The founders have a close affinity with the international “tech-for-good” community. Publishers often have unique challenges that should inform the development of publishing technologies from ideation all the way through to implementation and deployment. Contrary to activist organizations that work with small groups of at-risk human rights defenders, publishers cannot typically mandate the technology choices of their audiences. Technologies that aim to maintain and increase content reach or engagement therefore have to take an audience-centric perspective to design, and provide low or no friction to audience adoption consider.

With 30+ years of experience publishing for audiences in environments most hostile to press freedom, First Draft Media's founders are uniquely positioned to manage the development of these publisher-first, audience-centric publishing technologies.

Previous experience and current projects cross the range from censorship circumvention and shutdown mitigation tools and technologies, to ethical and offline content analytics and tracking, ad management and delivery, to publishing workflow tools and newsroom AI.