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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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My name is Justin Bank.

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I am the founder of a new entity called the independent journalism atlas.

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That's our logo we're quite proud of.

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We launched seven weeks ago in Miami at the night media forum.

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These are my two cofounders, Ryan and Liz Kelly Nelson.

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If I can do a little bragging real quick.

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The three of us met at the Washington Post 15 years ago.

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I was in charge of something called audience development.

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Can I ask anybody in the room, has anybody heard the phrase audience development before?

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Cool.

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It's so funny that it dovetails with journalism.

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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.

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It goes through the whole industry.

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We make journalism.

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We know every day we make the news.

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We publish it out.

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We broadcast it out.

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What does it mean to get people's attention?

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For years people were able to publish things and the distribution mechanism.

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Whether it was a physical relic that was put on people's door steps or delivered in their mailboxes.

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Or it was broadcast across spectrum in a matter of ways.

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You could presume out it goes.

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For the people constructing the news inside the newsrooms, whether they are reporters working in a city newsroom,

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or whether they are foreign correspondent filing dispatches,

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to think about what it means to gather the information and get it out to folks in that product sense,

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was a wildly new idea 15 years ago.

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The three of us meet at the Washington Post around 2010 doing that kind of work.

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That's very blog era internet, right?

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Liz actually was the celebrity blogger for the Washington Post in 2010.

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That's when we met her.

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She worked for a product called Celebritology.

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She would put out 5, 7, 12 blog posts about whatever is going on in the celebrity world.

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It was that version of internet.

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Ryan and I were on the first version of an audience team at a newsroom.

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Fast forward to today.

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All three of us spent 20 years working in these places.

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Our bios are on there.

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In today's context, Liz has an amazing project called Project C, Project Creator.

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In Project Creator, Liz in the last year and a half has just a mouse and butter,

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churns herself, this amazing community of people who are independent journalism creators,

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building their own products, building their own business models, solo, preneur, small teams.

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It's an amazing community of folks.

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It's Liz's work primarily.

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Ryan recently finished out a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard studying creator economy,

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getting very academic about it, rolling off of a great tenure at Axios,

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where he was trying to figure out that Axios model of smart brevity.

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How do you take that to the local communities?

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That was kind of Ryan's last project.

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I was recently managing editor at the Washington Post,

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actually with my friend and colleague, Lawrence Saxons,

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who will be your leader to speak,

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working on video strategy, design strategy, visuals writ large for the newsroom,

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as well as audience strategy, which is kind of more of my background.

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That background kind of took me to some interesting places at moments in time.

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In short, I worked at these places and watched them burn,

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is in a provocative way to say it.

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Let's just take it smaller.

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It's maybe different, we kind of say it as well.

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The real takeaway, hopefully, is that word audience on that screen,

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which kind of just captures what my role has been for, of course, 20 years in these places,

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and the different things I've kind of seen.

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So I want to dial into this one just really interesting anecdote.

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I was at the Washington Post in 2011.

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I was SEO editor.

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To my knowledge, I was the first SEO editor in an American newsroom.

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I know other folks who are doing stuff more from the marketing side of things.

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And when I joined, it was amazing kind of like learning as I went to be like,

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okay, I have this job.

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I kind of BS'd my way into this.

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What does this mean?

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How do I help a news publisher every day kind of get their information out there?

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I'd been there for a year or so when the Edward Snowden story happened.

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Does everybody remember?

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Cool.

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And just real briefly, right, to remind ourselves, you know, a government-placed whistleblower

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has this information, breaks it out.

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It's one of the most seminal stories of our lifetime,

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is that this person with bravery and a lot of this stuff kind of going on,

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reveals their story.

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The Washington Post and The Guardian were the two newspapers who got that information first.

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When I was sitting in the Washington Post newsroom, we knew there was a big story happening.

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You know, newsrooms are complicated.

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Any institution you work in, any kind of organization, right,

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there are different nodes and networks and layers kind of what's going on over there.

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When this story happens, Marty Barron, our historically, you know, incredible,

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like visionary editor who handles, like, big, you know, news stories,

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his office has lots of senior editors buzzing into it,

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and it has the investigative reporters going in.

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If you work in a newsroom, you kind of learn to follow the foot traffic.

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You can kind of figure out something's happening here.

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You know, if you see a bunch of support reporters going in a certain direction,

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you can kind of presume maybe there's a, you know, game kind of going on.

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If you see a bunch of investigative reporters constantly going to Marty's office

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with growing kind of rapidity for a couple days, you're thinking, okay,

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like something's kind of going to happen over here.

