Q&A with journalists and Pulitzer grantees Garance Burke, Khari Johnson and Lam Thuy Vo, moderated by journalist and UC Berkeley Lecturer Jamil Smith.

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Thursday, August 26

3:30-4:30 pm

Logan Multimedia Center at
UC Berkeley Journalism’s North Gate Hall

RSVP

Garance Burke, Khari Johnson and Lam Thuy Vo

About the Panelists

Garance Burke

Garance Burke (’04) is a global investigative journalist with The Associated Press, where her accountability reporting at the intersection of government, immigration and technology has sparked federal investigations, congressional hearings and Cabinet-level resignations. With a team of AP reporters, she won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for a global investigation into mass surveillance tools created in Silicon Valley. She was a 2020 John S. Knight Journalism and Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute Fellow at Stanford University, where she researched the role algorithms play in government decision-making.

Khari Johnson

Khari Johnson has covered artificial intelligence for the past decade, at first covering stories from a consumer technology approach driven by products and profit, but human rights abuses and extreme power imbalances turned his focus toward stories that examine how tech can impact society and the public interest.

Lam Thuy Vo

Lam Thuy Vo is a journalist who marries data analysis with on-the-ground reporting to examine how systems and policies affect individuals. She is currently an investigative reporter working with Documented, an independent, non-profit newsroom dedicated to reporting with and for immigrant communities, and an associate professor of data journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Previously, she was a journalist at The Markup, BuzzFeed News, The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera America and NPR’s Planet Money. She has shared her research about misinformation and the impact of algorithms on our political views at Harvard, Georgetown, MIT, Columbia, Data & Society, and other institutions. In 2019, she published a book about her empirical approach to finding stories in data from the Internet for No Starch Press.

About the Moderator

Jamil Smith

Jamil Smith is an award-winning journalist, editor, and audio host whose work examines how identity, politics, and culture shape public life and civil rights in the United States. He has held senior editorial and writing roles at publications such as Rolling Stone, Vox, and The New Republic. His reporting and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Time magazine — where he published his award-winning cover story about the film “Black Panther.” He has also hosted original podcasts, radio programs, and live events exploring race, politics, and social change. He teaches at UC Berkeley Journalism.

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This conversation is presented by UC Berkeley Journalism and the Pulitzer Center as part of our AI, Journalism and Public Trust Symposium.