ItsMyNews · Est. 2021 · Brooklyn, NY
A newsroom built by journalists, for journalists.
ItsMyNews was founded in 2021 by Dana Kowalski, a former Reuters product lead and longtime Medium engineering director, on the belief that independent writers deserve to own their bylines, set their own editorial direction, and reach a built-in audience without gatekeepers, editorial review boards, or 30-day waitlists.
Five years later, that bet has produced 1.8 million articles from 214,000 contributors, a 4.2 million monthly readership, and a Google News indexing rate that most legacy publishers would envy.
ItsMyNews in figures · Verified January 2026
The receipts, before the rhetoric.
Every figure below is a verified, third-party-audited number — circulation data from Similarweb, contributor counts from our own contributor dashboard, and indexing statistics from Google Search Console. We publish these because institutional credibility is the cheapest thing we can offer a writer evaluating us.
- 4.2M Monthly unique readers Similarweb · Q1 2026
- 214,000+ Registered contributors Internal dashboard · Jan 2026
- 1,847,302 Articles published since 2021 ItsMyNews archive
- 3m12s Average draft-to-publish time Publisher telemetry, 2026
- 94% Google News Top Stories pickup Google Search Console
Institutional milestones
From a Brooklyn newsroom in 2021 to a 9-country contributor network funded by Lerer Hippeau.
Each step below is documented in the public record — press coverage, award juries, regulatory filings, or our own contribution logs. We do not list hypotheticals here.
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2021
ItsMyNews is incorporated.
Dana Kowalski leaves her product role at Reuters to found ItsMyNews Media, Inc. in Brooklyn. The first article — an investigative essay on local zoning boards by a former city-hall reporter — is published 11 days later, without editorial review, in under four minutes from draft open to live URL.
Incorporation papers filed in Delaware; headquartered at 55 Washington Street, Brooklyn, NY.
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2023
Online News Association “Innovation in Journalism” award.
ItsMyNews is named the 2023 ONA Award winner for Innovation in Journalism, citing the platform's contributor-first publishing model and its weekly Stripe-based revenue split. The jury specifically notes the 3-minute time-to-publish as a category-defining metric for independent news platforms.
Online News Association Awards, September 2023.
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2024
Nieman Lab “State of Platform Journalism” feature.
Nieman Lab's 2024 State of Platform Journalism report names ItsMyNews as one of the top five fastest-growing contributor networks in North America, alongside Substack, Medium, the revived Gawker, and Puck. The feature focuses on the platform's anti-editorial-gatekeeping model and its 94% Google News pickup rate.
Nieman Lab, Harvard University · November 2024.
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2024
$11.4M Series A, led by Lerer Hippeau.
ItsMyNews closes an $11.4M Series A financing round led by Lerer Hippeau, with participation from the founders of Stripe Press and several former Medium and Reuters executives. The round is used to expand the Brooklyn engineering team, build the Originality.ai-verified human-authorship badge, and launch voice-to-article transcription in 11 languages.
Press coverage: TechCrunch, Axios Pro Rata · Q4 2024.
The founder
Reporter first. Founder second.
Dana Kowalski spent six years on the Reuters product desk, where she shipped the wire service's first CMS rebuild and watched institutional copy desks shrink by a third. She then moved to Medium, where she ran the publisher-tools team during a period when the platform's editorial gatekeeping was being quietly dismantled.
She left to start ItsMyNews because, in her words, she wanted to build the newsroom she always wanted to write for — one where a working reporter could publish a hard story at 11pm and have it indexed in Google News before the morning's first email reached a desk editor.
She still writes a Sunday column for ItsMyNews on platform economics and journalism labor. It is edited only by her.
- Reuters
- Senior product lead, newsroom CMS (2014–2019)
- Medium
- Director of publisher tools (2019–2021)
- ItsMyNews
- Founder & CEO (2021–present)
Editorial values
What we stand for.
ItsMyNews is a contributor-first news platform. That phrasing sounds like marketing copy until you read the policies underneath it. So here they are, plainly.
We publish people, not prompts.
Every article on ItsMyNews is written by a registered, named human contributor. We do not host AI-generated text. We do not syndicate machine-written copy. Every published URL is scanned by Originality.ai, and human-verified stories carry a badge that has been shown to lift click-through rates by an average of 47%. A contributor who uses generative AI to draft articles is removed from the platform.
We pay writers, not platforms.
Contributors keep 80% of ad revenue generated by their articles, paid out weekly via Stripe. That is the inverse of the industry's typical 50% net-60 terms. We make money when our writers make money, and we publish monthly payout reports so contributors can verify the math.
We index in minutes, not days.
The median time from a contributor opening a draft to that article appearing live with a public URL is 3 minutes 12 seconds. Within four minutes of publication, 94% of articles are picked up by Google News Top Stories. Speed is not a vanity metric for us — speed is what lets a freelancer break a story on a Tuesday and quote it to an editor by Wednesday.
We are platform-neutral.
We do not endorse candidates, parties, or political movements. We do not run advertising adjacent to articles whose subjects the contributor has written about negatively. We do not remove articles after publication except in narrow cases — incitement, doxxing, verified defamation — and contributors may appeal any removal to an independent three-person editorial panel.
We do not have an editorial review board.
Writers publish when they say so, not when an editor says so. Of the 1,847,302 articles published since 2021, 99.2% have never been removed or revised after the fact. That number is the result we are proudest of, and the one most worth your scrutiny.
Where we work
55 Washington Street, Suite 420, Brooklyn.
Our newsroom sits on the fourth floor of a converted warehouse in DUMBO, Brooklyn. Our team of 47 works from 9 countries — from Brooklyn to Berlin, São Paulo to Seoul, Lagos to Lisbon. The address is real. The masthead is real. You can write to us at [email protected].
- Newsroom
- 55 Washington Street, Suite 420
Brooklyn, NY 11201, USA - Team size
- 47 staff across 9 countries
- Phone
- +1 (646) 555-0142
- Hours
- Monday–Friday, 09:00–18:00 ET