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At one point in time, we later learned there was this air-gapped computer

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that Bart Gilman, the reporter working on this, had put into a room

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that only people who were at certain clearance could go into.

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Because we kind of moved further with audience development,

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our social editor was allowed to read the story,

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which was actually newer for us in 2011 for TJ to go in and read the story

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and kind of know what to do.

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So we published the story. It's going great.

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You know, it's actually days of stories kind of rippling out.

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There's kind of feedback loops of like, we have this information,

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will another person give us more information?

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That's how the news breaks out.

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As this is happening, stories are doing great,

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but we're noticing this trend that like by the afternoon,

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the story is buried in Google News.

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And so in 2011, here we are publishing scoop after scoop,

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the Guardian's publishing scoop after scoop,

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and by two in the afternoon, you go to Google News,

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and the Huffington Post is there, or Buzzfeed is there,

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and we had kind of learned a few tricks along the way.

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One trick was we called self aggregation,

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or what we would in turn joke, we'd call them SEO bombs.

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I'm seeing and nodding.

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Can I ask, have you had this experience in newsrooms you've been in?

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I mean, I have to be the news group that it's been your time to do that.

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We'll get to that in a second.

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So on the right hand side over here,

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God, I wish I could have found the original like screenshots I had from years ago,

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but we had a 22 year old, you know, like junior reporter who was fabulous.

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Max was a great, great reporter.

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But after a couple of days, I said to Marty, you know, the traffic that,

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you know, the audience is coming in, but we're losing the afternoon.

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We've done this trick.

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We've done this like self aggregation, the search bomb,

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where we literally have a file ready.

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We published the story in the morning,

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just like any newspaper would because it had to go in the morning's paper.

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By the afternoon, the algorithms were looking for that fresh story.

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We'd say, you know, we see the aggregators beating us.

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What if we just aggregate ourselves and kind of did something?

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Max earned front stories about Edward Snowden, about the PRISM program,

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were as widely read as the original reporting.

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Now it was a pass through.

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I don't show you the rest of this page,

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which is literally just like a couple sentences and a link to it.

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But we had to contort our product to compete with algorithms

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or to compete on algorithms to get people to our stories,

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which is the story of journalism over the last 10, 15, 20,

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I don't even know how many years to put this thing here.

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This is just my story.

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This is the places I've been at the moments in time.

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The New York Times, which I got to in 2014, at that point in time,

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I got there actually just in time for the first adaption of Snapchat,

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which was like dozens of people working really hard to figure out

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how do we take this Folsom product, 180 stories a day.

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I forgot the number, 27,000 words or so,

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the amount of information that would take it,

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an average human reader, eight and a half hours to get through,

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what should be on Snapchat.

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I actually think the Times, broadly speaking,

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I had really positive experience there of like when we launched the Daily,

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I was involved in that project, but hearing the editors involved saying,

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what should the New York Times sound like, was a great provocation, I think,

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of like, what are we good at in the New York Times?

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We're good at gathering information, we're good at storytelling,

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we're good at like, you know, sourcing,

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but what's the new thing sound for them, right, to turn into a podcast company?

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I think they've been wildly successful at it.

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To show you a less than positive experience I had in this idea

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of transformation product development,

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I was in NPR for the years on the slide over here.

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I found myself for a long time thinking, here I am at NPR,

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and I was seen as like a newspaper guy, which was very funny to me

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to spend these years at the Post and the Times, like Mr. Digital Guy.

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Here I am at the broadcaster being the newspaper guy.

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It took me months to figure out why NPR,

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most people here are familiar with the American, you know,

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public broadcasting system, has a series of amazing radio broadcast programs,

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has a series of amazing podcasts.

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If you go to their website, it's filled with news articles

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that look like newspaper articles.

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They're inverted pyramids that, you know, they have the facts at the top,

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they kind of store it down, roughly 600 words to 1500 words.

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First I didn't think much of it, but as I kind of spent more time

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inside the organization, I thought, this is interesting,

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like, this place has been around for 50 years.

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People write radio scripts.

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Scripts are very different than stories. They're a lot more narrative.

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They kind of have more voice in it.

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And it took me months to kind of understand, they did this

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because they hired newspaper people to make their website for them.

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For that strange reason, NPR.org, Tyler, you're shaking your head,

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because you spent time there as well, right?

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The amount of time you spent in this place thinking,

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why did these people whose genius is getting information,

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whose genius is storytelling, and NPR specifically,

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their genius is audio storytelling.

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They can kind of find sound that is wrestling in the background,

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and the right voice is that kind of in combination.

