Joe Amditis
Currently: Associate director of operations at the Center for Cooperative Media and adjunct professor at Montclair State University. Leading a $300K Google News Initiative grant on AI transparency standards for local newsrooms (2026-2027). Running operations for the 2026 Collaborative Journalism Summit — the 10th anniversary — at Temple University in Philadelphia. Building the Jay Rosen Internet Archive. Teaching a 4-week MOOC on prompt engineering for journalists through the Knight Center at UT Austin. Maintaining Reroute NJ, a multilingual transit guide in 11 languages. For technical projects and tools, see amditis.tech.
Work
- Democracy Day — coordinated a nationwide pro-democracy reporting collaborative. In 2024, 241 newsrooms across all 50 states and Puerto Rico published 268+ pieces. In 2025, grew to 300+ newsrooms and held its first live event at The Greene Space with WNYC in New York City. 700+ pieces of pro-democracy journalism published since 2022
- NJ News Commons — grew the Center for Cooperative Media's flagship network from ~150 to 330+ partners across New Jersey, including the Spanish Translation News Service and the NJ College News Commons
- Collaborative Journalism Summit — running operations for the annual national conference bringing together 200+ journalists, funders, community leaders, and advocates. In 2025, the Center received a $2.5M Knight Foundation grant to launch the Collaborative Journalism Resource Hub supporting 20+ collaboratives nationwide
- GNI Transparency and AI Initiative — $300,000 Google News Initiative grant (2026-2027) to define industry standards for how local newsrooms disclose AI use. Joe leads this initiative
- Collaborative Journalism Resource Hub — supported by a $2.5M Knight Foundation grant, supporting 20+ journalism collaboratives nationwide
- Civic science media collaborations — partnership with the Rita Allen Foundation funding 10 journalism-science projects
- Beginner's prompt handbook: ChatGPT for local news publishers
- WTF Just Happened Today — podcast producer and narrator (2017–2025)
- NJ Decides — multilingual, statewide election reporting collaboration (2025, 2023)
- Voting Block (2017) — collaborative political reporting project using "potlucks" to engage voters
- Loved and Lost (2020) — statewide COVID-19 memorial project naming NJ victims
- NJ Media Counts (2020) — 2020 Census reporting initiative
- NJ influencers research — mapping the local information landscape and influential voices across New Jersey
AI and journalism
- AI tools and guides for newsrooms — resource hub with guides, templates, and decision tools for journalists building with AI
- LLM journalism tool advisor — free interactive tool that helps newsrooms select the right LLM tools for specific journalism tasks
- Claude skills for journalism — 31 Claude Code skills and 11 workflow hooks for verification, FOIA, data journalism, academic writing, and more [source]
- Vibe coding for newsrooms — published in Generative AI in the Newsroom (December 2025)
- Beginner's guide to image generation with DALL-E 3 — published in Editor & Publisher
- Prompt engineering for journalists — 4-week MOOC through the Knight Center at UT Austin covering CLI tools, file-based prompting, automation pipelines, and RAG/MCP
- Member, Aspen Digital AI Elections Initiative Advisory Council
- AI and automation: An updated guide to using LLMs for local news (December 2024)
- AI disclosure framework — guide for deciding whether and how to disclose AI use, with scenario-based examples illustrating disclosure "materiality" and "proportionality"
- Vibe coding starter guide for newsrooms (December 2025)
Teaching
- STCM 140: Multimedia production for strategic communications — adjunct professor at Montclair State University. Curriculum covers foundations (The Cluetrain Manifesto, "markets are conversations"), the attention economy and AI tools, and production across graphic design, copywriting, audio, and video
- AI policy: students can use AI tools with a "transparency paragraph" explaining prompts used and rationale. Prompt engineering is taught as core literacy, not a shortcut
- Prompt engineering for journalists — 4-week MOOC through the Knight Center at UT Austin covering CLI tools, file-based prompting, automation pipelines, and RAG/MCP
- CUNY AI Journalism Lab coaching — mentoring Natalie Holly Purviance on building a newsroom AI source discovery tool (React/TypeScript, OpenAI, ChromaDB). Focus areas: entity extraction for search, in-app feedback, rubber duck debugging workflow
Consulting
- Tegna — AI and automation strategies
- The Hechinger Report — GPT-4 training
- Arizent publications — AI including Gemini for Business
- Local Media Association — AI email summarization
- NJ Advance Media — content summarization and social copy automation
- The Current (Louisiana) — weather data newsletter automation
- Dallas Free Press and News Product Alliance — automated workflows
- NJ News Commons Spanish Translation Project — cross-language solutions
- Heartland Signal — Zapier automations including the "squirrel emoji" workflow (react to auto-draft WordPress posts from links) and email-to-sheet parsing for newsletter revival
Autonomous systems
I run a personal AI infrastructure across a 4-node mesh network: two Raspberry Pis, a game server, and a GPU workstation with an RTX 4080 Super, all connected over Tailscale. An AI agent operates on a schedule — processing email, Slack messages, and meeting transcripts, logging tasks to a custom kanban board and CRM, and dispatching GPU render jobs across machines via Wake-on-LAN. The operations layer is being consolidated into a single Go binary (jawn-ops) replacing a collection of Python scripts, with one dependency and 158 tests.
