The second part of the day brought together journalists, developers and entrepreneurs who share one idea. AI can do a lot, but judgment, data and ties with communities are still human.
With just a few minutes per speaker, the lightning talks at Media Party Buenos Aires 2026 once again showed the diversity of the ecosystem at Konex. There were cross-border investigations, century-old archives, civic games and AI-built tools. Beyond technology, the projects shared common questions. What should we delegate to machines? How can we use the information that already exists? And how do we reach the people who need it most? If you missed the first part, read our article on the first block of lightning talks.
Collaboration: investigating beyond a single newsroom
How do you investigate the richest companies in history? For Natalia Viana of Agência Pública, the answer is collective. “We need collaboration, and we need to build an army,” she said. That is how The Invisible Hand of Big Tech was born, together with CLIP. It brought together 17 news outlets from 13 countries. The project worked in secret for nine months. It exposed the revolving door between the public sector and tech companies. It also revealed the lack of transparency in data center deals across Latin America. In addition, it uncovered Google’s strategy against laws that sought to make it pay for news content. Finally, it published an open database with nearly 3,000 cases of meetings and lobbying actions. The idea that it takes a network to investigate tech power was also at the heart of Marina Walker Guevara’s keynote.
Florencia Tuchin of the InContext agency presented a guide to design “symbiotic relationships” between journalism and civil society. She created it with the Pulitzer Center and the Universidad de los Andes. The key is that each side keeps its role and its independence. Impact is also measured differently: “We stopped talking about clicks and started talking about resonance.”
Human judgment: AI suggests, people decide
Several talks agreed on one clear limit. Camila Velasco, a columnist at Perfil, showed her “agency” of AI agents that does social listening. Every morning, it builds her a dashboard of verified topics. Her rule: “The agents listen, and I decide.” Marco Túlio Pires of Google DeepMind shares that view: for him, no answer should come without its source.
Juan Alberto Arias spent three months building Perceptor, an open source tool to manage home media libraries. It runs on AI agents, with human oversight at every step. “With AI we can delegate the work, but we can’t delegate judgment or data,” he said.
At Fundar, developer Armando Ezequiel explained that AI-generated code came out repetitive and inconsistent. The reason: “We were delegating judgment to the model.” The solution was to build their own open source chart library, with documentation designed for the models too. Open infrastructure was also one of the topics analyzed by Media Party’s Advisory Board.
Agustina González Míguez, creator of Beyond the Source, found in AI a reason to choose quality over quantity. For her, judgment, research and curiosity “should not know haste, but pause.”
Archives and audio: rescuing what already exists
El Eco de Tandil has more than 140 years of history. Today it is digitizing its paper archive with OCR. It adds an AI layer that can understand the writing of other eras, such as when Buenos Aires was spelled with a “y.” For Gonzalo of Grupo Rotonda, people who write for a newspaper “are not just reporting news; we are putting in writing the history of what is happening.”
Hernán Ordiales of LAIA proposed semantic search in audio. In his view, transcripts “lose the how.” They miss tones of voice, applause or booing in historic speeches and endless legislative sessions. This is not his first time at Media Party: at the 2025 edition, he showed how to go from a prompt to a sound piece with visuals in 17 minutes.
Community: useful information and everyday democracy
From the outskirts of São Paulo, Anderson Meneses of Agência Mural showed how AI turns public databases into service stories. These stories are visually labeled as automated, and local ambassadors review them. That content already reaches 11% of its audience. Paradoxically, “artificial intelligence led us to hold in-person events and also print editions.”
In Costa Rica, Daniel López Barboza created a game that invites neighbors and students to govern their municipality. As a result, they learn how public decisions work. His premise: “Democracy is protected every day.”
What the lightning talks left behind
The second block confirmed that AI can expand journalism’s reach, but the value still lies in human judgment, collaboration and ties with communities. Want to keep exploring these topics? Read more articles on AI in newsrooms.
Media Party wraps up tomorrow, Saturday, October 31, with the hackathon. Teams of journalists, developers and designers will turn these ideas into prototypes.
Last chance: join us on Saturday 31 at Konex (Sarmiento 3131), and admission is free. Register here and join the hackathon.
