10 Questions with Our New CTO, Daniel Craigmile

When Indiegraf set out to build the operating system for independent local media, we knew we needed the right technical leader to bring that vision to life. That moment is here. I'm thrilled to introduce Daniel Craigmile, Indiegraf's new Chief Technology Officer.

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What makes this hire meaningful goes beyond Daniel's résumé. It's a signal of what Indiegraf is: a technology company built specifically for local and independent media. That might sound like a load of jargon at first glance, but as you'll hear from Daniel, it's actually a pretty rare thing. Most of the tools publishers depend on today are generic SaaS products built for e-commerce or big corporate teams, and then awkwardly retrofitted for newsrooms. Indiegraf is building something different from the ground up, with publishers' actual needs at the center.

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Daniel is the right person to lead that work. He brings seven years experience working at the Texas Tribune, an additional six building tools for independent publishers at News Revenue Hub, and—perhaps most notably—he's the original architect of RevEngine, the same product that's now part of the Indiegraf family. "I'm really excited for Daniel to be joining us, “ says Erin Millar, CEO of Indiegraf. “At a time when the internet is overwhelmed with AI slop and publishers need tools that help them build trust and generate meaningful revenue, we had a vision but we didn't know how to execute it. Now we have what we need in Daniel and his team to build it and make that happen."

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I sat down with Daniel to learn more about what drew him to this work, what he thinks the biggest opportunity in the publisher tools landscape is, and where he sees Indiegraf’s Operating System going from here.

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Q+A with Daniel Craigmile

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Amy: I’m a believer that everybody working in this industry has a “superhero origin story” where they realized the journalism industry was meant for them. How did you end up at the intersection of media and technology? What drew you to this work?

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Daniel: I was working at the University of Texas when I stumbled onto the Texas Tribune through their data explorers. They had one that published every state employee's salary. Whether intentionally or not, it turned out to be a quiet force for pay equity. Employees could look up their salary, compare it to peers, and walk into their manager’s office armed with actual data. That's when it clicked for me: a digital publication could do so much more than the print publications I grew up with. And as a technologist, I could actually contribute to it. The Tribune had explorers for hospital statistics, prison populations, campaign finance, school data. Public-interest work, built in code. So when a role eventually opened up at the Tribune, I jumped at the opportunity.

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A: What did your time at News Revenue Hub teach you about what independent publishers actually need from their tech?

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D: Publishers need tech that respects their time. Most of them are running lean, wearing many hats, and trying to do real journalism on top of fundraising, audience development and operations. Every minute they spend wrestling with a tool, reconciling a report, or figuring out why two systems disagree is a minute not spent on their impactful work of journalism.

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A: What was it about Indiegraf specifically that made this feel like the right next move for you?

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D: News Revenue Hub was, at its core, a consulting company that happened to build a tech product. Indiegraf is a tech company built specifically for independent publishers. 

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Indiegraf has the talent and the resources to genuinely support and improve RevEngine (a product I've now watched evolve through three different employers), and they've been thoughtful about bringing other tools like Hearken and Stylebot under the same umbrella. The opportunity to keep building on something I helped architect, inside an organization actually set up to invest in it, was hard to pass up.

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A: A lot of companies talk about supporting independent journalism. What made you believe Indiegraf means it?

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D: Because they've been doing it since they started, and they've made it work at a price independent publishers can actually afford, which is genuinely hard. I can attest to this. A lot of the tech publishers depend on is priced for enterprise customers and then pretzeled to work for smaller outfits, or it's just out of reach entirely. Building sustainable tooling for independent newsrooms isn't a side effect of Indiegraf's business model; it is the business model.

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A: Indiegraf has made a deliberate move to expand our suite of tools beyond our CMS—bringing together Hearken, StyleBot, and now RevEngine—all in service of helping publishers maintain their independence. What's actually driving consolidation in the independent journalism field, and why now?

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D: Grant funding has declined, and the funders still in the space are backing fewer organizations. They're actively pushing for consolidation. At the same time, publishers are getting squeezed on the revenue side: search traffic is declining as AI summaries replace site visits, for example. The tooling landscape for publishers is still fragmented across a bunch of vendors, each charging separately.

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What we're building isn't a walled garden—it's an interoperable operating system designed to connect best-in-class tools so publishers can diversify their revenue and maintain their independence. Consolidation is the only realistic path forward, and benefits publishers by lowering costs. Now is the moment because the money is drying up, and publishers need a coherent solution that actually centers their needs.

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A: What do you think is most broken about the tools publishers are using today—and where does that point in terms of opportunity for Indiegraf?

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D: Two things, really: integration and fit. Most of the tools publishers rely on weren't built for publishers. Email service providers and analytics platforms are designed for e-commerce businesses; CRMs are designed for enterprise sales teams. Publishers end up bending those tools to do something they were never quite intended to do, and then paying extra to wire them all together, often with custom integration work that breaks the next time a vendor pushes an update. 

The opportunity for Indiegraf is to build an Operating System where integration is the default, and to build with publishers' actual workflows in mind instead of retrofitting generic SaaS to fit. That's a different product than the rest of the market.

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A: Indiegraf's mission is rooted in the sustainability of local and independent journalism—having worked in journalism, what does that mean for you personally?

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D: What I care about, and what I think Indiegraf's mission gets right, is supporting an industry that has the resources to actually inform its community. Too many news sites today are barely usable. Whether it's a paywall, a popup, a banner, an ad takeover, a video that autoplays or a combination of all of them, it's difficult to read the news.

The polls just closed for a runoff in my home state. I tried getting the results from the local corporate-owned paper and the Texas Tribune (a statewide independent newsroom). Guess which one had all of the above? Which one answered my questions? A healthy independent journalism ecosystem is one where outlets have sustainable revenue, lower costs, and they can put journalism first. That's what's worth supporting.

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A: What would success look like for you in your first year at Indiegraf?

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D: Success looks like the a comprehensive portfolio of products (RevEngine, Hearken, Stylebot, and future ones) woven together into a coherent whole, where publishers feel real time and cost savings from the integration rather than just seeing the same tools with a new logo.

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A: What do you want the local media community to know about where Indiegraf is headed?

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D: That RevEngine is going strong and has landed in a good home with a team genuinely committed to supporting it. The publishers who depend on it should feel reassured, not nervous, about this transition. And they should expect it to get better from here.

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A: What are you most excited about in the industry right now—and what keeps you up at night?

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D: I'm most excited that, despite a challenging environment, U.S. public media has found ways to survive the government funding cuts, and new newsrooms keep forming. There's a lot of good journalists out there making it work, even with all the headwinds.

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What keeps me up at night is the value asymmetry with AI. The point has been made before, but it's worth repeating: AI companies are extracting enormous value from journalism (training on it, summarizing it, getting ad revenue from it) without meaningfully paying back into the those that produce it. Big players like the NYT and the AP can and should file suits and negotiate licensing deals. They have the leverage and the legal resources to do it. But what about the small independent publishers? They don't have the same tools to fight back and get paid.