Thank you for your patience. Cool. Can people hear me now? Wicked. Okay, awesome. Please bear with me. I'm kind of um bricking a little bit. I'm following two of my like heroes from the industry, and also I've basically had to completely revise my like entire talk on the fly as a result of the earlier keynote. So let's do this. Yeah, so this is uh this is like about the third ish time I've given this talk, but I've done it for a completely different audiences the other two times. The first time was for a group mostly of publishers in London AT Protocols for publishers, second time was for more of a uh journalism tech audience, uh mostly like journalism consumers, and this one's more for builders and people who are in this space.
And uh kind of the idea I'm gonna be talking about is how can journalism uh start using the tools available in the Atmosphere to start creating its own algorithms, and I'll talk about why it's important. First off, a little bit about myself. Uh I work and have worked in news media since 2013 or so, but my background's always been kind of journalism and or tech um kind of on some level. Um I moved from uh Canada to London in 2011. I almost went to the UBC at one point. Uh it's really cool to be on this on this campus again.
Um but I ended up in London. Uh currently I work at a financial newspaper doing uh fancy charts mainly. Uh and but I I worked uh I've had bylines of various papers, uh including Financial Times, Times and Sunday Times, Economist Guardian, etcetera. Um and yeah, so I can kind of like the decentralized social media space because I find it really interesting in terms of how do we uh how can the space be used to present a idea of journalism that uh uh can be uh seen uh in ways that are censorship resistant that gives publishers more control over how their content is distributed, etcetera.
And so I I started initially on Mastodon. I was um I created an instance on Mastodon called for state.media way back in 2018. I think it was the very first journalism-related instance on uh the Fediverse. I might be wrong, but that please correct me if I am. Um it didn't really go anywhere. I got maybe like five users and I shut it down literally the week that Musk took over Twitter. Uh which was probably a good move in hindsight. Um I kind of you know uh fell out of love with uh the uh with um Activity Pub as a way of distributing journalism because there's some topographical kind of issues of the network that I kind of found frustrating and then I you know I got a Bluesky invite in 2023.
And uh I've really enjoyed being on the Atmosphere. I built a few different things, uh probably most notably the uh verified news feed uh and also the trending news feed, which I'll be talking about a little bit in a second. Um so yeah, uh purchasing this from two ways. Uh AT Pro needs journalists. I think that journalism is a very core function of any social media platform. My theory of change, uh you need to have all the following for a effective social media network that kind of is a center of conversation. Um start with the creatives, the shit posters, the people who are doing artsy fun things on this brave new platform that no one's really ever heard of yet.
Um and you know those are kind of like the people who start the platform who build interest for it to pull um interest from other people who will eventually join. Um Academics are another big part of a healthy social network. Um seeing all this stuff at uh uh AT science yesterday was just like super super cool and it's really exciting to see so much work happening kind of in that space. Um journalists uh because journalists talk about what's happening on these platforms. They are a big part of why they're seen as being socially relevant. Um and journalists kind of follow uh the creative types eventually, and following the journalists, you also get politicians.
And I see politicians as a big driver of uh people joining the social network because uh people want to talk to their elected representatives, uh the lecture representatives want to talk to the constituents. It's important for the health of the ongoing um social network. Uh and then following all those groups you get celebrities, which are really the kind of draw of like the other 90% of the social platform. People like to follow celebrities because they're curious what the people who they're excited about are. And like lastly, pornography is also like a really big part of what makes a healthy social network in my mind.
And I think that I I have an idea for a talk maybe I'm going to do next year about why I think that's the case. But anyways, I'm going to talk these talks specifically about journalism. And I think that the Atmosphere is really important for journalism right now because right now we have so much of our media ecosystem influenced by for-profit social networks like Twitter, X, Facebook, etc. And this chart is from uh magnitude media using a data source called Junkipedia, which looks at social media traffic. And it breaks down uh the most part uh most viewed partisan leaning political accounts on X in February.
And suffice to say I one of those circles is able to kind of impact the discourse a little bit, if only it's a bit bigger, is all I'm saying. And I I guess you know kind of why like a lot of this stuff interests me is because when I was going to journalism school back in like 2011, like a huge part of what you're taught is how do you maintain a Twitter following, how do you engage with your audience, how do you use uh social media for sourcing news coverage. Um and that's a big part of the day-to-day life of journalists.
And my personal belief, uh, and I should mention that pretty much everything I'm saying is just completely all just my opinions, I not reflective of any employer I've ever had. Um but my feeling is maybe the reason why the discourse is a little bit cooked is because the majority of journalists are spending a huge amount of their time on social networks that both uh elevate and incentivize far-right content. So uh 80Pro needs journalists. Um, but also I think journalism needs atproto. Um I think ATP Pro solves a lot of the fundamental needs that you have for social network as a media organization.
