Welcome uh to the first track of well, the first session of this track uh today. My name is Chad Kohalyk, I come from Protocols for Publishers, which you might have heard of. Uh I'm not gonna spend a bunch of time introducing people, we're gonna get right into the talks as fast as possible. But I just wanted to take a quick temperature check of the room to find out who here uh works in media and journalism. All right, and so it is everybody else uh mostly tech like technology folks, I'm assuming. Yes. Okay, excellent. That's just good, so we can kind of temper the the commentary for the room.
Uh today in this room, basically for the rest of the day, this is the media and civics track. Uh, we're gonna concentrate for these next few sessions this morning on creators. Uh so there's many different sessions back to back. Uh I hope you stick around. Um but first I'm gonna be turning it over to our first speaker, Justin Bank. Thanks so much, Chad. Cool, good morning. Um, can everyone hear me? Okay. Cool. Thank you. Um was everyone in that room for Erin's uh presentation of that essay that was wildly inspiring. Um I am so thankful to be here.
I am gonna try to um flow behind her elegance. This is gonna be a very different kind of talk. We're gonna kind of get a little more to the nitty-gritty. Um so I have a presentation that I'm gonna walk through. Uh I am a native New Yorker, I can speak very quickly. I will try to be mindful of that and slow down my register to borrow a phrase, but I will also speed up to kind of get to certain points. Um I'm gonna just aggressively ask anyone here to stop me, pause me, ask me to go deeper.
We're on a Saturday. Like, you know, it's wonderful to be at a convening like this, and I felt this energy. I was fortunate to be here yesterday with some groups and the day before. I'm here to follow the band aid of let's build, let's do things. So if people have questions or things to dial into, this presentation is kind of meant to be a bit of like a push this down a little bit so that's can you get oh there you go. Better, yes. So my goal here is to kind of present what I know from the field of journalism and hopefully kind of offer it up to folks from the worlds of technology of product of anyone else who might be your governance, um, but hopefully kind of get towards building things together more than anything else.
So uh 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 at in Miami at the Night Media Forum. Uh these are my two co-founders, uh Ryan Kellett 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. Um, I was in charge of something called audience development. Can I ask anybody in the room, has everybody heard the phrase audience development before? Cool, and it's so funny that it dovetails with journalism.
So those of us who worked in the field of journalism in the last 10, 15 years, I was very fortunate to be at the Washington Post 15 years ago when we kind of started doing this kind of stuff and eventually goes through the whole industry of like saying, well, you know, like we make journalism. We know every day we make the news, we publish it out, we broadcast it out. What does it mean to actually get people's attention? For years, people were able to publish things and the distribution mechanism, whether it was a you know physical relic that was put on people's doorsteps or delivered in their mailboxes, or it was broadcast across spectrum in a matter of ways, you kind of could just presume well out it goes, someone's kind of figure it out.
For the people constructing the news inside the the newsrooms, whether they are reporters kind of working in a city, a newsroom, or whether they are foreign correspondent filing dispatches, to think about what it means for them to gather the information and then get it out to folks kind of in that product sense was a wildly new idea 15 years ago. And so 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 wrote for a product called Celebritology. And so she would every day put out five, seven, twelve blog posts about whatever's kind of going in celebratology world. It was that version of internet. Uh Ryan and I were on the first version of an audience team at a newsroom. Fast forward to today, uh, all three of us spent 20 years working these places. You know, our bios are kind of on there. I'll just say, you know, 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 like a mouse and butter churned herself to this amazing community of people who are independent journalism creators, building their own products, building their own business models, solopreneurs, small teams.
It's an amazing kind of community of folks. That's Liz's work kind of primarily. Ryan uh recently finished out a Neiman fellowship at Harvard studying creator economy, getting very kind of academic about it, um, 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. Um I was recently the managing editor at the Washington Post, actually with my friend and colleague Lauren Sachs, who's here, who will be uh later to speak, um, working on video strategy, design strategy, visuals written large for the newsroom, um, as well as audience strategy, which is kind of more of my background.
And that background kind of took me to some interesting places at moments in time. Um I mean, 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 a different way to kind of say it as well. The real takeaway, hopefully is that word audience on that screen, which kind of just captures like what my role has been for across 20 years at 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 kind of doing stuff more from like the marketing side of things. And when I joined, um, it was amazing, kind of like learning as I went to be like, okay, you know, I have this job, I kind of you know 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, uh uh a government-placed whistleblower, you know, has this information, breaks it out. It's you know one of the most seminal stories of our lifetimes that you know this person with bravery and a lot of other 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. Um 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. This, you know, if you see a bunch of sport 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 like rapidity for a couple days, you're thinking, okay, like something's kind of kind of happened 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 move 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 to will another person give us more information, and 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 guardians 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 what we called self-aggregation, or what we would internally joke is we'd call them SEO bombs. I'm seeing a nodding. Can I ask, have you had this experience in newsrooms you've been in? I mean, I have even a newsroom. 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 a 22-year-old, you know, like junior uh reporter who was fabulous.
