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Between ICE raids, extreme weather, online harassment, and legal threats, the work of journalism has come to feel especially precarious. Today, a new app called JESS, which stands for Journalist Expert Safety Support, is available as a resource for journalists’ safety advice and planning. JESS functions like a chatbot on your laptop or phone. When prompted with details of a reporting assignment, it produces tips on physical safety, digital security, legal risks, and other precautions in the field. Covering a hurricane? JESS can provide a list of precautionary measures about flooding, or even suggest you plan to fill your gas tank. Reporting from a protest? JESS can recommend tactical gear.
The chatbot, now available in a beta version, was conceived in the spring of 2024 by Gina Chua, the executive editor at large of Semafor and executive director of the Tow-Knight Center for Journalism Futures, and Mike Christie, a former Baghdad bureau chief for Reuters who spent a decade overseeing the safety and well-being of the newsroom’s reporters. Many of JESS’s lessons could only have come through experience. When designing the main safety training course for Reuters, for example, Christie was surprised that one of the most common, serious risks to photographers might come not from bullets but from flooding. “If they’ve got two cameras, and they fumble one of them, and they almost dive into the raging floodwaters to save their camera,” he said, “I realized, Hold on, we actually need to teach people how to keep their camera equipment safe and secure.”
JESS aims to bring the basics of safety and security to newsrooms that cannot afford trainers like Christie. Chua and Christie partnered with the ACOS Alliance, an industry group focused on safety, and the Journalism Protection Initiative (led by Joel Simon, a CJR contributing writer). They announced the project in 2025 at the International Journalism Festival and secured $550,000 from the McGovern Foundation, a nonprofit that backs technology projects for the social good. The current, free version of the app is tailored for journalists in the United States, though the JESS team plans to expand globally.
JESS’s safety guidance incorporates Christie’s experience, as well as information drawn from guides produced by journalism safety organizations: the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Reporters Without Borders, and the International News Safety Institute. “You could, in theory, write a big book and give it to people,” Chua told me. “But in practice, who’s going to read it?”
Kate Parkinson, a journalism safety expert who is now the risk and safety manager at the Journalism Protection Initiative, drafted the early templates for JESS’s safety plans and tried out the platform for at least a hundred hours, stress-testing and scrubbing the system of AI-speak. JESS, she noted, takes into account special safety risks associated with a journalist’s stated immigration status, race, gender, age, and other identity factors. To evaluate the system’s capabilities, Parkinson assumed identities other than her own. “I’d write, ‘I’m a Black woman, assigned to cover a march in a neighborhood where there’s a nationalist group that’s been doxing me,’” she said. “I like to say that threats and hazards are universal, but risk is personal.”
ACOS and the Journalism Protection Initiative also invited more than a dozen journalists to test out JESS to identify gaps in content. One person who tried JESS several months ago told me that while it could be helpful, the sheer volume of information it provided could, at times, feel overwhelming or off-base. (JESS has evolved since then, although its answers can still run long.)
This week, I had the opportunity to try JESS out. I asked it to draw up a safety plan for a hypothetical reporting assignment: covering a protest in a politically conservative area of the US. The platform produced a number of suggestions, ranked by priority, including wearing head and eye protection. JESS also noted that “the key safety issue is not the ideology alone; it is how your identity, outlet branding, the crowd, counterprotesters, and police posture interact at that specific event.” At one point, the app seemed to push back against the fictional prompts. “If this is a real assignment…” one answer began. (Later, JESS acknowledged that it shouldn’t have questioned me.)
For those who helped build JESS, earning journalists’ trust was a top concern. Nikita Roy, who founded the consultancy that has been working on JESS’s technical development, told me that chats are private and not housed on servers or used to train models. Users have the option to store chats temporarily on their browsers. JESS can hallucinate, or make up information—a risk with any large language model—Roy told me. But JESS, which Roy said runs on OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, is designed to pull only from a specific corpus of documents and will annotate answers with links to sources. When JESS is integrated into a Claude or ChatGPT account, those systems’ rules and privacy guardrails apply. Those involved in JESS stressed that its guidance should be taken with a grain of salt—perhaps unsurprising, given their extensive experience in risk management.
Another short-term tester was Kate Ortega, the operations manager at Business Insider. She told me that she enjoyed using JESS in the trial and would consider adopting it to supplement her safety advice for reporters. But, she said, in thinking through how to prevent unsafe situations, “the things that are bad that could happen are varied enough, and bad enough, that I think you need a brain.”
Martin Shelton of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, another JESS tester, said that some key digital security materials were out of date when he originally tested it. Though they have since been updated, he said, they will need regular updates. “There will be situations where certainly you still do want to talk to a person who can help you go through your own risk assessment,” Shelton said of JESS. “But this is helpful.”
I asked Christie about whether it feels like he’s replacing himself as a trainer. He told me that he’d never considered that. “I think there’s such a paucity of safety advice for journalism as a whole,” he said, “that it’s really about filling gaps.”
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