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Like, to take from Aaron's amazing presentation she just gave,

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what's the register of conveying information?

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NPR, from an audio perspective, right? Legendary.

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Why were they making newspaper articles on websites?

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You know, it's confusing me, so it's been a couple years saying,

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why can't these radio scripts, which are very narrative,

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turn into live blogs, which was my great challenge there.

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Eventually we did it, which was amazing.

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But again, so much retrofitting, so much of like,

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what is this institution doing in the first place

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towards where it could kind of go afterwards.

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And so that's my experience in those different places.

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I mean, the real big takeaway is whatever publisher I was at

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or other people may have been at certain points in time,

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we're looking at 20 plus years of these institutions

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being filled with wildly talented people at gathering information,

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at storytelling, constantly trying to figure out

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how to get that information to people through an aggregation era

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that just destroyed them, that destroyed the industry,

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it destroyed so many different disciplines kind of within the industry.

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I could get lost down that part, it's a lot of trauma.

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The one thing I want to convey to this space

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is just to know in the journalism industry, in the media industry,

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that trauma is real.

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The people who raise their hands can all think of the people

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who are not in this room, who are at other conferences

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or trying to do other projects right now,

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who still lament the fact that they can't work on their story

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for X amount of time or that there's not as much love

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of the craft of this or that.

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But the takeaway I hope for this conference kind of going forward

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is the concept of survivors, of the embers,

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of like what's left from this.

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And I want to talk about very specific survivors.

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I have a few more I need to go through this presentation.

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One, Lauren, sitting right over there,

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we'll be up here later to talk a little bit about her journey

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with Local News International, her six month old company, Lauren?

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Is that fair? Yeah.

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Six month old independent journalism company

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that is doing fabulous things and Dave, who's not here,

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is kind of the face of it with those googly eyes.

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And we'll talk a little bit more about Lauren's experience kind of later today.

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I'll say one thing about Lauren's experience,

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this is a chart I'm very happy to show off here.

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Lauren, Dave and Micah, the three co-founders of Illinois,

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who were there six months ago,

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who were in broad strokes, Dave is the face of the TikTok channel.

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He's known as Washington Post TikTok guy,

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he's kind of like his nickname, his persona.

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There's a YouTube channel.

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This is one look at a competitive kind of benchmarking

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of what happened to the Washington Post's YouTube channels.

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You can kind of see the things doing their things.

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You can tell when Dave left, you can see what Dave built,

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and you can see what happened here, right?

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Which is the audience went with him.

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Like before platforms, there was a need for institutions

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to be the platform, to be the distribution mechanism.

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There are these slides that I've used in other contexts.

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Like I have a 12-year-old and a 10-year-old at home.

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I've gone to a couple of career days where I've tried to explain

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I'm a journalist, I'm an audience development journalist.

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Let me explain to you middle schoolers and elementary school kids

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what that means.

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To talk to Gen Alpha kids about what it means to work in a newspaper,

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I've used slides like this to say this is what a newspaper is.

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And everyone agrees.

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One of the things I've loved Dave for so many years is he's lean.

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This is why she was a TikTok guy.

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He'll use the newspaper emoji to convey what he is.

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The emoji actually does the work of explaining what this artifact was

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pre-internet in a certain way.

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And this is a slide I love showing the kids

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because it's something we've talked about in newsrooms for a generation now.

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For so long, you're going to train and train looked like this.

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And at a certain point in time, you're going to train and it looked like this.

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When I was at the New York Times, you used to talk about the breakfast table dynamic.

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Did you ever talk about that in your travels?

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Because for generations and generations, people would go to breakfast tables

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and what would they see in front of them

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versus what would they see in front of them now?

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Or was it the times just as we were putting the paywall up and figuring out

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that breakfast table dynamic is going away

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and we have to grab that brand equity.

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And I think the Times has done an amazing job of doing exactly that,

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grabbing that brand equity because now there is no more breakfast table like that.

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And so the takeaway I hope from the heart of the spiel is just that

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the individual journalists, those are the atomic units creating information.

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And Erin's talk, I think, again, beautifully lays out there of like,

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who are these nodes and networks to kind of move onto a protocol in kind of a certain way.

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It's not just aspirational. It's not just anecdotal.

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This is research that Reuters has been working towards for a few years

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and the last few months kind of continuing, kind of sharpening the version of displaying this.

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The thing to look at here is the purple and the blue and the ages, right?

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Who do younger audiences trust?

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Do they know to trust the brand or the brand, the individual behind it?

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The atomic unit is the individual behind it.

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And so I'm eager to tell a couple stories about individuals who are creating great journalism on the internet.

