Anita Zielina is a media executive, board member and strategic advisor working at the intersection of media, technology, AI and leadership. She serves on the Supervisory Boards of the Funke Mediengruppe and Mediahuis, two of Europe’s leading media groups, and is Vice Chair of the News Product Alliance, the international network for product leadership in media.

She is the Founder and CEO of Better Leaders Lab, where she leads a team providing strategic advisory and executive education to media, technology and mission-driven organizations. Previously, she held senior management roles at stern, Der Standard and NZZ, where she led digital and organizational transformation across editorial, product and business functions.

Anita Zielina also teaches executive education at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY in New York as Executive in Residence. She holds an Executive MBA from INSEAD, a degree in Law from the University of Vienna, and completed executive fellowships at Stanford University and the University of Oxford.

*Picture by Heribert Corn

Patrick is based in San Francisco, where he co-founded the AI consulting lab Verso. He helps newsrooms, non-profits, and business leaders step into the AI age, drawing on deep journalistic and technical experience. Verso offers AI training, strategy consulting, product design, and implementation. Previously, he was a John S. Knight fellow at Stanford University, where he explored the impact of artificial intelligence on the information ecosystem, especially on media and journalism. Patrick prototyped AI tools for reporters and editors, designed newsroom strategies, learned to code (in Python), and built entrepreneurship and business development skills. From 2013 to 2023, he was Head of Social Media for news at the Austrian Public Broadcaster ORF. In this role, he built its social presence on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook from scratch and grew it to reach a daily audience of 2.4 million followers.

Patrick est basé à San Francisco, où il a cofondé le laboratoire de conseil en IA Verso. Il aide les rédactions, les organisations à but non lucratif et les chefs d’entreprise à passer à l’ère de l’IA, en s’appuyant sur sa profonde expérience journalistique et technique. Verso propose des formations à l’IA, des conseils en stratégie, la conception de produits et leur mise en œuvre. Auparavant, il était titulaire d’une bourse John S. Knight à l’université de Stanford, où il a étudié l’impact de l’intelligence artificielle sur l’écosystème de l’information, en particulier sur les médias et le journalisme. Patrick a prototypé des outils d’IA pour les journalistes et les rédacteurs, conçu des stratégies pour les salles de rédaction, appris à coder (en Python) et développé des compétences en matière d’entrepreneuriat et de développement d’entreprise. De 2013 à 2023, il a été responsable des médias sociaux pour les actualités au sein du radiodiffuseur public autrichien ORF. Dans ce rôle, il a construit sa présence sociale sur TikTok, Instagram et Facebook à partir de zéro et l’a développée pour atteindre une audience quotidienne de 2,4 millions de followers.

Kaveh Waddell is a co-founder of Verso, a San Francisco-based AI consulting lab for newsrooms and nonprofits. Kaveh was a 2023–24 John S. Knight journalism and Human-Centered AI fellow at Stanford University; he was previously an investigative data journalist at Consumer Reports’ Digital Lab, a staff writer at Axios and The Atlantic, and a freelance reporter in Beirut, Lebanon.