A question many of us are asking: how can we be as effective as possible over the next four years?

A few years ago, I made the decision to move out of tech into non-profit news, and I'm glad I'm here. It's a different environment and the learning curve has sometimes been steep, but I strongly believe in the power of mission-driven investigative journalism and journalism centered in diverse perspectives to strengthen democracy. And it sure feels like democracy could use some strengthening.

My career has been driven by building open source platforms that offer alternatives to centralized services. I believe news is in dire need of these alternatives. To reach audiences and make an impact, newsrooms are currently dependent on companies like X, Google, and Apple - and therefore subject to their changing business decisions. This particularly matters in a shifting business landscape and a new political order that may create a more adverse environment for journalism.

For technologists - engineers, product leads, designers - there is an opportunity to help build great platforms that serve both newsrooms and audiences, and therefore democracy.

For newsrooms, there is an opportunity to invest in new platforms that will give you more autonomy and help you build deeper relationships with your audience. (Hint: newsletters are great but don't go far enough - and what happens when everybody's inboxes are managed by AI? That future is coming.)

I've been trying to work on creating space to bring these groups together. More on that later. But I think this is the work: news needs to invest in platform, and platform builders need to work in news. I've often complained that journalism treats technology like something that just happens to it, rather than owning and building it; now, this lack of ownership and strategy is becoming an existential threat.

This post was originally published on LinkedIn.