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 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

Nieman Lab — contributor since 2019, including annual predictions: "Please learn how to use your computer" (2026), "We stop excusing the lack of accessibility in news" (2025), "Journalism grapples with the promise and pitfalls of AI-assisted reporting" (2024), "AI throws a lifeline to local publishers" (2023)
925 Struggle Street — newsletter on journalism innovation, AI tools, collaborative reporting, and media equity
Medium — writing on collaborative journalism, the local news crisis, and newsroom technology
Muck Rack portfolio

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)

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)

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]

Available for speaking, collaborations, and interesting problems.