David Bruns

David Bruns is a multiple Murrow Award–winning digital news executive, video journalism leader, and independent media creator with more than two decades of experience building high-impact journalism, teams, and new forms of digital storytelling.

Most recently, Bruns founded Off the Precipice, an independent digital news and journalism channel built initially on YouTube and expanding across emerging platforms. The project explores the rapidly changing intersection of artificial intelligence, journalism, technology, and society, while also experimenting with how AI can be incorporated into modern editorial workflows, production, research, graphics, and audience development. Its programming includes The Precipice Report, an AI-focused news report, along with reporting and practical journalism content designed for a changing creator-driven media landscape.

Previously, at The Washington Post, Bruns served as Executive Producer of Original Video and later as Head of Video Logistics and Planning, helping lead the strategy, editorial vision, and operational execution of the newsroom's multiplatform video journalism. He led teams responsible for major investigative and enterprise projects combining video, text, photography, graphics, and interactive storytelling, including the investigative documentary on Paul Manafort's activities in Ukraine and the innovative "Raising Barriers" multimedia series.

Bruns also directed live and breaking-news coverage for many of the Post's largest stories, including presidential inaugurations, election nights, political conventions, international conflicts, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning coverage of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Under his leadership, the Post's video operation dramatically expanded its audience, increasing embedded video traffic by more than 800 percent. His work and teams have been recognized with multiple Murrow Awards, a duPont-Columbia Award, and honors from POYi, NPPA, WHNPA and other journalism organizations.

Earlier, Bruns spent nearly a decade at the Associated Press as a Video News Supervisor, overseeing video journalism and investigations serving thousands of broadcast and digital clients around the world. He helped develop new approaches to digital video, trained journalists in visual storytelling, and contributed to Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporting. He began his career in broadcast journalism at KCRA-TV in Sacramento and as a freelance investigative reporter in California.

Across those roles, Bruns has focused on a consistent problem: how journalism adapts when technology changes the way information is produced, distributed, and consumed. Today, his work increasingly centers on artificial intelligence—both as one of the defining stories facing journalists and society and as a new set of tools reshaping how media organizations create, verify, package, and distribute information.

Bruns holds a BA in English Literature from UC Davis.