Joe Amditis
Currently: Teaching a 5-week MOOC on prompt engineering for journalists through the Knight Center at UT Austin. Building AudioBash, a voice-controlled terminal for Claude Code. The 2026 Collaborative Journalism Summit — the 10th anniversary — is coming to Temple University in Philadelphia.
Work
- Democracy Day — coordinated a nationwide pro-democracy reporting collaborative; in 2024, 241 newsrooms across all 50 states and Puerto Rico published 268+ pieces of journalism about threats to democracy. In 2025, the initiative held its first live event at The Greene Space with WNYC in New York City
- 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 — lead organizer of 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
- 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
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
- 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 — 5-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
Writing
Speaking and media
- Al Jazeera English (2025) — on concerns about AI use in news
- 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)
Background
- Associate director of operations, Center for Cooperative Media (Montclair State) — 10+ years
- Adjunct professor, School of Communication and Media, Montclair State
- Ron Miskoff Award for New Jersey Journalism Educator of the Year (2020)
- Excellence in Journalism Awards — online deadline reporting, media-affiliated blog
- Iraq veteran (NJ Army National Guard, 2008–2009)
- M.A. social journalism, CUNY Newmark 2016
- B.A. political science and criminal justice, Rutgers 2013
- Co-founder, Muckgers (Rutgers investigative outlet)
Side projects
- Reroute NJ — free tools for NJ Transit riders navigating the Portal Bridge cutover
- AudioBash — voice-controlled terminal for Claude Code (Electron, React, TypeScript) [source]
- Scrapefruit — desktop web scraping platform with intelligent cascade system (Python, Flask, Playwright) [source]
- Yap — voice-to-text dictation tool for Windows
- Pisscord — private Discord clone with P2P encryption, voice/video calls [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
- NJ current status — the front page of the internet for New Jersey news [source]
- 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]
Contact
Available for speaking, collaborations, and interesting problems.