9:15–10:30 / Thursday May 14
How a Three-Person Startup Added AI as the Fourth Co-Founder
The Independent Journalism Atlas is a vetted database of 1,200+ creator-journalists — built and maintained by a three-person team using AI at every stage of the pipeline. This session walks through the exact AI workflows that make it possible: automated data ingestion from Substack, newsletters, and partner submissions; LLM-powered cleaning and standardization of messy CSV data via scripted Python processes; and AI-assisted verification of inclusion criteria like original accountability journalism and trust markers. We'll show how we use Claude as a daily operational layer — from structured morning briefings synthesizing calendar, email, Slack, and industry news, to generating partner "co-lists" that let organizations build curated subsets of the Atlas for their communities. Attendees will see how a resource-constrained team can punch far above its weight by treating AI not as a novelty but as essential infrastructure for journalism's emerging creator ecosystem.
// speakers
Justin Bank
Co-founder
The Independent Journalism Atlas
LinkedIn →Justin is a co-founder of the new'ish Independent Journalism Atlas which is charting the landscape of journalism in the creator economy with lists and data to make the work legible so we we can support the humans building in this new direction. Prior to that, Justin has spent 20 years leading digital innovation at major news organizations: The Washington Post (Managing Editor, first SEO editor, built audience engagement teams), The New York Times (founded Audience Development team post-Innovation Report), NPR (Senior Director of Digital News and Strategy). He is a principal at Better Media Studios which is building better media products within the burgeoning creator economy and regularly contributes to Project C.
Ryan Kellett
Co-founder
The Independent Journalism Atlas
LinkedIn →Ryan Y. Kellett is an audience futurist, media industry consultant and co-founder of The Independent Journalism Atlas, building the infrastructure layer for journalism in the wider creator economy. He previously was an executive at Axios and The Washington Post. He was a 2025 Nieman Berkman Klein Fellow for Journalism Innovation at Harvard University.