is now worth 14 billion dollars and already beats the box office, and said Shorta’s audience watches 42 minutes a day, almost twice as much as Netflix. The platform’s edge is its cultural roots, with its own star system of local talent, and a use of AI in editing and post-production that lets the team put the production budget into the actors without falling into “AI slop.” The next step is expanding to Mexico and Brazil.
What comes next
Media Party continues on Friday, October 30, with the sandboxes, lightning talks and workshops. On Saturday, October 31, the hackathon turns ideas into prototypes.
Check out the full program on the Media Party Buenos Aires 2026 schedule.
There are still two days of Media Party at Ciudad Cultural Konex (Sarmiento 3131), and admission is free: register here and join the conversation on the future of journalism.