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Yeah, you're a Casey fan?

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I was thinking Casey the whole time.

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Casey's got a really good case study here.

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He's an amazing case study. I mean, can I ask, why were you thinking of him?

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Well, so I work in the artificial intelligence industry,

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and we're in kind of a more very huge issue thing,

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and really systematically in question.

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But like the way that like, it's kind of like then out of reach,

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almost it seems in my mind, it's like the way that like a community of us functions.

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And Casey is our guy.

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So like, you're a platformer.

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I read platformer.

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Yeah.

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It's an art work.

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It's cool.

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Like, you know, I taught him on market sequence.

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He's huge.

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He's a tall man. Yeah.

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Very tall.

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Very kind man too.

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Very tall kind man. Yes. Yeah.

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But he's probably the best example of what you're describing.

330
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Yeah.

331
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He's about Casey as part of the version.

332
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Exactly.

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So Casey, did you start following Casey's work when he was at the Verge as a reporter?

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Yeah.

335
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So you knew him from there, right?

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Casey is amazing.

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I mean, we could spend hours talking about Casey and I would in other contexts.

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The takeaways for his conference, hopefully are Casey's an individual human reporter, right?

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He was at an institution five years ago.

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He very thoughtfully, I had to borrow a phrase from that time, decoupled from the Verge

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for the first year or two of platformer.

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I think even still, he made a gap for a little while.

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He licensed back.

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So Casey is now a publisher on Ghost at this point in time.

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He had a sub-stack journey, which we won't get lost on that one.

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But he has moved platforms multiple times and his audience follows him.

347
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Now he is one of one, right?

348
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I believe he might be the best living journalist alive.

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I just think what he's doing is so important and his ability to run a business.

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I think Casey's amazing in a million different ways.

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For this room, I almost took a mastodon screenshot.

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I didn't know if that would be on Kuth or not.

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There was a protocol conference, right?

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All open interoperability and we're bridging in every direction.

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Around late December, early January, there was a very special episode of Hard Fork and Search Engine

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where they launched the Forkaverse as a mastodon instance.

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I was taking a walk listening.

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My mind's been going towards protocol.

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I just had met Ted and Chad like weeks earlier.

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I'm kind of reading up on things.

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And to hear them say like, fuck it, we're doing to do it.

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We're going to move people to an instance.

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And tell this very special episode of buying the server space.

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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.

365
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You go to the instance.

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We're watching like the Pied Piper dynamic of what does it mean for a journalist to take their audience with them

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to a protocol base.

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Like Casey is that example for sure.

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But there's so many other amazing examples.

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I mean, again, I'm going to be a little mindful of time.

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I'm coming back up here later with Lauren.

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And it's going to be so interesting.

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I think they hear Lauren's story about running a business.

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What does it mean to run a business?

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What does she need to run a business?

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What does it mean to find audience?

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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?

378
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Does anybody here know Kyla Scanlon?

379
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I love that, you know, she's amazing.

380
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She is, she's a phenom.

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I mean, I don't, you know, she is a younger journalist, I'll just say.

382
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I think she is very early career-ish.

383
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But in a certain amount of years, my God, she is everywhere and she's good at everywhere.

384
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Like this quote that I found of hers on the Substac note captures some of her genius in a certain way.

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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.

386
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She has a new essay on her Substac, which is between some of her New York Times pieces.

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Modern journalism, there are these individuals.

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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.

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Like she is just extraordinary.

390
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But there are so many folks like this out there.

391
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So I am the one of the three co-founders of the journalism atlas.com or journalism atlas.com, the independent journalism atlas.

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We launched six, seven weeks ago.

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We're still figuring ourselves out in a lot of ways.

394
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The thing we know we're doing is we are making a list of good independent journalism.

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There's lots of amazing journals in the world.

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There's lots of amazing institutions that need your support as well.

397
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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.

398
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The internet for a long time has allowed people to publish in certain ways.

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But at this moment in the timeline, there's so much important independent journalism.

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There's so many people moving from institutions to independence.

401
00:24:05.000 --> 00:24:10.000
There's so many people who are independent who can kind of like robustly armor up themselves into businesses.

402
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There is a live moment in this ecosystem.

403
00:24:12.000 --> 00:24:14.000
So these are two screenshots of our product right now.

404
00:24:14.000 --> 00:24:15.000
Our product is a prototype.

405
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We are just trying to kind of get in the market and show people how much great independent journalism this is.

406
00:24:20.000 --> 00:24:27.000
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.

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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.

408
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The idea of federated media is happening and it has been happening.

409
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Just it doesn't have that word.