Max was a great, great reporter. But after a couple days, I said to Marty, you know, the the traffic that you know, the audience is coming in, but we're losing the afternoon. We've done this this trick, we've done this like self-aggregation, this search bomb, where we literally have a file ready to go. We file 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, there's uh the algorithms are 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 Earnfront's stories about um about Edward Snowden about the Prism uh uh program were as widely read as the original reporting. Now it was a pass through. And I'll 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, you know, I don't even know how many years to you know put this thing in here.
This is just my story. This is the places I've been, 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 adaptation 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 an average human reader, eight and a half hours to kind of 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 like what are we good at the New York Times? We're good at gathering information, we're good at storytelling, we're good at like you know, uh sourcing. But what's the new thing's 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 uh positive experience I had in this idea of transformation product development. I was an NPR for the years on the slide over here.
I found myself for a long time thinking here I am an 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 as like Mr. Digital guy. Here I am at the broadcaster being the newspaper guy. And it took me months to figure out why. NPR, most people here are familiar with the uh the American uh you know public broadcasting system has a series of amazing uh uh 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, the kind of story goes 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 um audio storytelling. They can kind of find find sound that rustling in the background and the right voices that kind of in combination, like to take from Aaron's amazing uh 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 I spent a couple of 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 could it 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 kinds of disciplines kind of within the industry. I could get lost down that part, it's a lot of trauma. But 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 could 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 through this presentation. One, Lauren, sitting right over there, uh, will be up here later to kind of 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. Um I'll say one thing about Lauren's experience. This is a chart I'm very happy to show off here. Um Lauren, Dave and Micah, the three co-founders of L and I leave the Washington Post six months ago or so, where in broad strokes, they 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. They also have YouTube channel. This is one look at uh 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 um the audience went with him. Like before platforms, there was a need for institutions to be the platform, to be the distribution mechanism. Um, there are these slides that I've used in other contexts. Like I've uh I have a 12-year-old and a 10-year-old at home. I've gone to a couple 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 reasons I've loved Dave for so many years is he's leaned into this is Washington's TikTok guy, he'll use the newspaper emoji to convey kind of what he is. That you know, 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, is like for so long you go on train and train look like this, and at a certain point in time you want 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? The concept was that for generations and generations, people would go to breakfast tables and what would they see in front of them versus what they see in front of them now? Or is 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 you know this is there is no more breakfast table like that.
And so, you know, the takeaway I hope from the spiel part of the spiel is just that the individual journalists, those are the atomic units creating information. And Aaron's talk, I think, again, beautifully lays out there of like who are these nodes and networks to kind of move on to a protocol in kind of a certain way. Um it's not just aspirational, it's not just anecdotal. This is research that Reuters has been working towards for a few years in the last few months, kind of continually 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 that or is 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. He's the only really good case study here. He's an amazing case study. I mean, can I ask why were you thinking of him? So I work in artificial television industry. And we're in like kind of a very new thing.
Really systematic. Like the way that like it's kind of like been out of the almost seems in my mind as like kind of like a wave of like a media. And Casey is our guy. So you you read platformer. I read platform, hardcore. Cool. Like, you know, I saw him on market three once. He's huge. It's a tall man. Yeah. Very tall. Very kind man, too. Very tall, kind man. Yes. Yeah. But he's he's probably the best example, like what you're describing about Casey. Exactly. And so Casey did have did you start uh following Casey's work when he was at the verge as a reporter?
Yeah, so you knew him from there, right? Casey is amazing in a mil I mean we could spend hours talking about Casey, and I would in other contexts. The takeaways for this conference, hopefully, are Casey's an individual human reporter, right? He was at an institution five years ago. He very thoughtfully had to borrow a phrase from that time, decoupled from the verge. For the first year or two of platform, I mean, I think even still he, you know, maybe there's 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 Substack journey, which we won't get lost down that one. But he has moved platforms multiple times and his audience follows him. Now he is, you know, one of one, right? Like I believe he might be the best living journalist alive. You know, I just think what he's doing is so important in his ability to run a business. I think Casey's amazing in a million different ways. For this room, I you know, I I almost took a Mastodon screenshot. I didn't know if that would be uncouth or not. Um there was an uh protocol conference, right?
All open interoperability and we're bridging in every direction. Uh around uh late December, early January, there was a very special episode of Hard Fork and Search Engine where they launched the Forkiverse as a Mastodon instance. I was taking a walk listening, you know, my mind's me going towards protocol. I just had met Ted and uh um and uh uh Chad like uh weeks earlier at this point, like I'm kind of reading up on things and to hear them say like fuck it, we're doing a do it, we're gonna move people to an instance and you know tell this very special episode of buying the server space, and then to go online and be on a number 100 and then to watch in the weeks go by 10,000, 12,000, 15,000 people go to the instance.