Um, and I'll get into a few of those in a second. Um I think this is the case. Uh a lot of these charts are from the uh Reuters Digital News Report. Um they track uh something called uh news avoidance. And I'm gonna show us in three different charts or different metrics. This is from the 2024 edition because I couldn't find this longitudinal kind of data for 2025 yet. But um so this shows the proportion of people who report using no sources of news in the last week. They just completely managed to avoid all the news headlines.
And in the last like 10 years, it's grown by about like roughly 10%, especially amongst younger age cohorts. Uh further, you have um the amount of people who are uh extremely or very interested in news has declined substantially since uh 2015 to a point where uh the 18 to 24 demographic, only 33% are extremely or very interested in news. Uh this is from the 2025 data uh showing just the breakdown globally of news avoidance. Um 40% of all people surveyed are avoiding the news. It's even bigger in like uh the younger cohorts in the 25 to 34 cohort, a whole 43% of readers are actively avoiding the news.
So like what's driving this? Um I kind of feel in some ways that uh a big part of it is the way in which algorithms deliver news to readers, and it's very overwhelming and it prioritizes engagement over um newsworthiness or uh public understanding. And as a result of that burnout, you have people who are uh moving to AI as a primary source of news. Uh this is the proportion that used AI chat box for news in the last week. This is also from the Reuters Digital News Report. Um it kind of is towards about 10% kind of globally.
Um further, newsleaders are understand this challenge. Uh 50% think it's gonna be like a slow burn kind of impact on the industry, and 20% thinks it's gonna be the next big thing. So regardless, about 70% of news leaders think it's gonna have an impact on the industry. And yet, despite all this, social media continues to be uh a major source of news, and in fact it's growing. Um if you look at that orange line, that's the US. Uh in 2025, the US joined a what what Reuters refers to as the social first club, uh, which is countries that uh were a majority of people get their news primarily initially from social media.
So we need to make social work as a place that people get news, because if we don't, then the incumbents will continue doing so, and the quality of our discourse will just deteriorate over time. This is alluded to in the last uh talk, and I'm gonna go through it like very, very briefly, but this is my uh brief and incomplete recent history of algorithmic fuckery. Um this only goes back to 2015. I'm sure there are more examples that you can use, and these are just a half dozen I just picked out of a hat, basically, but these are the ones that kind of impact me.
Uh Google accelerated mobile pages, AMP is one of them. Um they Google said, hey, if you use this new technology that makes news faster to download and read will boost you in terms of page rank, and I think that had a pretty negative effect on the quality of news that was being served by Google. Um as mentioned in the last talk, there is a pivot to video, and I have another personal kind of connection to this in that I'm from the generation of journalists who sort of graduated journalism school while pivot to video was happening, and it was devastating for an entire generation of journalists.
Um I'm not sure if kind of like the younger journalists have really even fully recovered from at this point. Uh 2022, you have must taking over Twitter and deprioritizing outgoing links, which has had a major impact on um news traffic. Uh in 2023, you had Facebook uh blocking Canadian titles because of the online media act. Um can't get Canadian news on Facebook no more. And in 2024, you start to see uh AI overviews uh start to become a thing on Google, which has had a really massive impact on the traffic that news orgs receive from organic search.
Um for this one, I've also added like a 2026 edition. Uh there's a few more things. These are kind of like just loosely related. I know they're not quite on topic with it, but you had like TikTok being sold to Oracle, so you have a major uh upcoming um channel for news be sold to a company for ultimately political reasons in a very politically fraught moment, let's just say.
So in both these examples, you have uh the a government that is uh pushing technology providers to change how their algorithms work in order to uh better align with that regime's interests. Um then just this month you have uh Google trialing uh basically replacing human-written headlines with AI headlines. Um you also have the superhuman experts controversy where they uh grammarly effectively had this new feature that they've since killed where uh it would offer writing advice from your favorite journalists, just the promise they didn't ask the journalists if they could use their names. So uh basically what I'm trying to get at with all this.
Um I'm trying to make a point here, and my point is ultimately why do we still trust big tech with news distribution? There's lots of reasons why we probably shouldn't at this point. Um back when I was like growing up my local paper used to hire people to ride around on bicycles, usually like you know, elementary and high school students, and chuck papers onto people's front lawns. That was a very core function of the newspaper and it related to uh distribution. Um since then, uh in the internet era, we basically handed that entire part of the business to tech companies who whose interests are often not aligned with that of journalism or that of uh just public information.
So with that, um a couple questions. One, wouldn't it be cool if journalism wasn't held hostage by large tech companies and the billionaires who owned them? And furthermore, wouldn't it be cool if journalists and news orcs had a say in how users discover news content? And lastly, wouldn't it be cool if there was more transparency about why users are seeing news topics on social media. At the moment, so much of the way in which news is delivered to users is basically like an opaque box that you can't look into and you can't really interrogate and you don't really know why you're receiving the news, and furthermore, why is this the news of the day?
