Interview with Justin Bank from The Independent Journalism Atlas
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Sure.
I’m a journalist by profession. I started my career as a reporter for the website Factcheck.org a few months before YouTube launched. I was hired at the Washington Post in 2010 as what I believe was the first 'SEO Editor' in American journalism before stints at the New York Times and NPR and a final, brief, return to WaPo as Managing Editor in 2023.
Throughout my job(s), I focused on ensuring our journalism reached audiences and worked on a variety of projects within newsrooms about how to adapt the journalism we created for newspapers and broadcasts to fit on websites, newsletters, home screens, and so many different versions of the social internet from blogs to social networks to this newer social broadcasting era. And since ‘newsroom audience’ work was so cross-functional, I’ve also spent much time working on broader media strategy that like product, revenue, and, of course, growth.
Can you tell us about your project and what led you to launch it?
Inside all of those news organizations, I spent years championing "off-platform" strategies to complement our owned/operated products and coordinate with our marketing funnel to grow subscriptions.
When we launched paywalls while I was at NYT and WaPo over a decade ago, we would have non-subscribers reading up to 20 articles a month before subscribing.
As the desktop/browser driven internet kept evolving towards… where we are now, I went from championing ‘off-platform' strategies to ‘social-native’ storytelling. When I returned to WaPo in 2023, I talked about trying to view social media as “above the funnel,” which is a very traditional legacy publisher way to think.
When I left WaPo in 2024 for a sabbatical to focus on health, I found myself continually following and interacting with more independent journalists and storytellers. At the same time, my co-founders Ryan [Kellett] and Liz [Kelly Nelson] had fellowships studying creator economy and we found ourselves saying the same things and coming to the same conclusions publicly and privately.
We launched a taxonomy of ‘creator journalism’ in early 2025 and a list of The Top 50 creator journalists last summer. By Fall, we kept hearing from contacts inside media organizations, at platform companies and elsewhere asking us: How’d you make this list? How’d you find all these different people?
Cross-platform discovery is an obvious problem. So is quality and standards. So we started working on a database. We bootstrapped a prototype for The Independent Journalist Atlas at Knight Media Forum in early February. We're at 1,100+ creators and counting, organized by beat, geography, format, and the communities they serve.
So this is a journalism project?
For sure. The gravity holding journalism together is shifting. Legacy newsrooms are getting smaller. There are changes to the environment in how the news industry is funded, gathered, and distributed. Trust in institutions is falling as trust in individuals rises.
I’m an optimist and want to follow those signals. We need to support the individuals building this journalism. And there are so many encouraging new models, like Dave Jorgenson using skits and humor to grab your attention through vertical videos and funneling audiences to his thoughtful newsletter essays. He developed his persona and style at WaPo and then felt enough confidence from watching peers like V Sephar and Kara Swisher and went indie.
Back in 2014, when violence began in Ferguson Missouri, Wesley Lowery from the Washington Post was on the ground leading coverage. When the ICE presence in Minnesota turned violent, longtime community independent journalist Georgia Font is leading coverage that gets picked up by national news.
So after two decades of working inside mainstream, legacy publications looking for ways to distribute our journalism, I'm now watching these methods of journalism distribution invert. It’s decentralized to the individual journalist level. And the Atlas is being built to help us chart (and support!) those individual creators.
And is there a larger strategic thinking behind the project?
I've been coming at this from a journalism angle — thinking about what 'poly platform' promiscuity actually means for the creator stack, watching journalism decouple from "journalist" as a job title, tracking what's actually working for local news on Substack, how the
Increasingly, I've been convinced we can all build our own, better internet — that the protocol layer is where this all gets interesting. And, ultimately, that now, more than ever, journalists and technologists are SUPER aligned in building a better information ecosystem together.
Towards that end, I’m super inspired by the ways Ben Werdmuller discusses Archipelagos of trust. Or how Rudy Fraser talked about creators at SXSW last week.
You mentioned you are going to Atmosphere Conference. Why?
I want to understand how what we're building plugs into what you're building. Starter packs for journalists (we're developing a Bluesky inspired prototype here!) Shared identity layers. POSSE-friendly creator profiles.
My talk is titled: “The Aggregation Era burned down journalism institutions. The federated era is emerging from those ashes.” I’m thinking of the ways entrepreneurial independent journalists are building their stacks across YouTube, Beehiiv, Substack, TikTok, Discord, Telegram, etc. That is the practical federated architecture for them to collab and reach audiences.
But could the Atlas be a discovery substrate for atproto-native apps? I have many questions and not enough answers. So that's the posture I'm bringing to Vancouver.
How can people contribute/connect to your project?
Well, we have a submission page! As many names of independent and creator journalists as we can have crowdsourced and socialized helps that cause!
But, for this crowd, I’m particularly hopeful to find partners and collaborators who want to build the tools that can help journalists and creators gather, construct, distribute and monetize their journalism… and foster meaningful community with their audiences, as a throughline across those processes.
Currently The Atlas tracks the Platforms a creator is using. Will the Atlas also track protocol-based publishing in the future?
