We are creating the essential systems that support creator journalism: discovery, standards, and fair partnerships for a more open and resilient media future.
We chart individuals and their work, wherever that may lead.
Around the world, individuals are developing new approaches and models to produce trusted reporting, reach loyal audiences, and shape public discourse. Yet the systems that support journalism – discovery, standards, partnerships – were developed for a different era. Institutions supporting trustworthy information need new models to work with an expanding universe of individual operators.
Our Atlas is designed to connect audiences with these creators—those who are telling the stories they choose, with purpose, for the communities they cultivate and serve.
We're actively talking to mission-aligned partners and eager to connect more. Please read on and reach out. Our first product release is scheduled for February 2026.
The information industry has long privileged containers over creators. Newspapers and networks stewarded the practice of journalism and owned the entire means of distribution – and with it, the intellectual property, relationships, and authority built by individual journalists. That infrastructure supported creation but also extracted value. Reporters generated immense value but were rarely able to reap commensurate financial benefit, ownership of or agency over their work. It was too laborious for them to collaborate with the people they chose, or even just carry their own ideas and products forward.
The platform-led era started breaking down long-standing industry dynamics. Social and search became the dominant forms of discovery as news and information became infinitely available through algorithmic feeds and other digital products trained on our social graphs. Publisher monopolies eroded and new technologically-driven ones emerged.
Within this landscape, it becomes easier for individuals to reach audiences and build communities as they report on and explain the world we live in. And yet, it is even harder for individual consumers to keep up with news, place it in context and discover new sources of information.
The editorial process of assembling the elements of journalism – reported facts, quotes, visuals – and the distribution of them, have been fractured.
We believe this is the moment to invert the model with intention – to empower individual creators and curators of information.
Social broadcasting has eclipsed social media networking. Community-building has shifted to spaces where we can authenticate our personal connections (like DMs and group-chat). We know that AI-driven software will further shape and intermediate the relationships between platforms, products, publishers, producers of all that content and all of us – individually and collectively.
We are building a future where individual creators – the atomic units generating information – own their work, their audience, and their reputation.
Whether working independently or inside a newsroom, reporters should be able to take their authority and body of work with them – portable, transparent, and recognized across the ecosystem to whichever platforms and products they choose to publish on and engage. With the increase in AI-generated media – both slop and high-quality – the time to recognize the fidelity of human creation is NOW.
To safeguard this future, we must build durable systems of support.
The Independent Journalism Atlas exists to close those gaps.
Journalism creators exist in every corner of the world. Yet there is no reliable way to find them, differentiate them from other types of content creators, understand their work, or measure their impact.
Without visibility, individual creators and worker-owned collectives are often overlooked by funders, ignored by institutions, and disconnected from one another.
That is why we start here: by charting a comprehensive, trusted map of independent creator journalism today. This is our foundation. We won't just identify creators; we will capture detailed data across a range of categories—spanning formats, beats, business models, audience reach, ethics, community engagement, missions, and more—allowing us to understand this nascent ecosystem at a deeper level.
Creator-led journalism has brought an authenticity that thrives outside traditional credentials. But credibility demands rigor. Open standards around sourcing, transparency, and ethical practice protect both creators and their audiences—while still giving room for individual creators to explain where they may differ from their peers. Standards also provide institutions and funders with a way to engage without gatekeeping or exploitation.
The Atlas will act as a curator of best practices emerging from trusted industry leaders like Trusting News, Pew Research, CNTI, Project C, The Video Consortium, and—crucially—from creators themselves, by gathering and adapting proven approaches to help individuals develop and maintain credibility. We will also commission new research to track and understand the evolving ways trust is built and earned in the creator ecosystem: from transparency norms to audience engagement models to forms of accountability.
By curating, adapting, aligning, and advancing standards, we ensure that creator journalism is not just visible but also credible and sustainable.
And by having these standards overseen by a steering committee of fellow journalists, we empower the community to govern itself with lived experience, peer support, empathy, and shared values.
Today's licensing, syndication, and partnership systems are optimized for legacy outlets – not individual creators or nascent collective newsrooms. As a result, creators face steep barriers to scaling their reach, diversifying revenue, and collaborating on equal footing with traditional media.
We will serve as a repository of proven business models from across the media, entertainment, and technology industries, adapting them for journalism creators. We will also prototype and test new forms of intermediation – systems that make it simple for creators to license their work, enter into fair partnerships, and participate in distribution networks without ceding ownership or editorial independence.
By combining the best of what exists with innovations built for this emerging space, we will create and foster infrastructure that allows creators, institutions, and platforms to work together sustainably and transparently.
We're developing creator-centered revenue opportunities including PR distribution services, RFP pipelines for public communications campaigns, and marketplaces for B2B research and consulting services.
This work unlocks an entirely new class of information providers for communities — and provides funders with visibility and intelligence they've never had before.
We protect and promote their economic and editorial independence. Revenue comes from institutions that benefit from creator infrastructure, never from creators themselves.
We build bridges, not barriers. Connecting creators to institutions, institutions to each other, and independent voices to the resources they need. We reject extraction. We choose connection.
Good information ecosystems flourish when creators flourish. We reject zero-sum thinking. The future of journalism expands when we broaden access, lower barriers, and support experimentation. More voices means a healthier democracy.
Infrastructure that scales while honoring local culture and community context.
Open standards, shared methodologies, and clear ethical frameworks.
The infrastructure we're building serves everyone who believes credible journalism strengthens communities. Here's what the Atlas unlocks:
Legitimacy without gatekeeping. Your work, audience, and reputation travel with you—across platforms, partnerships, and career moves. Access to revenue pathways, fair partnerships, and sustainability models built for how you actually work.
See the full landscape of journalism creators, not just legacy outlets. Invest with real data on reach, impact, and credibility.
Discover credible creators in your markets for collaboration, syndication, or hiring—while learning new models for reaching audiences directly.
Find trusted voices worth amplifying, with transparent metrics and ethical standards already in place.
Connect with voices rooted in real communities, backed by credibility signals you can trust.
Access structured, global datasets revealing how creator journalism reshapes media systems and democratic engagement.
See role models and pathways beyond traditional newsroom hierarchies.
Build tools informed by open standards and grounded in journalistic principles.
Audiences discover trusted voices and have more confidence in the information flowing to them. Communities get accountable, accessible journalism. Democracy gets the pluralistic media ecosystem it needs to function.
We believe journalism and information distribution are in a constant state of evolution.
As we close out 2025, we believe creator journalism is an evolution of democratic information sharing – complementing, challenging, and enriching traditional media while allowing independent voices to thrive. Even as we name this moment, the next is already forming — shaped by new creators and technology, and defined by how we choose to act.
The crossroads are clear: consolidation or creativity, monopoly or multiplicity. The Independent Journalism Atlas is charting the path toward a more open, plural, and resilient media future.
The Independent Journalism Atlas is designed to be built with and for the community it serves.