Contact

Burt Herman

Contact
Burt Herman

Burt Herman

Co-founder, Hacks/Hackers · Brooklyn, NY

Journalist turned builder. I run Hacks/Hackers — convening events around AI and journalism, working with newsrooms to adopt new technology and building tools that put it to work.

Earlier in my career I spent more than a decade as a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press. Datelines is my passport from those years, stamp by stamp.

Recent writing

Hacks/Hackers

People are asking AI who to vote for.
We built a way for newsroom voter guides to answer

A pilot that lets AI chatbots quote newsroom voter guides in their own words, name the newsroom and link back.
Hacks/Hackers

How we made our site more readable for AI agents and how you can too

Ask-AI buttons, an MCP server and an llms.txt file: small changes that open the archive to agents — no platform migration required.
  1. How do you know when AI is wrong? Hacks/Hackers
  2. Computers finally work the way I dreamed they would Hacks/Hackers
  3. The Content Management System is dead. Long live the Context Management System. Hacks/Hackers
  4. Forget Google Zero, we need to talk about People Zero Nieman Lab
  5. AI Real Talk: How publishers can survive the AI age YouTube
  6. AI, journalism and society at this moment in history Hacks/Hackers
  7. When politicians flood the zone: AI solutions Hacks/Hackers
  8. The year we stop talking about AI Nieman Lab
  9. AI Real Talk: To Sue or Not to Sue YouTube
  10. AI Real Talk: RIP Web YouTube
  11. How Apple AI signals the decline of apps and the web itself Hacks/Hackers
  12. More open source AI Nieman Lab
  13. The year AI truly arrives and with it the reckoning Nieman Lab

Projects

Hacks/Hackers

Voter Guide Commons

A shared server that lets AI assistants answer ballot questions from newsroom voter guides: quoted exactly, with the newsroom's name and a link back.

As co-founder and principal of Hacks/Hackers, I've spent more than 15 years connecting journalists with technologists. The network grew from a San Francisco meetup in 2010 to dozens of chapters worldwide. Today the organization is focused on AI — convening practitioners around journalism's AI moment and helping newsrooms put new tools to work.

I also co-founded Storify in 2010 — a platform for curating social media into coherent narratives at a moment when that felt new. It reached millions of users before being acquired by Livefyre, then Adobe. I helped launch the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, working on how to sustain local news. I later served as a product director on the Condé Nast technology platform team, and most recently as CEO of Lede, building publishing tools for independent newsrooms.

Before all that, I reported for The Associated Press from Korea, Moscow, Central Asia and Berlin for more than a decade. My passport from those years, stamp by stamp, is at Datelines. I was a JSK fellow at Stanford, where I earned my bachelor's and master's degrees and served as editor-in-chief of The Stanford Daily.

Work with me

Available for consulting, speaking and workshops on AI, journalism and the future of trusted media.

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