Thank you.
My name is Justin Bank.
I am the founder of a new entity called the independent journalism atlas.
That's our logo we're quite proud of.
We launched seven weeks ago in Miami at the night media forum.
These are my two cofounders, Ryan and Liz Kelly Nelson.
If I can do a little bragging real quick.
The three of us met at the Washington Post 15 years ago.
I was in charge of something called audience development.
Can I ask anybody in the room, has anybody heard the phrase audience development before?
Cool.
It's so funny that it dovetails with journalism.
Those of us who worked in the field of journalism in the last 10, 15 years, I was fortunate to be at the Washington Post 15 years ago.
It goes through the whole industry.
We make journalism.
We know every day we make the news.
We publish it out.
We broadcast it out.
What does it mean to get people's attention?
For years people were able to publish things and the distribution mechanism.
Whether it was a physical relic that was put on people's door steps or delivered in their mailboxes.
Or it was broadcast across spectrum in a matter of ways.
You could presume out it goes.
For the people constructing the news inside the newsrooms, whether they are reporters working in a city newsroom,
or whether they are foreign correspondent filing dispatches,
to think about what it means to gather the information and get it out to folks in that product sense,
was a wildly new idea 15 years ago.
The three of us meet at the Washington Post around 2010 doing that kind of work.
That's very blog era internet, right?
Liz actually was the celebrity blogger for the Washington Post in 2010.
That's when we met her.
She worked for a product called Celebritology.
She would put out 5, 7, 12 blog posts about whatever is going on in the celebrity world.
It was that version of internet.
Ryan and I were on the first version of an audience team at a newsroom.
Fast forward to today.
All three of us spent 20 years working in these places.
Our bios are on there.
In today's context, Liz has an amazing project called Project C, Project Creator.
In Project Creator, Liz in the last year and a half has just a mouse and butter,
churns herself, this amazing community of people who are independent journalism creators,
building their own products, building their own business models, solo, preneur, small teams.
It's an amazing community of folks.
It's Liz's work primarily.
Ryan recently finished out a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard studying creator economy,
getting very academic about it, rolling off of a great tenure at Axios,
where he was trying to figure out that Axios model of smart brevity.
How do you take that to the local communities?
That was kind of Ryan's last project.
I was recently managing editor at the Washington Post,
actually with my friend and colleague, Lawrence Saxons,
who will be your leader to speak,
working on video strategy, design strategy, visuals writ large for the newsroom,
as well as audience strategy, which is kind of more of my background.
That background kind of took me to some interesting places at moments in time.
In short, I worked at these places and watched them burn,
is in a provocative way to say it.
Let's just take it smaller.
It's maybe different, we kind of say it as well.
The real takeaway, hopefully, is that word audience on that screen,
which kind of just captures what my role has been for, of course, 20 years in these places,
and the different things I've kind of seen.
So I want to dial into this one just really interesting anecdote.
I was at the Washington Post in 2011.
I was SEO editor.
To my knowledge, I was the first SEO editor in an American newsroom.
I know other folks who are doing stuff more from the marketing side of things.
And when I joined, it was amazing kind of like learning as I went to be like,
okay, I have this job.
I kind of BS'd my way into this.
What does this mean?
How do I help a news publisher every day kind of get their information out there?
I'd been there for a year or so when the Edward Snowden story happened.
Does everybody remember?
Cool.
And just real briefly, right, to remind ourselves, you know, a government-placed whistleblower
has this information, breaks it out.
It's one of the most seminal stories of our lifetime,
is that this person with bravery and a lot of this stuff kind of going on,
reveals their story.
The Washington Post and The Guardian were the two newspapers who got that information first.
When I was sitting in the Washington Post newsroom, we knew there was a big story happening.
You know, newsrooms are complicated.
Any institution you work in, any kind of organization, right,
there are different nodes and networks and layers kind of what's going on over there.
When this story happens, Marty Barron, our historically, you know, incredible,
like visionary editor who handles, like, big, you know, news stories,
his office has lots of senior editors buzzing into it,
and it has the investigative reporters going in.