410
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And so, you know, I think that's a really important thing.

411
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I think that's a really important thing.

412
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And I think that's a really important thing.

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The idea of a poly platform strategy.

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To survive.

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You know, their version of being the kelp.

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Is like their fronds.

417
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Have to show up in a few different places.

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While they figure out.

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Kind of where the anchor space is going to be.

420
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You know, there's this amazing reporter.

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Marisa.

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Cap.

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Has anybody here.

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If you guys are on.

425
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Bluesky.

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I love the hands.

427
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Amazing.

428
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That's amazing.

429
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the hands. Amazing, amazing, amazing. Marisa again could spend hours talking

430
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about just her as a use case, another amazing use case of an independent

431
00:25:47.000 --> 00:25:51.440
journalist. So this quote that's up here is from an Associated Press story about

432
00:25:51.440 --> 00:25:56.640
her maybe a month or two into a Trump 2 administration. So Marisa had this great

433
00:25:56.640 --> 00:26:01.620
scoop, she publishes it out, you know it's an amazing story, right, like a woman in

434
00:26:01.620 --> 00:26:04.200
Brooklyn who is a great independent reporter who gets access to this and

435
00:26:04.200 --> 00:26:07.600
kind of off she goes. And this quote is just amazing, her stomach was not, the fact

436
00:26:07.600 --> 00:26:10.360
that like she was like living through this thing of like I'm in this apartment,

437
00:26:10.360 --> 00:26:13.960
I have this information, there is no legal team behind me, there is no

438
00:26:13.960 --> 00:26:17.160
institution, like she just kind of had to do it and she did it and you know and

439
00:26:17.160 --> 00:26:20.180
actually this had this screenshot over here, that's not the scoop from a year

440
00:26:20.180 --> 00:26:23.200
ago, that's another scoop she had a month ago or so. She has now turned into like in

441
00:26:23.200 --> 00:26:27.040
a great another case study to think about in this room at this convening. You

442
00:26:27.040 --> 00:26:30.480
this is probably the most prominent scoop machine journalist active on Blue

443
00:26:30.480 --> 00:26:34.660
Sky. I don't know that I would put another name out there and she's building this

444
00:26:34.660 --> 00:26:38.180
kind of business primarily off Bluesky. Like it's you know now she she's

445
00:26:38.180 --> 00:26:42.380
building her monetization off of Beyive or her newsletter is, but the fact that

446
00:26:42.380 --> 00:26:46.440
she has kind of done what she's done in this ecosystem with these communities, her

447
00:26:46.440 --> 00:26:50.540
funnel is Bluesky to Beyive right now and she's able to do stuff like this to

448
00:26:50.540 --> 00:26:53.820
move her subscriber count up, which gives her a business, which gives her a livelihood,

449
00:26:53.820 --> 00:26:56.860
which allows her to kind of keep creating journalism. And I hope this room

450
00:26:56.860 --> 00:27:00.820
as community can think about Marisa as a very tangible example right now, not just

451
00:27:00.820 --> 00:27:05.020
because of her, because what's being built around her in a certain way. So this

452
00:27:05.020 --> 00:27:09.620
is a product that just launched three or four days ago. Has anybody seen this news

453
00:27:09.620 --> 00:27:18.500
of Trust Fund? Amazing. So Michael Jar Jar is a media executive. He was at the

454
00:27:18.500 --> 00:27:22.380
FT for a while I know. He's been kind of ruminating on this for a few months. We've

455
00:27:22.380 --> 00:27:24.540
been in touch with him from the independent journalism Atlas. We were in

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00:27:24.540 --> 00:27:28.140
touch with him a few months ago as he was starting. We consider him a very big

457
00:27:28.140 --> 00:27:31.020
fellow traveler. He gave us a heads up a week or two ago and said, hey, it's

458
00:27:31.020 --> 00:27:34.620
getting kind of real here and thank you for launching as I build my tech stack.

459
00:27:34.620 --> 00:27:38.300
It's been nice to have your database like publicly out there. I ingested it

460
00:27:38.300 --> 00:27:41.980
and I figured out affinity scores like I'm helping add towards my like

461
00:27:41.980 --> 00:27:46.020
subscription bundle creating tool. What his tool is, is it's a little smaller

462
00:27:46.020 --> 00:27:49.700
here, is he's allowing independent journalists to sign up. If they're on

463
00:27:49.700 --> 00:27:54.100
Beyive or sub stack, he kind of has that handshake kind of figured out. And if

464
00:27:54.100 --> 00:27:58.140
you're at Beyive or sub stack, you can sign on with his platform. If you're an

465
00:27:58.140 --> 00:28:01.340
independent publisher of newsletters, you can find other people like you and or

466
00:28:01.340 --> 00:28:04.060
you can go on and be like these are the two or three I want to work with. And the

467
00:28:04.060 --> 00:28:06.820
screenshot kind of shows how if you're an independent publisher you can say

468
00:28:06.820 --> 00:28:10.340
we're a bundle now. We'll all be a little cheaper if you buy our bigger bundle.

