Global
four people speaking on a stagePhoto by Cole Keister

From Publication to Public Trust: AI and the New Media Economics

After the AI tools are built, the hard questions turn to trust and financing. On August 19, journalists, product leaders, and technologists ask what audiences still trust, and how journalism will still be funded.

Program

  • 6:30pm – Doors open
  • 7:30pm – Panel
  • 8:15pm – Q&A
  • 8:30pm – Networking
  • 9:00pm – Doors close
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Event start time

  • San Francisco

    6:30PM

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How can journalism remain trusted and sustainable in the age of AI?

On August 19, we will look what happens after the AI tools are built. As newsrooms move past prototypes, the hardest questions have shifted from technical feasibility to daily operations, public trust, and monetization.

The Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report puts the drop in organic search traffic to news sites at roughly a third globally, with trust in news at its lowest since 2015. As the old traffic-and-ads model weakens, the verified, human, accountable work becomes both hardest to automate and easiest to trust, which is why trust and revenue increasingly look like the same question.

Journalists, product leaders, technologists, and entrepreneurs work through the messy reality of AI at newsroom scale, from daily workflows to disclosure to what pays next. The evening doubles as a gathering for the Bay Area journalism community, with time to mingle with our visiting Swiss journalists.

This event is part of our 4th edition of the Multimedia Lab for Journalists, an immersive 2-week intensive program designed to support established and emerging professionals in journalism and multimedia storytelling from Switzerland.

Speakers

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    Speaker

    Djordje Padejski

    Associate Director of the Stanford University, John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships

    Djordje Padejski is a journalism scholar, educator and media innovation leader focused on how artificial intelligence is reconfiguring journalism, news organizations and the broader news media ecosystem. He is Associate Director of the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University and a lecturer teaching courses on AI and journalism. His research examines how news organizations adopt and use AI, how journalism has covered the evolution of AI and emerging approaches to the responsible use of AI in journalism. Earlier in his career, he worked as an investigative and data journalist and editor with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), OCCRP and the Center for Investigative Reporting (Reveal), founded and directed the Center for Investigative Journalism in Serbia and helped lead ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks investigation. He created FOIA Machine, an open-source platform for public records requests.

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    Speaker

    Grant Marek

    Editor-in-Chief at SFGATE

    Since taking over as SFGATE’s editor-in-chief in 2019, Grant Marek has helped the digital news site triple the size of its staff from 21 to 63. In 2024, SFGATE overtook LATimes.com as the most read site on the entire West Coast and now drives more than 28 million visits per month. Prior to SFGATE, Marek held various editorial roles at Thrillist, Yahoo Sports, the San Francisco Examiner, the Desert Sun, the Santa Clarita Valley Signal and Sports Illustrated, among others. He’s a graduate of UC Berkeley and has lived in the Bay Area since 2001.

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    Moderator

    Marie-Astrid Langer

    US Tech Correspondent

    Marie-Astrid Langer is the US-foreign correspondent for Switzerland´s leading publication Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ). Based in Silicon Valley, she´s covering technology and politics since 2018. Langer holds an MBA from the University of Tuebingen, Germany. In 2015, she was the Arthur F. Burns fellow with the Wall Street Journal in San Francisco. Langer is a Young Leader of Atlantikbrücke and the American Swiss Foundation, and an alumna of the Henri-Nannen-Journalistenschule. In 2021, Suhrkamp published her first book “Kamala Harris, ein Porträt”.

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    Speaker

    Sally Lehrman

    Founder and CEO of The Trust Project

    Lehrman founded and leads the nonprofit, nonpartisan Trust Project, which affirms and amplifies journalism’s commitment to transparency, accuracy, inclusion and fairness so that the public can access news they can trust. She guides operations, trains news leaders, leads industry and public workshops and speaks regularly to audiences globally. Lehrman was awarded a Gold Globee Award as Female Achiever/Communicator of the Year for her Trust Project work and named one of MediaShift’s Top 20 Digital Innovators. A journalist on medicine, science and business, her honors include a Peabody Award, duPont-Columbia, the John S. Knight Fellowship, with bylines in Scientific American, Nature, Health and several public radio documentary series distributed by NPR, among others. She is passionate about making sure people can access news that empowers them to act confidently on issues that matter to them and enhance the communities they’re part of. Besides journalism itself, her work touches on ethics, inclusion, nonprofit strategy, communication, civic involvement and helping civic institutions earn trust so they may better serve the public.