If you work in a newsroom, you kind of learn to follow the foot traffic.
You can kind of figure out something's happening here.
You know, if you see a bunch of support reporters going in a certain direction,
you can kind of presume maybe there's a, you know, game kind of going on.
If you see a bunch of investigative reporters constantly going to Marty's office
with growing kind of rapidity for a couple days, you're thinking, okay,
like something's kind of going to happen over here.
At one point in time, we later learned there was this air-gapped computer
that Bart Gilman, the reporter working on this, had put into a room
that only people who were at certain clearance could go into.
Because we kind of moved further with audience development,
our social editor was allowed to read the story,
which was actually newer for us in 2011 for TJ to go in and read the story
and kind of know what to do.
So we published the story. It's going great.
You know, it's actually days of stories kind of rippling out.
There's kind of feedback loops of like, we have this information,
will another person give us more information?
That's how the news breaks out.
As this is happening, stories are doing great,
but we're noticing this trend that like by the afternoon,
the story is buried in Google News.
And so in 2011, here we are publishing scoop after scoop,
the Guardian's publishing scoop after scoop,
and by two in the afternoon, you go to Google News,
and the Huffington Post is there, or Buzzfeed is there,
and we had kind of learned a few tricks along the way.
One trick was we called self aggregation,
or what we would in turn joke, we'd call them SEO bombs.
I'm seeing and nodding.
Can I ask, have you had this experience in newsrooms you've been in?
I mean, I have to be the news group that it's been your time to do that.
We'll get to that in a second.
So on the right hand side over here,
God, I wish I could have found the original like screenshots I had from years ago,
but we had a 22 year old, you know, like junior reporter who was fabulous.
Max was a great, great reporter.
But after a couple of days, I said to Marty, you know, the traffic that,
you know, the audience is coming in, but we're losing the afternoon.
We've done this trick.
We've done this like self aggregation, the search bomb,
where we literally have a file ready.
We published the story in the morning,
just like any newspaper would because it had to go in the morning's paper.
By the afternoon, the algorithms were looking for that fresh story.
We'd say, you know, we see the aggregators beating us.
What if we just aggregate ourselves and kind of did something?
Max earned front stories about Edward Snowden, about the PRISM program,
were as widely read as the original reporting.
Now it was a pass through.
I don't show you the rest of this page,
which is literally just like a couple sentences and a link to it.
But we had to contort our product to compete with algorithms
or to compete on algorithms to get people to our stories,
which is the story of journalism over the last 10, 15, 20,
I don't even know how many years to put this thing here.
This is just my story.
This is the places I've been at the moments in time.
The New York Times, which I got to in 2014, at that point in time,
I got there actually just in time for the first adaption of Snapchat,
which was like dozens of people working really hard to figure out
how do we take this Folsom product, 180 stories a day.
I forgot the number, 27,000 words or so,
the amount of information that would take it,
an average human reader, eight and a half hours to get through,
what should be on Snapchat.
I actually think the Times, broadly speaking,
I had really positive experience there of like when we launched the Daily,
I was involved in that project, but hearing the editors involved saying,
what should the New York Times sound like, was a great provocation, I think,
of like, what are we good at in the New York Times?
We're good at gathering information, we're good at storytelling,
we're good at like, you know, sourcing,
but what's the new thing sound for them, right, to turn into a podcast company?
I think they've been wildly successful at it.
To show you a less than positive experience I had in this idea
of transformation product development,
I was in NPR for the years on the slide over here.
I found myself for a long time thinking, here I am at NPR,
and I was seen as like a newspaper guy, which was very funny to me
to spend these years at the Post and the Times, like Mr. Digital Guy.
Here I am at the broadcaster being the newspaper guy.
It took me months to figure out why NPR,
most people here are familiar with the American, you know,
public broadcasting system, has a series of amazing radio broadcast programs,
has a series of amazing podcasts.