469
00:28:10.340 --> 00:28:14.140
Which solves for a problem I think people have seen for a long time of like

470
00:28:14.140 --> 00:28:17.080
well I understood paying for the one bundle over there. Now there's like 75

471
00:28:17.080 --> 00:28:20.740
independence. I love Casey. I love Marisa. How many independent subscriptions I

472
00:28:20.740 --> 00:28:23.900
manage over here. So I think Michael is in a great direction. Doing this thing

473
00:28:23.900 --> 00:28:27.260
now. He's off protocol. He's building the software in a different way. But an

474
00:28:27.260 --> 00:28:29.460
amazing example to bring here because he's building with somebody who is on

475
00:28:29.460 --> 00:28:34.220
protocol. And you know the idea of like who's wearing what they're doing is the

476
00:28:34.220 --> 00:28:37.540
the guts of what I'd love to work on here like in these next couple days. This

477
00:28:37.540 --> 00:28:40.220
is another visualization of like what we're building at the Atlas. Again we're

478
00:28:40.220 --> 00:28:44.700
all prototypes at this point. We are you know showing our you know our laundry

479
00:28:44.700 --> 00:28:50.100
over here. Like I, all three of us are not technical to you know lightly kind of

480
00:28:50.100 --> 00:28:53.780
say something here. 15 years ago or so when I was a fact check that org in the

481
00:28:53.780 --> 00:28:57.660
beginning of my career as a fact check reporter in 2006 7 8 at one point in

482
00:28:57.660 --> 00:29:01.020
time I said we need a new website. I downloaded some WordPress software. I

483
00:29:01.020 --> 00:29:05.620
watched some YouTube videos. I FTP'd up some stuff. I dreamweaver was truly how I

484
00:29:05.620 --> 00:29:09.460
learned how to internet. And then I end up these cool jobs right. It wasn't my job

485
00:29:09.460 --> 00:29:12.700
to build anymore. I just hopefully was a good enough colleague to the Tyler's of

486
00:29:12.700 --> 00:29:16.340
the world and saying like hey I think this can we build that. So to kind of

487
00:29:16.340 --> 00:29:19.700
come back to a like Claude cursor powered world and kind of build these

488
00:29:19.700 --> 00:29:24.260
tools. We're prototyping in real time but our actual idea and work we think is

489
00:29:24.260 --> 00:29:27.620
the curation. Is the finding of the journal server here. And so this is just

490
00:29:27.620 --> 00:29:31.900
another like array visualization of like at this point we have 1165 people

491
00:29:31.900 --> 00:29:35.980
publicly on the website. And we're kind of showing here's the you know where

492
00:29:35.980 --> 00:29:38.340
they're living. They're on these platforms not on these platforms. They're

493
00:29:38.340 --> 00:29:41.900
publishing this kind of content. We have like I'm kind of showing a little

494
00:29:41.900 --> 00:29:44.900
something on this slide of like we have thousands more who are kind of like in a

495
00:29:44.900 --> 00:29:48.500
catalog. We're just not in a rush to keep publishing everything immediately. We're

496
00:29:48.500 --> 00:29:51.860
trying to figure out like how to thoughtfully do it. Should we be launching

497
00:29:51.860 --> 00:29:55.260
in more cities or should we doing more globally. Should we doing this platform

498
00:29:55.260 --> 00:29:59.260
versus that platform. Should we work with a certain platform partner who as we

499
00:29:59.260 --> 00:30:02.580
publish will try to get more visibility for them on other platforms or figure

500
00:30:02.580 --> 00:30:05.980
out their monetization hooks. And we are very live kind of in those conversations

501
00:30:05.980 --> 00:30:09.780
right now. These are roughly the three groups we're talking to. Trying to figure

502
00:30:09.780 --> 00:30:14.740
out like between philanthropy publishers and platforms. There's intermediation to

503
00:30:14.740 --> 00:30:19.700
do on behalf of creators as cohorts. Some were very actively have a couple dozen

504
00:30:19.700 --> 00:30:22.420
let's say creators who want to work with a certain publisher in a certain way or

