Rebooting Democracy in the Age of AI: “AI and the Media” with Jill Abramson and Ethan Zuckerman

Watch the recording here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A71VxORMDLU&t=2s

Rebooting Democracy in the Age of AI Lecture Series presents “AI and the Media.”

Join us on Thursday, January 25 at 5 p.m. ET for a conversation about how artificial intelligence is, and will continue to, impact the media landscape in the United States and around the world. 

“AI and the Media” will feature Jill Abramson, Northeastern Professor and Burnes Center for Social Change Senior Fellow and former executive editor of the New York Times, and Ethan Zuckerman, associate professor of public policy, information and communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and director of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure. 

The discussion continues the Rebooting Democracy in the Age of AI Lecture Series, hosted by Beth Simone Noveck, which talks with innovative designers, thinkers, and changemakers working to “do democracy” differently in the age of artificial intelligence. Conversations explore how machine learning, natural language processing and generative AI can enable more participatory and inclusive ways of solving problems. Through online and in-person conversations with pioneers working to democratize power in governments, schools and workplaces,  conversations aim to address how to use new technologies to strengthen democracy.

Jill Abramson leads the Burnes Center for Social Change’s Initiative on Investigative Solutions Journalism. She is a journalist who spent 17 years in the most senior editorial positions at The New York Times, where she was the first woman to serve as Washington bureau chief, managing editor, and executive editor. Before joining the Times, she was deputy Washington bureau chief and an investigative reporter covering money and politics at The Wall Street Journal for nine years. She was the editor of Legal Times in Washington, D.C.

She is the author of six books, including Strange Justice, which she wrote with Jane Mayer and Merchants of Truth, a narrative history of the digital transition of the news media. From 2015-2019 she also wrote a weekly political column for The Guardian. Random House in 2021 and 2022 published two books she wrote for middle-schoolers, What Is Congress andWhat is the Supreme Court.

Recent articles by Abramson have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and the Columbia Journalism Review, among others. She has been a frequent political commentator for BBC News. 

She has won many journalism awards and a Bok Award for her successful teaching.

Ethan Zuckerman is associate professor of public policy, information and communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and director of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure. His research focuses on the use of media as a tool for social change, the use of new media technologies by activists and alternative business and governance models for the internet. He is the author of Mistrust: How Losing Trust in Institutions Provides Tools to Transform Them (2021) and Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (2013). With Rebecca MacKinnon, Zuckerman co-founded the international blogging community Global Voices. It showcases news and opinions from citizen media in more than 150 nations and 30 languages, publishing editions in 20 languages. Previously, Zuckerman directed the Center for Civic Media at MIT and taught at the MIT Media Lab. In 2000, Zuckerman founded Geekcorps, a technology volunteer organization that sends IT specialists to work on projects in developing nations, with a focus on West Africa. Previously, he helped found Tripod.com, one of the web’s first “personal publishing” sites. 

To learn more about the series and read our blog on AI, democracy and governance, visit: https://rebootdemocracy.ai/. 

The series is hosted by the Burnes Center for Social Change and the GovLab, in partnership with the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University.

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