Combatting AI Misinformation in the 2024 Election Series – Montclair, New Jersey

AGENDA

9:30 am | Continental breakfast & registration

9:50 am–10:00 am | Opening Remarks from Montclair

10:00 am–11:20 am | Election Deception: Best Practices for Journalists Facing AI-Driven Misinformation

This session covers the essentials of misinformation and disinformation, techniques for verifying images and videos, and methods to identify synthetic media. Participants will explore the limitations of current verification tools, understand the evolving generative AI landscape, and learn effective counter-messaging strategies. The training contextualizes the relative risks AI technology poses to media ecosystems from a critical viewpoint and provides best practices for journalists navigating this new digital landscape.

Presenter:
Jaime Longoria, Manager of research and training for the Disinfo Defense League at Media Democracy Fund & Adjunct lecturer at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY

11:20 am–11:30 am | Break

11:30 am–12:30 pm | Practical Applications of Automation and Assistive AI in Media and Journalism Workflows

Joe will walk us through practical applications of automation and assistive AI in media and journalism workflows. Joe has published guides on how newsrooms can use AI tools and on creating custom assistive AI bots, and his expertise lies in helping newsrooms automate non-journalistic tasks to increase efficiency and reduce redundancy. He will go over how to integrate tools like Google Sheets, Zapier, and Slack with AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT in order to save time on tasks, including documenting meetings and written communications, extracting useful info from long meeting minutes and transcripts, drafting alt text or image descriptions for web and social media content, and other operational and record-keeping workflows.

Presenter:
Joe Amditis, Associate Director of Operations at the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University and an adjunct professor in the School of Communication and Media

12:30 pm–1:00 pm | Lunch & Network

REGISTER HERE

This in-person workshop is free and open to all NAHJ members. Non-members can attend for a $25 donation.

Speakers

Jaime Longoria
Manager of research and training for the Disinfo Defense League at Media Democracy Fund & Adjunct lecturer at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY

Jaime is manager of research and training for the Disinfo Defense League at Media Democracy Fund and an adjunct lecturer at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Previously, he worked as a senior investigative researcher and special projects manager at First Draft, a researcher at NBC News Investigations, and was data editor at Type Investigations. Jaime is the winner of the Sidney Hillman Foundation’s 2020 Social Justice Reporting Award.

Joe Amditis
Associate Director of Operations at the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University and an adjunct professor in the School of Communication and Media

Joe Amditis is the associate director of operations at the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University and an adjunct professor in the School of Communication and Media. He is also the producer and host of the WTF Just Happened Today podcast. Joe has also coordinated several collaborative reporting projects, including Democracy Day, a nationwide reporting collaborative involving hundreds of newsrooms across the United States. He is the author of several guides and educational resources for small and local newsrooms, including guides on generative AI.