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Feb. 7 | Brad Samuels to speak at the inaugural Open Source Journalism Conference in Los Angeles

February 7th 2025

On February 7, 2025 from 3:15-4:15pm PST join SITU founder Brad Samuels in a panel on emerging and useful open source tools at USC's Inaugural Open Source Journalism Conference.

Brad Samuels is a founding partner of SITU, an unconventional and creative architecture firm, and he has contributed to many open-source investigations. SITU Research has developed CODEC, a tool for managing video evidence. Megan Chan is Google's News Ecosystem lead, and she will be talking about PinPoint, a tool for analyzing large document troves. Welton Chang is the co-founder and CEO of Pyrra, and he'll be talking about Pyrra's technology for analyzing information across social media. Tristan Lee is a data scientist at Bellingcat, and he'll be talking about Bellingcat's toolkit and one tool that Bellingcat has developed.

Moderated by Haley Willis, a reporter on the New York Times' Visual Investigations Team who has contributed to four Pulitzer Prizes.

The conference's program can be found here.


About the Inaugural Open Source Journalism Conference:

Open source journalism has made enormous strides and contributed to multiple Pulitzer Prizes, yet there has been no major conference solely dedicated to convening journalists, engineers, architects, researchers, and other contributors to share best practices, debate ethical issues, build relationships, and advance a field with enormous potential for uncovering vital facts about the world.

Many news organizations desperately want to dive into this critical form of reporting but lack the technical know-how. In response, this conference is for seasoned experts and raw novices. The conference will offer a training track so that newbie open source journalists can return to their newsrooms with skills they can apply right away.

A key theme will be new frontiers for open source journalism, in which speakers explore areas where open source fact finding has been underutilized but could be deployed for incredible impact.

The inaugural Open Source Journalism Conference is co-hosted by the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism and the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley. We are grateful to our lead sponsor, the Google News Initiative, and our co-sponsors CNN, the Ken and Jackie Broad Family Fund, Crankstart, the Western Wind Foundation, and the Scripps Howard Fund.

Please write to opensourceconference2025@gmail.com anytime with questions, comments, or concerns.

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