13 Webinars this week about AI, Journalism & Media
/Mon, May 4 - Strategic AI for Nonprofit Leaders
What: This session isn't about tools. It’s about fixing the decision layer that comes first. You’ll learn how to move from scattered, individual use to a more coordinated, human-led approach grounded in your mission, values, and your team’s real capacity.
Who: Ryann Miller, Founder of Spark & Signal.
When: 12 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: TechSoup
Tue, May 5 - Open Sesame: Opening the Algorithmic Black Box with Practical Explainability Use Cases
What: This presentation addresses the practical gap between organisational expectations and the technical implementation of explainable AI (XAI). Through two real-world use case scenarios, credit scoring and employee attrition prediction, we demonstrate how state-of-the-art XAI techniques, including SHAP (SHapley Additive Explanations) and LIME (Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations), can be integrated into organisational processes to meet compliance and ethical demands.
Who: Marcus Becker, Assoc. Prof., Digital Transformation & Innovation Management, Management Center Innsbruck; Ana Moya, Lead, WAN-IFRA Data Science Expert Group.
When: 10 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: World Association of News Publisher
Tue, May 5 - Finding opportunities within business journalism and B2B publications
What: This webinar is focused on how journalists can build careers and thrive in business and industry-focused newsrooms. Our panelists will share insights on how their teams operate and what they look for in job applicants and potential colleagues.
Who: Paul F. Albergo, a journalism educator at American University; Maya Earls, deputy team lead for the Environment and Energy team at Bloomberg Law; Thai Phi Le, senior managing editor at Informa TechTarget.
When: 12 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: National Press Club
Tue, May 5 - From Vectors to Tensors: Expanding the Possibilities of AI Search
What: Vector embeddings transformed how we build search and retrieval systems, and if you’ve shipped production applications on top of them, you already know what they can do—and may also be starting to discover what they can’t. Vectors are powerful, but they represent a single point in space, while complex search problems involving multiple signals, multimodal data, or nuanced relevance ranking require something more expressive. Tensors extend what’s possible, enabling richer representations, more sophisticated scoring, and retrieval that can reason across dimensions that vector search simply wasn’t built to handle.
Who: Vespa.ai’s Bonnie Chase, Director of Product Marketing; Zohar Nissare-Houssen, Strategic Presales Lead Engineer.
When: 12 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: The New Stack
Tue, May 5 - Skill Lab: Build Your First Workspace Agent
What: Join us for a practical OpenAI Academy session on how to identify, scope, build, test, and scale your first workspace agent for a team workflow. We’ll start with the basics: what agents are, how they work, and how they differ from other ways of using ChatGPT. Then we’ll walk through how to identify a strong workflow, write an “Agent Requirements Doc,” build a first version with tools, skills, and triggers, test and improve the agent, and roll it out safely with permissions, approvals, and feedback loops.
Who: Juliann Igo, GTM, OpenAI.
When: 1 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: OpenAI Academy
More Info
Tue, May 5 - Beyond stress: What journalists should know about burnout
What: You will contribute anonymously to a series of prompts to learn actionable insights for reassessing and repairing your relationships with work. Created specifically for those working within news organizations, this session will help journalists.
Who: Sam Ragland, API’s senior vice president.
When: 1 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: American Press Institute
Wed, May 6 - Advanced AI Course: Building AI agents to make you a better journalist
What: In this session you will learn to: Understand what AI agents are and see a live demonstration of building one; Explore an example agent she has created, nicknamed; NewsBot Identify realistic ways agents could streamline your reporting and reduce repetitive tasks.
Who: Parvathi Subbiah, Tech Lead, AI Lab at The Economist.
When: 7:30 am
Where: Zoom
Cost: Member: £15; Nonmember: £25
Sponsor: Women in Journalism
Wed, May 6 - Canva + AI
What: In this tactical Mini Lab, you’ll see how school communicators can use Canva’s AI features to create social graphics, animated posts, and scroll-stopping videos that support enrollment, recruitment, and everyday district storytelling, while maintaining brand consistency and trust.
Who: Kate Crowder, Communications Coordinator, Germantown Municipal School District (Tenn.)
When: 12 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: National School of Public Relations
Wed, May 6 - The Missing Layer How Conversational AI Turns Student Reflection into Institutional Intelligence
What: Learn how structured, conversational AI–guided reflection generates continuous, actionable insight into student learning and persistence, without adding new reporting burdens.
Who: Rebecca Thomas Pathways, ePortfolio Director and Associate Teaching Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Bucknell University; Jeffery Yan, Cofounder & CEO, Digication.
When: 2 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: American Association of Colleges and Universities
Wed, May 6 - How AI Can Improve Colleges’ Communications with Students
What: This webinar features a panel of campus leaders discussing how institutions are using AI and other technology to strengthen student communications and keep humans in the loop. We’ll also dig into findings from The Chronicle’s national survey of administrators and faculty on AI for student communications, including perceptions of virtual assistants and why some are funding their own AI tools.
Who: Ian Wilhelm, Deputy Managing Editor, The Chronicle of Higher Education.
When: 2 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: The Chronicle of Higher Education
Thu, May 7 - Codex for everyday work: Take ambitious ideas from start to finish
What: This is a beginner-friendly session on using Codex for real work and everyday tasks. We’ll explain what Codex can help you do in everyday work, and how to start with work you can review, build on, and trust.
Who: Diana Stegal, Customer Education, OpenAI; Charmaine Pek, AI Deployment, OpenAI; Kelsey Pedersen, Codex, OpenAI.
When: 2 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: OpenAI Academy
Thu, May 7 - Journalist Workshop: Incorporating science into every story
What: Explore the Science Reporting Navigator to incorporate scientific evidence, perspectives or context into your work, even when on deadline. In this hour-long workshop, participants will spend half an hour learning how to use the Science Reporting Navigator as a reporting tool and half an hour workshopping ideas and stories to turn into successful pitches.
When: 3 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: New England Newspaper & Press Association
Fri, May 8 - AI-powered personalization and its risks
What: Experts from Smith School and an industry leader explore the pros and the cons of this revolutionary change.
Who: Balaji Padmanabhan, Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives and Director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Business, University of Maryland; Eaman Jahani, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland; Robert H. Smith School of Business; Robyn Tomlin, Executive Director, American Press Institute.
When: 12 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: University of Maryland