If you go to their website, it's filled with news articles
that look like newspaper articles.
They're inverted pyramids that, you know, they have the facts at the top,
they kind of store it down, roughly 600 words to 1500 words.
First I didn't think much of it, but as I kind of spent more time
inside the organization, I thought, this is interesting,
like, this place has been around for 50 years.
People write radio scripts.
Scripts are very different than stories. They're a lot more narrative.
They kind of have more voice in it.
And it took me months to kind of understand, they did this
because they hired newspaper people to make their website for them.
For that strange reason, NPR.org, Tyler, you're shaking your head,
because you spent time there as well, right?
The amount of time you spent in this place thinking,
why did these people whose genius is getting information,
whose genius is storytelling, and NPR specifically,
their genius is audio storytelling.
They can kind of find sound that is wrestling in the background,
and the right voice is that kind of in combination.
Like, to take from Aaron's amazing presentation she just gave,
what's the register of conveying information?
NPR, from an audio perspective, right? Legendary.
Why were they making newspaper articles on websites?
You know, it's confusing me, so it's been a couple years saying,
why can't these radio scripts, which are very narrative,
turn into live blogs, which was my great challenge there.
Eventually we did it, which was amazing.
But again, so much retrofitting, so much of like,
what is this institution doing in the first place
towards where it could kind of go afterwards.
And so that's my experience in those different places.
I mean, the real big takeaway is whatever publisher I was at
or other people may have been at certain points in time,
we're looking at 20 plus years of these institutions
being filled with wildly talented people at gathering information,
at storytelling, constantly trying to figure out
how to get that information to people through an aggregation era
that just destroyed them, that destroyed the industry,
it destroyed so many different disciplines kind of within the industry.
I could get lost down that part, it's a lot of trauma.
The one thing I want to convey to this space
is just to know in the journalism industry, in the media industry,
that trauma is real.
The people who raise their hands can all think of the people
who are not in this room, who are at other conferences
or trying to do other projects right now,
who still lament the fact that they can't work on their story
for X amount of time or that there's not as much love
of the craft of this or that.
But the takeaway I hope for this conference kind of going forward
is the concept of survivors, of the embers,
of like what's left from this.
And I want to talk about very specific survivors.
I have a few more I need to go through this presentation.
One, Lauren, sitting right over there,
we'll be up here later to talk a little bit about her journey
with Local News International, her six month old company, Lauren?
Is that fair? Yeah.
Six month old independent journalism company
that is doing fabulous things and Dave, who's not here,
is kind of the face of it with those googly eyes.
And we'll talk a little bit more about Lauren's experience kind of later today.
I'll say one thing about Lauren's experience,
this is a chart I'm very happy to show off here.
Lauren, Dave and Micah, the three co-founders of Illinois,
who were there six months ago,
who were in broad strokes, Dave is the face of the TikTok channel.
He's known as Washington Post TikTok guy,
he's kind of like his nickname, his persona.
There's a YouTube channel.
This is one look at a competitive kind of benchmarking
of what happened to the Washington Post's YouTube channels.
You can kind of see the things doing their things.
You can tell when Dave left, you can see what Dave built,
and you can see what happened here, right?
Which is the audience went with him.
Like before platforms, there was a need for institutions
to be the platform, to be the distribution mechanism.
There are these slides that I've used in other contexts.
Like I have a 12-year-old and a 10-year-old at home.
I've gone to a couple of career days where I've tried to explain
I'm a journalist, I'm an audience development journalist.
Let me explain to you middle schoolers and elementary school kids
what that means.
To talk to Gen Alpha kids about what it means to work in a newspaper,
I've used slides like this to say this is what a newspaper is.
And everyone agrees.
One of the things I've loved Dave for so many years is he's lean.
This is why she was a TikTok guy.
He'll use the newspaper emoji to convey what he is.
The emoji actually does the work of explaining what this artifact was
pre-internet in a certain way.
And this is a slide I love showing the kids
because it's something we've talked about in newsrooms for a generation now.
