Founder of the YESEO app
Ryan Restivo was a 2022-23 Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow who created the YESEO app, a free Slack app that has been installed in over 600 workspaces and helps journalists with SEO best practices. The tool has assisted over 18,000 stories since launch across newsrooms in the United States, Canada and globally. YESEO was a finalist for the 2024 Online Journalism Awards category Excellence in AI Innovation. YESEO’s goal is to reduce the time it takes to come up with that relevant headline, the right keywords and get your work seen and read. Ryan has presented at conferences hosted by the Online News Association (ONA25), Public Media Journalists Association (PMJA25), the 2025 Collaborative Journalism Summit hosted by the Center for Cooperative Media as well as the JournalismAI Festival 2025 in London. YESEO partnered with The Oglethorpe Echo, a news-academic partnership at the University of Georgia, in the JournalismAI Innovation Challenge supported by the Google News Initiative. YESEO is partnering with Kimbap Media to work with 10 newsrooms to test new paid features to the product. Ryan has presented webinars with the Online News Association as well as the Lenfest Institute's Audience Community of Practice as well as in classes with students at the University of Iowa, Northwestern University, University of Missouri and University of Southern California. Ryan has over 15 years of experience in digital media and is a 2008 graduate of Marist College in New York.