505
00:30:22.420 --> 00:30:25.900
work with a platform in a certain way. Some as we're kind of doing BD almost like

506
00:30:25.900 --> 00:30:30.860
is a ghost like entity to say well if we did something like this platform X or

507
00:30:30.860 --> 00:30:33.620
publisher why could you work with people in a way. We are kind of really just

508
00:30:33.620 --> 00:30:36.620
trying to like conceptually kind of proof of concept thing over here. And we're

509
00:30:36.620 --> 00:30:40.180
looking for anyone else like Michael a fellow traveler who wants to build who

510
00:30:40.180 --> 00:30:44.060
wants to fund who wants to operate this kind of more like multimodal network

511
00:30:44.060 --> 00:30:48.020
node kind of existence. This is I guess the best expression I think of what we

512
00:30:48.020 --> 00:30:50.900
are in this space. I think we're a lot of things in a lot of different rooms but

513
00:30:50.900 --> 00:30:55.300
to this room to this conference where I think our project offers is that we're

514
00:30:55.300 --> 00:31:00.420
committed to making a long long list in database. We have a thousand you know

515
00:31:00.420 --> 00:31:04.900
plus already we see the path three four five thousand frankly. As time goes on as

516
00:31:04.900 --> 00:31:08.420
I understand what we're able to do with software and with like the seeds of our

517
00:31:08.420 --> 00:31:11.820
curation. If we imagine a world where we can actually go around the globe look

518
00:31:11.820 --> 00:31:15.580
across all platforms as they are today I think there are hundreds of thousands

519
00:31:15.580 --> 00:31:19.620
of high-quality I'll call them journalism creators but not journalists

520
00:31:19.620 --> 00:31:23.420
necessarily. My co-founder Ryan when he was at Neiman he did some work in thinking

521
00:31:23.420 --> 00:31:26.460
this through and said you know as I look around there's too many people who don't

522
00:31:26.460 --> 00:31:30.380
identify as journalists but they're doing journalism and so last year for

523
00:31:30.380 --> 00:31:34.500
Neiman Lab he wrote a thoughtful piece it's journalism not journalists. We are

524
00:31:34.500 --> 00:31:37.860
following that kind of like conceptual framework over here so this is some

525
00:31:37.860 --> 00:31:40.860
language that we spent some time thinking through. And as we go through

526
00:31:40.980 --> 00:31:43.820
our database has some things that are hiding in plain sight like Joe Rogan's

527
00:31:43.820 --> 00:31:47.540
on there. I think I don't say it's provocative but we do want to say that

528
00:31:47.540 --> 00:31:50.380
if people are going to interview people newsmakers and put the information on

529
00:31:50.380 --> 00:31:54.580
display just like Barbara Walters Oprah you know the the hot wings get like I

530
00:31:54.580 --> 00:31:57.380
don't know if hot ones is on our list or not but I would put them on there. People

531
00:31:57.380 --> 00:32:01.180
who are giving a platform to information of people who can influence other

532
00:32:01.180 --> 00:32:04.860
people's lives is journalism of a certain stripe. The language we love the

533
00:32:04.860 --> 00:32:07.500
most that's been the most helpful to us when there's been edge cases we're kind

534
00:32:07.500 --> 00:32:12.260
of curious what we're doing is the word missional which is hiding in that first

535
00:32:12.260 --> 00:32:16.380
paragraph. It's missional work that advances information and understanding

536
00:32:16.380 --> 00:32:20.340
for a community. Hearing Aaron speak a second ago again I get chills just

537
00:32:20.340 --> 00:32:23.460
thinking about it again that's the community we want to be in we love

538
00:32:23.460 --> 00:32:27.660
journalism we love the tradecraft I've spent my career in newsrooms loving the

539
00:32:27.660 --> 00:32:29.980
stories about like what happened when you know I lived through the Edward

540
00:32:29.980 --> 00:32:32.620
Snowden stuff but to be in the newsrooms where the pending on papers happened or

541
00:32:32.620 --> 00:32:37.140
the deep throat stuff like to hear these stories is amazing but at this moment in

542
00:32:37.140 --> 00:32:39.940
time with the timeline we're going forward in we really think about the

543
00:32:39.940 --> 00:32:42.900
people doing it they like Marisa sitting at that kitchen table and how does she

544
00:32:42.900 --> 00:32:46.180
get source information how does she get validation how she get monetization kind

545
00:32:46.180 --> 00:32:48.580
of against her in a certain way so these are the folks we're talking to you

546
00:32:48.580 --> 00:32:51.500
here's another kind of shot of like a prototyping thing we're kind of building