For so long, you're going to train and train looked like this.
And at a certain point in time, you're going to train and it looked like this.
When I was at the New York Times, you used to talk about the breakfast table dynamic.
Did you ever talk about that in your travels?
Because for generations and generations, people would go to breakfast tables
and what would they see in front of them
versus what would they see in front of them now?
Or was it the times just as we were putting the paywall up and figuring out
that breakfast table dynamic is going away
and we have to grab that brand equity.
And I think the Times has done an amazing job of doing exactly that,
grabbing that brand equity because now there is no more breakfast table like that.
And so the takeaway I hope from the heart of the spiel is just that
the individual journalists, those are the atomic units creating information.
And Erin's talk, I think, again, beautifully lays out there of like,
who are these nodes and networks to kind of move onto a protocol in kind of a certain way.
It's not just aspirational. It's not just anecdotal.
This is research that Reuters has been working towards for a few years
and the last few months kind of continuing, kind of sharpening the version of displaying this.
The thing to look at here is the purple and the blue and the ages, right?
Who do younger audiences trust?
Do they know to trust the brand or the brand, the individual behind it?
The atomic unit is the individual behind it.
And so I'm eager to tell a couple stories about individuals who are creating great journalism on the internet.
Yeah, you're a Casey fan?
I was thinking Casey the whole time.
Casey's got a really good case study here.
He's an amazing case study. I mean, can I ask, why were you thinking of him?
Well, so I work in the artificial intelligence industry,
and we're in kind of a more very huge issue thing,
and really systematically in question.
But like the way that like, it's kind of like then out of reach,
almost it seems in my mind, it's like the way that like a community of us functions.
And Casey is our guy.
So like, you're a platformer.
I read platformer.
Yeah.
It's an art work.
It's cool.
Like, you know, I taught him on market sequence.
He's huge.
He's a tall man. Yeah.
Very tall.
Very kind man too.
Very tall kind man. Yes. Yeah.
But he's probably the best example of what you're describing.
Yeah.
He's about Casey as part of the version.
Exactly.
So Casey, did you start following Casey's work when he was at the Verge as a reporter?
Yeah.
So you knew him from there, right?
Casey is amazing.
I mean, we could spend hours talking about Casey and I would in other contexts.
The takeaways for his conference, hopefully are Casey's an individual human reporter, right?
He was at an institution five years ago.
He very thoughtfully, I had to borrow a phrase from that time, decoupled from the Verge
for the first year or two of platformer.
I think even still, he made a gap for a little while.
He licensed back.
So Casey is now a publisher on Ghost at this point in time.
He had a sub-stack journey, which we won't get lost on that one.
But he has moved platforms multiple times and his audience follows him.
Now he is one of one, right?
I believe he might be the best living journalist alive.
I just think what he's doing is so important and his ability to run a business.
I think Casey's amazing in a million different ways.
For this room, I almost took a mastodon screenshot.
I didn't know if that would be on Kuth or not.
There was a protocol conference, right?
All open interoperability and we're bridging in every direction.
Around late December, early January, there was a very special episode of Hard Fork and Search Engine
where they launched the Forkaverse as a mastodon instance.
I was taking a walk listening.
My mind's been going towards protocol.
I just had met Ted and Chad like weeks earlier.
I'm kind of reading up on things.
And to hear them say like, fuck it, we're doing to do it.
We're going to move people to an instance.
And tell this very special episode of buying the server space.
And then to go online and be on number 100 and then to watch in the weeks go by 10,000, 12,000, 15,000 people.
You go to the instance.
We're watching like the Pied Piper dynamic of what does it mean for a journalist to take their audience with them
to a protocol base.
Like Casey is that example for sure.
But there's so many other amazing examples.
I mean, again, I'm going to be a little mindful of time.
I'm coming back up here later with Lauren.
And it's going to be so interesting.
I think they hear Lauren's story about running a business.
What does it mean to run a business?
What does she need to run a business?
What does it mean to find audience?