We are watching like the Pied Piper dynamic of what does it mean for a journalist to take their audience with them to a protocol based like Casey is that example for sure. But there's so many other amazing examples. I mean, I again you know I'm gonna be a little mindful of time and I'm coming back up here later with Lauren and it's gonna be so interesting. I think to 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 do journalism on the internet today without all the legacy stuff of the newspapers and the radio and all that.
Is anybody here know Kyla Scanlon? I love the you know, she's amazing. She is she's a phenom. I mean, I don't you know I 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 a Substack note captures some of her genius in a certain way. On the right, I knew 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 substack, which is between some of our New York Times pieces. Modern journalism or 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 uh 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. Uh there's lots of amazing journalism 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 AM radio and all sorts of other places. The internet for a long time hasn't 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. And 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 topic-based that kind of also shows you platforms as well. The takeaway that you know, it's probably the number one thing I want 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 protocol's 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. Kyla and Casey and Lauren and the team at LNI, they are building federated networks. They are making choices to publish a little bit more on YouTube, a little bit less on TikTok. Kyle is making choices to be ever present everywhere. Casey's making very specific choices to be with certain newsletter publishers he believes in and to build partnerships with the New York Times for a podcast or to license back to the verge. They are federating all these different ways, but they have this other language.
And the one I'll kind of draw your most attentions to are the idea of not all eggs in one basket. This is the reality that creators are living in right now that I hope anyone building can kind of think about that's where they are is no eggs in every basket. And then I'd ask you to think a little bit about this phrase that I've been banding about the idea of a polyplatform 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.
Um, there's this amazing reporter Marisa Cabis. Is anybody here in this room, if you guys are on Bluesky, I love the hands. Amazing, amazing, amazing. Marisa, I 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 to administration. So Marisa had this great scoop. She publishes it out. Um, 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, right? Her stomach was in 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 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 Bluesky. 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 Beehive 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 beehive 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, but because kind of what's being built around her in a certain way. So this is a product that just launched three or four days ago. Is anybody seen this news of trust fund? Amazing. So Michael uh Jarjar is a um a media executive. He was at the FT for a while, I know. Um 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 uh towards my like you know subscription bundle creating tool. What his tool is is it's a little smaller here. Is he allowing independent journalists to sign up if they're on Beehive or Substack, he kind of has that handshake kind of figured out.
And if you're at Beehive or Substack, you can sign on his platform if you're an independent publisher of newsletters. You can find other people like you, or 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 independents. I love Casey, I love Marisa. How many independent subscriptions should 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 kind of 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 where and 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 uh I all three of us are not technical to you know lightly kind of say something here. Um 15 years ago or so, I when I was at factcheck.org in the beginning of my career as a fact check reporter in 2006, seven, eight. At one point in time, I submitted 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 ended up in these cool jobs where it wasn't my job to build anymore.
I just hopefully was a good enough colleague to the uh tilers 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 real time but our actual idea and work we think is the curation, is the finding of the journalist over here. And so this is just another like array visualization of like at this point we have 1,165 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. Um 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 do it more globally? Should we be doing this platform versus that platform? Should we work with a certain platform partner who as we publish, we'll 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 of dozen, let's say, creators who want to work with a certain publisher in a certain way or work with a platform a certain way. Some is we're kind of doing BD almost like as 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 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, what I think our project offers is that we're gonna we're committed to making a long, long list and database.
We have a thousand, you know, plus already. We we see the path to 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, kind of did some work and 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 kind of hiding in plain sight, like Joe Rogan's on there. I think I don't want to say it's provocative, but we do want to say that if people are going to interview people, newsmakers and put their information on display, just like Barbara Walters Oprah, you know, the um 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 trade craft. 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're willing to think about the people doing it today, like Marisa sitting at that kitchen table, and how does she get source information? How does she get validation, how does she get monetization kind of against her in a certain way. So these are the folks we're talking to. Here's another kind of shot of like a prototyping thing we're kind of building out. We have dozens of these things of just saying, well, well, we have the data as is publicly, and 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 tech stack 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, you know, I think I have this on this slide, kind of what we are.
We are figuring out a product market fit where we've kind of gone seven weeks in is we're realizing 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 is our relationships institutions. We're looking to figure out this B2B thing of like any um entity, whether you are a startup or a long running institution, whatever your monetization hooks are, if you need access to high quality information, those are the people we want to talk to.
And if you're building that direction, we want to talk alongside you as well. Um I kind of want to land on this to say like, you know, uh actually I kind of grabbed it when I was in the room. I put this there, I just was sitting gobsmacked with Erin'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 journalism, people who wouldn't even know they're in my community, but are doing it, but I want to 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 be in community with you guys as well about that. So I'll just end with this and say, like, you know, um, I've been saying this to Chad and Tesla 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 it is with the humans creating the journalism are. And that's what I'd love to talk about here.