547
00:32:51.500 --> 00:32:54.580
out we have dozens of these things I'm just saying well we have the data as is

548
00:32:54.580 --> 00:32:57.940
publicly we have more data behind the scenes anyone here who wants to talk

549
00:32:57.940 --> 00:33:03.260
about by geo by topic by platform we have 18 columns of like metadata we're

550
00:33:03.260 --> 00:33:06.740
kind of cultivating behind the scenes we are thrilled to work with anybody and we

551
00:33:06.740 --> 00:33:09.660
also have active communities that we can go query and ask them qualitative

552
00:33:09.660 --> 00:33:12.900
questions how are you making money who's the third person you would hire what tax

553
00:33:12.900 --> 00:33:15.980
deck would you want in a certain way we are very eager to build in public

554
00:33:15.980 --> 00:33:19.620
alongside people and just keep building prototypes and other I mean we've kind

555
00:33:19.620 --> 00:33:22.740
of figured out in the end and I think I have this on this slide kind of what we

556
00:33:22.740 --> 00:33:26.180
are we are figuring out our product market fit where we've kind of gone seven

557
00:33:26.180 --> 00:33:29.140
weeks in as we were losing real clearly we do think there's a B2C thing here

558
00:33:29.140 --> 00:33:32.020
like people should hopefully find this thing and if you individually want to

559
00:33:32.020 --> 00:33:35.500
find great creators amazing but the real value we have is our relationships

560
00:33:35.500 --> 00:33:40.100
institutions we're looking to figure out this B2B thing of like any entity

561
00:33:40.100 --> 00:33:43.380
whether you are a startup or a long-running institution whatever your

562
00:33:43.380 --> 00:33:45.980
modernization hooks are if you need access to high quality information

563
00:33:45.980 --> 00:33:48.220
those are the people who want to talk to and if you're building that direction we

564
00:33:48.220 --> 00:33:53.540
want to talk alongside you as well and I kind of want to land on this to say like

565
00:33:53.540 --> 00:33:57.980
you know actually I kind of grabbed it when I was in the room I put this there I

566
00:33:57.980 --> 00:34:01.300
just was sitting gobsmacked with Aaron's elegance and just thought well if we

567
00:34:01.300 --> 00:34:04.900
need to you know anchor networks and humans this was the slide I built was my

568
00:34:04.900 --> 00:34:08.540
version of that like the community I come from of independent journalists and

569
00:34:08.540 --> 00:34:11.380
creators of people constructing journals and people who wouldn't even know they're

570
00:34:11.380 --> 00:34:14.180
in my community we're doing it but I want champion them these are the three

571
00:34:14.180 --> 00:34:17.380
things they need and so anything we can do in these next couple days to figure

572
00:34:17.380 --> 00:34:21.260
out the audience portability question the discoverability coordination

573
00:34:21.260 --> 00:34:25.140
questions and the questions of community management and monetization tools Kevin

574
00:34:25.140 --> 00:34:29.660
Kelly's thousand true fans wired essay rings deeply in this community we'd love

575
00:34:29.660 --> 00:34:32.780
to talk and kind of meet community with you guys as well about that so I'll just

576
00:34:32.780 --> 00:34:37.180
end with this and say it like you know I've been saying this to Jen and Tessa

577
00:34:37.180 --> 00:34:41.700
kind of came online here I can't believe how structurally aligned the work and

578
00:34:41.700 --> 00:34:47.020
mission of journalism is to protocol based thinking our institutions have

579
00:34:47.020 --> 00:34:50.740
just been turned into what they've turned into journalists are finding a

580
00:34:50.740 --> 00:34:55.740
way through networks and nodes I'm just like tickled with the concept of the

581
00:34:55.740 --> 00:34:58.740
people who are doing the deep-seated work on what the software means to build in

582
00:34:58.740 --> 00:35:01.940
that direction how aligned is with the humans creating the journalism are that's

583
00:35:01.980 --> 00:35:11.340
what let's talk about here I was like right bang on time awesome thank you

584
00:35:11.340 --> 00:35:16.780
Justin Justin is around the conference and he's looking to connect with folks

585
00:35:16.780 --> 00:35:19.500
so please connect with him if you want to talk more about this stuff we're

586
00:35:19.500 --> 00:35:22.940
gonna just swap out our setup here we're running of course 10-15 minutes behind

587
00:35:22.940 --> 00:35:27.220
but hey it's atmosphere conference it's the same last year this is this is

588
00:35:27.220 --> 00:35:32.700
beginning to be a tradition all right so Natalie come on up and get connected

589
00:35:32.700 --> 00:35:35.020
here