What does it mean to do journalism on the internet today without all the legacy stuff of the newspapers and the radio and all that?
Does anybody here know Kyla Scanlon?
I love that, you know, she's amazing.
She is, she's a phenom.
I mean, I don't, you know, she is a younger journalist, I'll just say.
I think she is very early career-ish.
But in a certain amount of years, my God, she is everywhere and she's good at everywhere.
Like this quote that I found of hers on the Substac note captures some of her genius in a certain way.
I made this slide this morning or last night, like just on LinkedIn in the last couple days, she's on LinkedIn talking about her appearance with like Marketplace on like a tour, as well as what's her other note over here.
She has a new essay on her Substac, which is between some of her New York Times pieces.
Modern journalism, there are these individuals.
Now, she again is a phenom, like the highest level of I think like, my God, she can manage all these platforms and she has a small team.
Like she is just extraordinary.
But there are so many folks like this out there.
So I am the one of the three co-founders of the journalism atlas.com or journalism atlas.com, the independent journalism atlas.
We launched six, seven weeks ago.
We're still figuring ourselves out in a lot of ways.
The thing we know we're doing is we are making a list of good independent journalism.
There's lots of amazing journals in the world.
There's lots of amazing institutions that need your support as well.
But independent journalism has always been around going back to the days of like zines and, you know, radio and all sorts of other places.
The internet for a long time has allowed people to publish in certain ways.
But at this moment in the timeline, there's so much important independent journalism.
There's so many people moving from institutions to independence.
There's so many people who are independent who can kind of like robustly armor up themselves into businesses.
There is a live moment in this ecosystem.
So these are two screenshots of our product right now.
Our product is a prototype.
We are just trying to kind of get in the market and show people how much great independent journalism this is.
These are two views of a bubble view of like a geo look and then a topic based that kind of shows you platforms as well.
The takeaway that, you know, despite the number one thing I'm going to say in this conference is as I meet more people who come from other industries who are working on things and thinking of the protocols application to what you can build.
The idea of federated media is happening and it has been happening.
Just it doesn't have that word.
And so, you know, I think that's a really important thing.
I think that's a really important thing.
And I think that's a really important thing.
The idea of a poly platform strategy.
To survive.
You know, their version of being the kelp.
Is like their fronds.
Have to show up in a few different places.
While they figure out.
Kind of where the anchor space is going to be.
You know, there's this amazing reporter.
Marisa.
Cap.
Has anybody here.
If you guys are on.
Bluesky.
I love the hands.
Amazing.
That's amazing.
the hands. Amazing, amazing, amazing. Marisa again could spend hours talking
about just her as a use case, another amazing use case of an independent
journalist. So this quote that's up here is from an Associated Press story about
her maybe a month or two into a Trump 2 administration. So Marisa had this great
scoop, she publishes it out, you know it's an amazing story, right, like a woman in
Brooklyn who is a great independent reporter who gets access to this and
kind of off she goes. And this quote is just amazing, her stomach was not, the fact
that like she was like living through this thing of like I'm in this apartment,
I have this information, there is no legal team behind me, there is no
institution, like she just kind of had to do it and she did it and you know and
actually this had this screenshot over here, that's not the scoop from a year
ago, that's another scoop she had a month ago or so. She has now turned into like in
a great another case study to think about in this room at this convening. You
this is probably the most prominent scoop machine journalist active on Blue
Sky. I don't know that I would put another name out there and she's building this
kind of business primarily off Bluesky. Like it's you know now she she's
building her monetization off of Beyive or her newsletter is, but the fact that
she has kind of done what she's done in this ecosystem with these communities, her
funnel is Bluesky to Beyive right now and she's able to do stuff like this to
move her subscriber count up, which gives her a business, which gives her a livelihood,
which allows her to kind of keep creating journalism. And I hope this room
as community can think about Marisa as a very tangible example right now, not just
because of her, because what's being built around her in a certain way. So this
is a product that just launched three or four days ago. Has anybody seen this news
of Trust Fund? Amazing. So Michael Jar Jar is a media executive. He was at the
FT for a while I know. He's been kind of ruminating on this for a few months. We've
been in touch with him from the independent journalism Atlas. We were in
touch with him a few months ago as he was starting. We consider him a very big
fellow traveler. He gave us a heads up a week or two ago and said, hey, it's
getting kind of real here and thank you for launching as I build my tech stack.
