Journalist.net: The platform enabling any publisher to draw on global newsroom

In an age of falling foreign news budgets, a tech platform has been set up which enables any publisher to draw on a thousands-strong global newsroom.

Freelance jounalists can join Journalist.net for free after proving their credentials, with more than 10,000 already signed up. The platform then plays matchmaker between clients – anyone from a major newsbrand to a Youtuber or podcaster – and professional journalists.

Publishers are vetted to ensure work requests are genuine and pay a monthly fee to use the platform. Because all financial transactions take place on the platform itself, payment for a job is guaranteed on completion, whether work is used or not, and there’s no chasing invoices.

Publishers pay a single monthly invoice for all the freelances they’ve worked with on the platform, streamlining and simplifying the payment process.

Journalist.net was co-founded by friends Henry Peirse and Morgan Sowden, who first met in Sarajevo in the mid-1990s during the Bosnian War. Sowden was working as a technician for a non-profit setting up an internet cafe and Peirse working as an English teacher and freelance reporter.

Peirse stayed in the region for nine years, eventually leaving to set up an agency connecting journalists with media organisations. It’s from this that Journalist.net, formerly known as Paydesk, emerged in 2014.

As the news media ecosystem has increasingly fragmented along with its audience, which has shifted away from print and linear broadcast to digital, social and on-demand, Journalist.net’s founders believe it has a larger role to play.

“We want to be the glue that keeps the news business together,” said Sowden.

“We’re going through a period where there’s less money to create the news… The big newsgathering organisations that used to have staff all over the world no longer have that staff… Journalist.net is the one place you can find a global network of freelancers.”

Peirse added: “As the industry changes and as the consumption of news goes up, but the platforms and the distribution mechanisms vary, you still need to have the people who know the story… and know how to get that story across…

“We’re trying to make news professionals available to a wider range of people, so they can make a living and we can get good information out there.”

Clients don’t have to be traditional publishers, as Peirse notes “anyone who has a website is technically a publisher”. Work requests on Journalist.net include those from a Youtube channel run by a pilot who investigates plane crashes and employs freelance journalists in the vicinity of a crash to interview those impacted by it for his channel.

A common use case is trade titles that want to cover a conference in another country but can’t afford to fly someone out there, hiring a reporter local to the area instead. Or, in the case of a Lithuanian newspaper, hiring someone to interview one of their countrymen who rode across the Atlantic once he arrived on foreign shores.

In this way, the platform “connects the people with boots on the ground, who actually generate the news, with whoever wants to buy it and consume it,” said Sowden. Rather than relying on social media snippets, it puts the power back in the hands of professionals.

“Social media is all well and good for finding authentic quotes from authentic voices on the ground, but… you need the journalist – you need that context, taste, colour, smell, added by somebody with some experience of the place and with the bigger picture,” Peirse said.

“If you were to ask somebody stuck in the middle of a war zone what on earth is going on, they can only tell you what’s happening right in front of them. They can’t give you the bigger picture. From a news gathering perspective, social media is a useful tool… but… you still need people with experience to pull it all together.”

Although Journalist.net is powered by people, the platform uses AI as a tool to provide deeper insight into a journalist’s writing and as a way to enrich their profile. Once signed up and verified, AI crawls the internet looking for other articles with a journalist’s byline and automatically adds them to their profile – an option that can be turned off if desired.

It then analyses the text of the articles to extract keywords, but it can go further than that and actually summarise the topic of an article, even if that keyword is not specifically mentioned, and even extract the sentiment of the piece, e.g. did it speak positively or negatively about its subject, for greater insight into their work.

“It’s the ability to provide rich metadata about each journalist, so [the client] can make sure they find the most appropriate journalist for their product,” said Sowden.

The platform protects its journalists, some of whom may well be under threat of persecution where they are, by not making their private details visible.

But while AI is a useful enrichment tool for the platform, the founders are clear that for Journalist.net it’s the people that are important, “we’re just making it easier to find them”, with Sowden comparing the platform to the likes of Check-a-Trade. What’s more, as a former Silicon Valley employee, he doesn’t believe AI is a real threat to the work of journalists.

He pointed to the work of a Brazilian media organisation that was using a Large Language Model to transform data from air quality monitors in Sao Paolo into text, creating an alert service on WhatsApp that delivers the air quality of the day to subscribers.

“That’s all well and good, but all AI is doing is taking data and turning it into plain English. Is that a story? A story is ‘has air quality got worse this year?’ or ‘increased traffic jams because of broken traffic lights has caused a reduction in air quality’ – it’s connecting the pieces.”

He said the same organisation had sent reporters out into the city’s Metro system to measure the gap between the carriage and platform, then followed this up with an FOI request to find out how many people had fallen and injured themselves at each station, piecing the two together for a story. “AI can’t do that yet,” said Sowden.

“I think AI in the newsroom is going to have a huge impact, but on a very uninteresting section [of journalism]. It’s going to be those quarterly earnings reports that are already being written automatically and distributed on Bloomberg and so on,” he added.

“This idea that you can have citizen reporting, where everybody with an iPhone is a journalist, is the same as everyone with an iPhone is a data point, like that air quality monitor in Sao Paolo. But a data point isn’t a story…

“We are going to need journalists and we need journalism to connect those disparate parts, that’s not going away, that’s not being disrupted by social media or AI in the way we think it is. The problem we’re facing, the crisis, is who’s going to pay for it.”

Journalist.net’s network of freelance journalists is an answer to this problem.

“We’ve got all these journalists and news professionals in one place, so whoever is up for paying for it will know where to find them,” said Peirse. “And they are definitely going to need them.”

Journalist.net is free to sign up for freelance journalists worldwide.

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