For sure. This is happening so fast. We literally had a mission statement in December, a prototype in February and now we’re here. We’re driven by the urgency and need for human connectivity and high quality information. Our primary mission is making the lists of the actual humans doing this work and connecting other humans to that work. Protocol-based publishing feels deeply aligned with that mission, so excited to find ways to bridge between worlds, to borrow a phrase.
Protocols for Publishers ✨ will also be at the ATmosphere Conference in Vancouver, BC, March 26th - 29th, participating in the Media and Civics track. Come find us!
This week's links 🔗
💅 Getting noticed by LLMs
Perplexity, one of the first AI companies to introduce them, is backing away from ads with an executive saying “the challenge with ads is that a user would just start doubting everything . . . which is why we don’t see it as a fruitful thing to focus on right now.” https://www.ft.com/content/6eec07a5-34a8-4f78-a9ed-93ab4263d43c
Bain research prepares brands for an AI-mediated future "when people never see your app, your website or your marketing." They advised optimizing for GEO (the AI equivalent of SEO), re-defining brand touchpoints, and the evergreen advice to "imagine new possibilities that couldn’t be achieved before." There are some bits of interest buried in the brief, including one that has come up multiple time at PfP✨: Make identities portable. https://www.bain.com/insights/when-people-never-see-your-app-designing-brands-for-the-agentic-economy/
In just a few minutes Professor Ada Palmer tells the story of how Gutenburg went bankrupt, and his machine was a long-term series of revolutions, framing that for a way to think of how LLMs are an echo of the computer revolution. https://indieweb.social/@wackJackle@norden.social/116200269160312602
🫰 Making AI companies pay
In the UK The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, BBC, and Sky News formed Standards for Publisher Usage Rights (SPUR) to coordinate on shared technical standards and licensing to control how journalistic content is used in training. https://en.ilsole24ore.com/art/publishing-and-the-born-spur-british-publishers-demand-global-rules-and-fair-remuneration-AI5ow1fB
FIPP has set up an AI Working Group and published a survey "to assess the real-world impact and sustainability of publisher licensing deals with AI companies." The survey only takes an estimated 4 minutes. 🤨 https://www.fipp.com/news/fipp-announces-a-trio-of-ai-related-actions-for-its-members/
Stack Overflow saw a massive decline in traffic with the rise of LLMs. It has now implemented CloudFlare's Pay-Per-Crawl, requiring AI bots and search crawlers to pay micro‑fees to access its data. https://stackoverflow.blog/2026/02/19/stack-overflow-cloudflare-pay-per-crawl/
IAB has launched a public comment on its proposed CoMP (Content Monetization Protocols) Initiative, which defines infrastructure for compensating publishers like pay-per-crawl, pooled compensation models, and compensation tied to a piece of content's contribution to AI output (see next item below). The pubic comment lasts until April 9. https://iabtechlab.com/standards/comp-content-monetization-protocols-initiative/
All content is not equal. What is the value of this content versus that content? “Pay by demonstrated value” (or pay-per-value for short) competes against pay-per-crawl, pay-per-query, and flat-fee-lump-sum-content-licensing. But… it's complicated. https://digiday.com/media/wtf-is-pay-per-demonstrated-value-in-ai-content-licensing/
Microsoft thinks they have this figured out with the release of their new Publisher Content Marketplace last month where they claim "publishers will be paid on delivered value." They have worked with The AP, Business Insider Inc, Condé Nast, Hearst, People, USA TODAY, Vox Media (and more) and now have a pilot program where they are looking for partners. https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en/blog/post/february-2026/building-toward-a-sustainable-content-economy-for-the-agentic-web
One solution to solving web publisher revenue? Touch grass 🫳🌱😉 “A Tour Guide for Journalists is a digital guide to help local newsrooms, niche publishers and independent journalists plan and execute a walking tour pilot.“ https://www.futuretides.org/how-to-tours-for-journalists/
🗣️ On social
"most publishers, their principled objections notwithstanding, in practice continue to work with platforms because they have other priorities they value more than disentanglement, and suggest the balance between entanglement and disentanglement is an important area for further empirical work."
Jonathan Benton complains about publishers complaining about platforms. https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/is-it-hypocritical-for-news-publishers-to-complain-about-tech-companies-platforms-but-still-be-on-them/
PfP✨ Master of Ceremonies Ben Werdmuller joins Rabble on the Revolution.social podcast and talks about his previous work founding Elgg, the tensions between media and venture capital, and much more. https://megaphone.link/NOTDI8086006866
Federated social media application Mastodon released a new Share button that abstracts away the complexity of decentralized architecture. https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2026/03/a-new-share-button/
🗓️ Upcoming Events
Friend of PfP✨ Richard Reisman will be joining an amazing lineup at the Knight Institute to discuss "Can Middleware Save Social Media?" Washington DC/Online, March 27, 2026 https://knightcolumbia.org/events/can-middleware-save-social-media
Fediforum, an online unconference for the Open Social Web is now open for registration. Online, April 28-30, 2026 https://fediforum.org
Some very interesting sessions are being previewed for Hacks/Hackers 2nd Annual Al x Journalism Summit. Baltimore, May 13–14, 2026 https://www.hackshackers.com/summit-program-2026-ai-x-journalism-may-13-16/