- jawn-ops — single Go binary handling health checks, token refresh, notification polling (Gmail, Drive, Slack), Telegram messaging with inline buttons, email dedup ledger (SQLite), dashboard API client, session management, and cross-machine sync. Deployed on both Pis
- Mission control dashboard — FastAPI + React app with project board, contact management, interaction timeline, relationship network graph, and real-time updates via Socket.io
- Scheduled autonomy — event-driven pipeline that monitors Slack channels, analyzes meeting transcripts, categorizes action items, and drafts email responses with approval workflows via Telegram
- Cross-machine coordination — dispatches GPU renders to a Windows workstation, routes traffic through Cloudflare tunnels, and syncs state across nodes
- Credential management — Rust daemon (jawn-vault) providing secure credential proxy with caching, audit logging, and automatic token rotation over Unix socket
Writing and research
Publications
Columns and essays
- Don't be a slop cannon (Substack, 2026)
- Claude Chode: An autonomous Claude Code system running on $700 of Raspberry Pi gear (Substack, 2026)
- I'm a Claude Code agent with my own Gmail account. Here's what my workday looks like. (Substack, 2026)
- This small New Jersey newsroom treated its voter guide like a service product (Substack, 2026)
- Vibe coding for newsrooms (Generative AI in the Newsroom, 2025)
- Could alt text be a useful framework for AI disclosures? (Medium, 2025)
- I built this free tool to help newsrooms learn how to use LLMs (Substack, 2025)
- We asked New Jersey journalists about their pay. Here's what they told us. (Medium, 2025)
- A guide to practicing care in journalism (Substack, 2024)
- How Gavin Rozzi's OPRAmachine opened a window into New Jersey government (Substack, 2024)
- AI-generated news has arrived in New Jersey (Medium, 2023)
- The Nazi chatbots are coming (Medium, 2023)
- What if you could use AI as the institutional memory for your newsroom? (Medium, 2023)
- John Oliver isn't responsible for saving journalism (Medium, 2016)
- Journalism vs. activism (Medium, 2016)
- Beyond the numbers: Newsroom losses in New Jersey (Medium, 2016)
- An ethical analysis of Serial (Medium, 2016)
- Slavery and academia: A troubled history of Rutgers University (Muckgers)
- Arab regime change and US policy
- Social constructions and political terrorism
Research
Papers
Speaking and media
- Al Jazeera English (2025) — on concerns about AI use in news
- SIIA — feature interview on AI tools for publishers
- PBS NJ Spotlight News (2023) — on AI-run news sites and tech in journalism
- Creative Commons Global Summit (Mexico City, 2023) — collaborative journalism panel
- International Journalism Festival
- ONA20 — content-sharing as the media industry's response to the sharing economy
- Collaborative Journalism Summit — multiple years; Democracy Day, election coverage, AI workshops
- WVU Media Disrupted — how AI is transforming creative arts and journalism practice
- Newsroom Robots — harnessing the power of ChatGPT for local newsrooms (2023)
- Democracy Nerd — Democracy Day (2022)
- Miami Herald (Feb 2025) — on Gen Z and AI adoption in workplaces
- Magazine Association of BC (April 2024) — let AI do the boring stuff
- AImpactful podcast (Dec 2023)
- Media Copilot (Aug 2023) — the reality of applying AI in newsrooms
- WVU "Media Disrupted" panel — how AI is transforming creative arts and journalism practice
- News Product Alliance — Newsroom 2.0: how AI is changing the game
- Press mentions and media coverage — via the Center for Cooperative Media
Background
Career
- Associate director of operations, Center for Cooperative Media (Montclair State), September 2023-present — oversees strategic planning, development, execution, and evaluation of programs and operations
- Assistant director of products and events, Center for Cooperative Media, July 2021-June 2024 — led events including Collaborative Journalism Summit, ensured all Center products were widely distributed
- Associate director, Center for Cooperative Media, March 2016-November 2021 — partnerships, collaborative initiatives, editorial, new products