It's been nice to have your database like publicly out there. I ingested it
and I figured out affinity scores like I'm helping add towards my like
subscription bundle creating tool. What his tool is, is it's a little smaller
here, is he's allowing independent journalists to sign up. If they're on
Beyive or sub stack, he kind of has that handshake kind of figured out. And if
you're at Beyive or sub stack, you can sign on with his platform. If you're an
independent publisher of newsletters, you can find other people like you and or
you can go on and be like these are the two or three I want to work with. And the
screenshot kind of shows how if you're an independent publisher you can say
we're a bundle now. We'll all be a little cheaper if you buy our bigger bundle.
Which solves for a problem I think people have seen for a long time of like
well I understood paying for the one bundle over there. Now there's like 75
independence. I love Casey. I love Marisa. How many independent subscriptions I
manage over here. So I think Michael is in a great direction. Doing this thing
now. He's off protocol. He's building the software in a different way. But an
amazing example to bring here because he's building with somebody who is on
protocol. And you know the idea of like who's wearing what they're doing is the
the guts of what I'd love to work on here like in these next couple days. This
is another visualization of like what we're building at the Atlas. Again we're
all prototypes at this point. We are you know showing our you know our laundry
over here. Like I, all three of us are not technical to you know lightly kind of
say something here. 15 years ago or so when I was a fact check that org in the
beginning of my career as a fact check reporter in 2006 7 8 at one point in
time I said we need a new website. I downloaded some WordPress software. I
watched some YouTube videos. I FTP'd up some stuff. I dreamweaver was truly how I
learned how to internet. And then I end up these cool jobs right. It wasn't my job
to build anymore. I just hopefully was a good enough colleague to the Tyler's of
the world and saying like hey I think this can we build that. So to kind of
come back to a like Claude cursor powered world and kind of build these
tools. We're prototyping in real time but our actual idea and work we think is
the curation. Is the finding of the journal server here. And so this is just
another like array visualization of like at this point we have 1165 people
publicly on the website. And we're kind of showing here's the you know where
they're living. They're on these platforms not on these platforms. They're
publishing this kind of content. We have like I'm kind of showing a little
something on this slide of like we have thousands more who are kind of like in a
catalog. We're just not in a rush to keep publishing everything immediately. We're
trying to figure out like how to thoughtfully do it. Should we be launching
in more cities or should we doing more globally. Should we doing this platform
versus that platform. Should we work with a certain platform partner who as we
publish will try to get more visibility for them on other platforms or figure
out their monetization hooks. And we are very live kind of in those conversations
right now. These are roughly the three groups we're talking to. Trying to figure
out like between philanthropy publishers and platforms. There's intermediation to
do on behalf of creators as cohorts. Some were very actively have a couple dozen
let's say creators who want to work with a certain publisher in a certain way or
work with a platform in a certain way. Some as we're kind of doing BD almost like
is a ghost like entity to say well if we did something like this platform X or
publisher why could you work with people in a way. We are kind of really just
trying to like conceptually kind of proof of concept thing over here. And we're
looking for anyone else like Michael a fellow traveler who wants to build who
wants to fund who wants to operate this kind of more like multimodal network
node kind of existence. This is I guess the best expression I think of what we
are in this space. I think we're a lot of things in a lot of different rooms but
to this room to this conference where I think our project offers is that we're
committed to making a long long list in database. We have a thousand you know
plus already we see the path three four five thousand frankly. As time goes on as
I understand what we're able to do with software and with like the seeds of our
curation. If we imagine a world where we can actually go around the globe look
across all platforms as they are today I think there are hundreds of thousands
of high-quality I'll call them journalism creators but not journalists
necessarily. My co-founder Ryan when he was at Neiman he did some work in thinking
this through and said you know as I look around there's too many people who don't
identify as journalists but they're doing journalism and so last year for
Neiman Lab he wrote a thoughtful piece it's journalism not journalists. We are
