Editors

Walker Bragman

Editorial Director

Walker is co-founder and editorial director of the OptOut Media Foundation and a New York-based reporter. He previously worked for The Lever and graduated from Brooklyn Law School in 2019. Walker publishes Important Context, and his reporting has appeared in outlets such as The Intercept, Jacobin, and Paste Magazine.

Liana DeMasi

LGBTQ+ Editor

Liana is a queer, Brooklyn-based, New York-bred journalist, author, copywriter, and MFA Fiction Candidate at City College. Most of their fiction work centers around the climate and how the human condition responds to atrocity. While that makes most of their work quite grim, they seek to amplify love, companionship, and beauty throughout. Their reporting focuses on the climate, queer topics, health, politics, and culture, and can be found in Atmos, Rewire News Group, i-D, The Boston Globe, Autostraddle, Poynter, and others.

Amanda Magnani

Climate Editor

Amanda is a Brazilian journalist and photographer focused on social and environmental issues. After living in seven countries, she returned to Brazil to dedicate herself to documenting the diverse realities that make up her homeland. She approaches her work with a decolonial perspective, and she always seeks to collaborate with the subjects of the narrative. Her work has been featured in National Geographic, Al Jazeera, The New Humanitarian, BBC Brasil, and Folha de São Pualo, among other publications.

Amanda is a master in Journalism, Media and Globalization from Aarhus University, the Danish School of Media and Journalism, and Charles University, and a specialist in Public Policy and Gender Justice from the Latin American Council of Social Sciences

Lindsay von Werner

Social Media Editor

Lindsay has an extensive and award-winning background in art, photography, and design. Her work has been published in many places, most recently in We March On, a book documenting women’s protests.

News Curators

Walker Bragman

See above.

Liana DeMasi

See above.

Jacqueline Keeler

Diné/Ihanktonwan Dakota writer living in Portland, Oregon. She has been published in The Nation, Salon, The DailyBeast, Quartz, and many other publications. Jacqueline has been interviewed on PRI’s The World, BBC, MSNBC, and Democracy Now. Her books, “The Edge of Morning: Native Voices Speak for the Bears Ears” and “Standing Rock to the Bundy Standoff: Occupation, Native Sovereignty, and the Fight for Sacred Landscapes,” are both available from Torrey House Press.

Alex Kotch

Alex is an investigative reporter who has been on staff at the Institute for Southern Studies, International Business Times, the Center for Media and Democracy, and Sludge, a money-in-politics news site he helped launch. He and his team at IBT won a SABEW Best in Business award for their reporting on the Trump tax-cut bill. A campaign finance expert, Alex’s work has been published by more than two dozen media outlets including The American Prospect, The Nation, Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch, and Vice. In 2020, he co-founded the OptOut Media Foundation.

Amanda Magnani

See above.

Michael Sainato

Michael is a labor reporter for The Guardian US based in Gainesville, Florida.

Tech Team

Robert Diamond

Backend Developer

Software engineer for over 30 years with an interest in music and climate change. Been there, done that, have a bunch of t-shirts…

Reza Etezal

DevOps Manager

Journalism enthusiast. Urban cyclist. Recovering techno-optimist. Socialist. Canadian.

Kyle P. Feeley

UX Developer and Designer

Kyle has over 15 years of experience designing and building user interfaces for websites, native applications, and desktop software. He has also created branding for companies in a variety of industries including news, entertainment, fashion and nonprofit. His dog is not impressed by any of this.

Matthew Smith

Frontend and Web Developer

Mobile developer with five years of experience building performant applications using JavaScript, React, React Native, Redux, Firebase, and Git.

Rob Watson

Backend Developer

Rob Watson is musician and software engineer hailing from Oakland, California. When he's not helping further the cause of independent media, he enjoys playing baroque music on the classical guitar and riding his vintage Italian road bike around the hills of the Bay Area.