- Coordinator, Center for Cooperative Media, June 2014-March 2016 — partner recruitment, trainings, events, special projects
- Adjunct professor, School of Communication and Media, Montclair State University, September 2022-present
- Producer and narrator, WTF Just Happened Today, August 2017-2025 — daily political news podcast
- Teaching assistant, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, January-June 2017 — community engagement class
- Co-founder and director of operations, Muckgers Media LLC, June 2013-January 2016 — student-focused investigative publication at Rutgers-New Brunswick
- Research assistant, Rutgers Political Science Department, January 2013-May 2014 — strategies of political revolutions in Africa, Latin America, Middle East
- Lecturer and research assistant, Rutgers Criminal Justice Department, January 2011-December 2013 — lectured on U.S. overseas detention operations for Professor Michael Welch
- Legal and research assistant, Stevens, Hinds & White P.C., January-June 2012 — Nelson Mandela's attorney's law firm in Harlem
Military service
- NJ Army National Guard, February 2006-February 2013, Sergeant E-5, Bravo Team Leader
- Deployed to Iraq (2008-2009)
- Hurricane Irene disaster relief operations (August 2011)
Education
- M.A. social journalism, CUNY Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, 2016
- B.A. political science and criminal justice, Rutgers University New Brunswick, 2013
- Warrior Leader Course, Fort Dix Non-Commissioned Officer Academy, 2012
Awards and recognition
- Ron Miskoff Award for New Jersey Journalism Educator of the Year (2020)
- Member, Aspen Digital AI Elections Initiative Advisory Council
- Excellence in Journalism Award — online deadline reporting
- Excellence in Journalism Award — media-affiliated blog (2016)
- Army Achievement Medal (x2)
Side projects
- Reroute NJ — multilingual guide for NJ Transit riders navigating the Portal Bridge cutover, with a commute comparison tool, curated news coverage feed, interactive map, embeddable widgets for newsrooms, and translations in 11 languages [source]
- KeyJawn — custom Android keyboard for terminal users and LLM agents, with a terminal key row, voice input, clipboard history, slash commands, and SCP image upload (Kotlin) [source]
- AudioBash — voice-controlled terminal for Claude Code (Electron, React, TypeScript) [source]
- Pisscord — private Discord clone with P2P encryption, voice/video calls [source]
- Scrapefruit — desktop web scraping platform with intelligent cascade system (Python, Flask, Playwright) [source]
- Jawn Vault — secure credential proxy with caching and audit logging (Rust)
- WristControl — control your computer with a smartwatch
- PocketLink — browser extension for creating shortlinks
- Eventbrite automation — automates event draft creation from Airtable with AI-generated banners
- Python Explorer — searchable database of 345 Python libraries across 23 categories [source]
- NJCIC — work supporting the NJ Civic Information Consortium and its grantees [source]
- NJCIC grantees map — interactive map of NJ Civic Information Consortium grantees [source]
- CCM stakeholder map — interactive stakeholder mapping tool for ally/obstacle maps [source]
- SecureNJ — secure, open source tools for organizers and residents
- GeoSprite — generate images from Google Maps using Gemini
- Claude Codiac — compare Claude Code /insights reports and discover coding compatibility [source]
- SocialSnag — Chrome extension for downloading HD media from social media (v1.1.0 on Chrome Web Store)
- AudioSlop — document-to-audiobook pipeline with voice cloning and synced transcript player
- Gemma-Jawn — fine-tuning Google Gemma 4 E2B for local infrastructure tasks. 34 autoresearch experiments, 48% improvement
- MOOC starter kit — starter repo for the prompt engineering for journalists MOOC
- KeyKey — keystroke visualizer for screen recordings and tutorials
- Hawk Translation API — REST API for translating journalism content into 10 languages, built for NJ News Commons partner newsrooms
- jawn-tmux — tmux session manager for AI agent workflows with visual pane attention and live sidebar
Contact
Available for speaking, collaborations, and interesting problems.