following that kind of like conceptual framework over here so this is some
language that we spent some time thinking through. And as we go through
our database has some things that are hiding in plain sight like Joe Rogan's
on there. I think I don't say it's provocative but we do want to say that
if people are going to interview people newsmakers and put the information on
display just like Barbara Walters Oprah you know the the hot wings get like I
don't know if hot ones is on our list or not but I would put them on there. People
who are giving a platform to information of people who can influence other
people's lives is journalism of a certain stripe. The language we love the
most that's been the most helpful to us when there's been edge cases we're kind
of curious what we're doing is the word missional which is hiding in that first
paragraph. It's missional work that advances information and understanding
for a community. Hearing Aaron speak a second ago again I get chills just
thinking about it again that's the community we want to be in we love
journalism we love the tradecraft I've spent my career in newsrooms loving the
stories about like what happened when you know I lived through the Edward
Snowden stuff but to be in the newsrooms where the pending on papers happened or
the deep throat stuff like to hear these stories is amazing but at this moment in
time with the timeline we're going forward in we really think about the
people doing it they like Marisa sitting at that kitchen table and how does she
get source information how does she get validation how she get monetization kind
of against her in a certain way so these are the folks we're talking to you
here's another kind of shot of like a prototyping thing we're kind of building
out we have dozens of these things I'm just saying well we have the data as is
publicly we have more data behind the scenes anyone here who wants to talk
about by geo by topic by platform we have 18 columns of like metadata we're
kind of cultivating behind the scenes we are thrilled to work with anybody and we
also have active communities that we can go query and ask them qualitative
questions how are you making money who's the third person you would hire what tax
deck would you want in a certain way we are very eager to build in public
alongside people and just keep building prototypes and other I mean we've kind
of figured out in the end and I think I have this on this slide kind of what we
are we are figuring out our product market fit where we've kind of gone seven
weeks in as we were losing real clearly we do think there's a B2C thing here
like people should hopefully find this thing and if you individually want to
find great creators amazing but the real value we have is our relationships
institutions we're looking to figure out this B2B thing of like any entity
whether you are a startup or a long-running institution whatever your
modernization hooks are if you need access to high quality information
those are the people who want to talk to and if you're building that direction we
want to talk alongside you as well and I kind of want to land on this to say like
you know actually I kind of grabbed it when I was in the room I put this there I
just was sitting gobsmacked with Aaron's elegance and just thought well if we
need to you know anchor networks and humans this was the slide I built was my
version of that like the community I come from of independent journalists and
creators of people constructing journals and people who wouldn't even know they're
in my community we're doing it but I want champion them these are the three
things they need and so anything we can do in these next couple days to figure
out the audience portability question the discoverability coordination
questions and the questions of community management and monetization tools Kevin
Kelly's thousand true fans wired essay rings deeply in this community we'd love
to talk and kind of meet community with you guys as well about that so I'll just
end with this and say it like you know I've been saying this to Jen and Tessa
kind of came online here I can't believe how structurally aligned the work and
mission of journalism is to protocol based thinking our institutions have
just been turned into what they've turned into journalists are finding a
way through networks and nodes I'm just like tickled with the concept of the
people who are doing the deep-seated work on what the software means to build in
that direction how aligned is with the humans creating the journalism are that's
what let's talk about here I was like right bang on time awesome thank you
Justin Justin is around the conference and he's looking to connect with folks
so please connect with him if you want to talk more about this stuff we're
gonna just swap out our setup here we're running of course 10-15 minutes behind
but hey it's atmosphere conference it's the same last year this is this is
beginning to be a tradition all right so Natalie come on up and get connected
here