Students are working closely with the team at Hearken, and are gaining valuable insights into how important audience engagement is to our media landscape.
Nick Hagar
Postdoctoral Scholar, Generative AI in the Newsroom Initiative
Nick is a postdoc developing genAI applications for newsrooms. They research how collective attention works in large, complex systems: how people discover information online, why things get popular, and what influences content creators. Formerly at the New York Times, Meta, and others.
Projects
Projects Nick Hagar has worked on.
Reporters Workbench AIan agent‑augmented “notebook” that helps journalists turn raw notes into actionable tasks and evidence‑based insights
Reporter’s Workbench AI is a desktop web app that lets a journalist group notes into story projects, converts fresh notes into suggested tasks via OpenAI’s o3 function‑calling capabilities, and automatically executes a small set of high‑value tools within those tasks—web search, long‑PDF search and extraction, and quick dataset queries—using OpenAI’s search tool, PDF parsing, and DuckDB. By measuring end‑to‑end task‑completion time, the prototype will test whether a lean, agentic workflow can meaningfully accelerate early‑stage reporting without sacrificing control or transparency.