Um if we could kind of work to improve all of these things together. And to some degree, uh I think custom feeds are an answer to that. Um it's one of those things that I think we're gonna have to do some work as builders in this um in the Atmosphere to try and teach newspapers how to use this technology. Um because they can start using it, they can start building their own algorithms, they can start serving content to readers in a way that makes sense for that readership, They can start doing it today. And frankly, very few have.
So these are two feeds I built. This is probably what I'm best known for. On the left, you have the OG reverse chronological news feed, which has about 300-ish odd news orgs in it. And on the right, you have the trending news feed, which is the same but using a very arbitrarily weighted trending algorithm. I usually just like chose random numbers for the trending news feed when I initially set it up. And it's been really cool working with some researchers in the US to try to basically A-B test various versions of the feed with different uh weights to see which delivers the most user satisfaction for consuming the news.
And I think it's really interesting. As somebody who works in the journalism space who's created a feed of news for users to then work with researchers to try and improve the news reading experience for readers, not so much that increases their engagement or whatever, but so that they can have a better news reading experience so they can see more local news, so they can see more things that are relevant to them. Instead of just whatever hot button topic is just wanting to be um pushed in front of them by like the major traditional media. So the news feed, my news feeds together, we have about 8,000 DIUs.
And like in the context of like, say Twitter's Discovery feed or like a lot of the other big platforms, 80,000 DAUs, it's not much. But to start, it proves it can be done. And I think that's a point that we need to start bringing to news orgs. The fact that you can do these things now. This is uh and furthermore, you can do things that like you can do it fairly easily. This is uh my Grays page for the news feed, and there's a button that I've circled up top saying remix. And if you want to create your own version of the feed, say you want to exclude the onion from it.
Uh the one satirical paper I have in the news feed is the onion. I kind of just take it as given that in 2026, you should probably know that the onion is a satirical paper. I still have people constantly ask me to remove it though. If you want to though, you can remix the feed, remove the onion from it. There you go. Um I went though, I love the onion. Um or say you want to change like a sorting option, or say you want to uh make it so that uh you know image posts aren't allowed, you can do that.
You can click remix, it will create a new version of my feed uh in your account. It will still use the same list of orgs and whatnot, and you can then have that as a personalized improved source of news. Um similarly, uh Grays recently released a new feature called uh it it's effectively uses a similar algorithm to the 4U feed to find personalized content. And in like five minutes of work, I created a new version of the feed that is like very personalized uh to my news viewing habits. And anybody who uses Grays can just do this.
Um and news orgs that uh you know create their own feeds, can create different ways in which users can view that content. How are we going for time by the way? Okay, cool, thank you. Um so yeah, so these are two examples of like ways that news orgs or feeds could work in a kind of more localized capacity. Like so, my my two feeds are very, very global. They're world news or reverse chronological or trending as it is. But you can also do things that are more specific to your news org and to that audience. Um on the left is the Financial Times staff fee, which is a feed that I may have helped with.
Um, and it's effectively anybody who the Financial Times uh account follows in one feed. And like I kind of love it. Like I use it like myself like on a daily basis, it's one of the first feeds I check in the morning. Because it has all the contributors for the FT, you can see what are those journalists talking about at a glance in one place. And you can pay it to your home screen, and if you're a reader of that paper and you really care deeply about what those journalists are talking about or thinking about, you can see that really quickly.
Um similarly, you have uh Rich Farrow's Minneapolis Ice feed, which I think is like a great example of using feeds in like a hyper-local context, taking a topic that is really relevant to the local community and taking a combination of news content, uh local writers, individuals who are impacted, and putting it into one place. And I think that there's like a lot of really interesting use cases like this that local news could do. But maybe part of the problem that why I haven't really seen a lot of examples like this is just because they're not really aware of this technology.
And so with that, I think you know, a big part of what we need to do as builders is start popularizing this technology and trying things and just building feeds. And you know, whether it's using Grays or like Surf is also really, really exciting. I mentioned Grays a lot, but Surf is super super cool. I've been playing with that a little bit. Love the interface for it. The new thing they mentioned earlier could also be cool. But like ultimately there are many and uh there's also like um yeah, so but anyways, there's a lot of roots to create custom feeds now.
And I think you know, I I would encourage people to just start building things. If you don't have a source of news that you need um on atproto, just build it. You can just do things uh and share it with people and tell people uh about it and tell them why it's useful because it's it's kind of up to us to popularize this technology because at the moment it's kind of hard to find. It's kind of um not exactly obvious for people who are new to Bluesky or to the Atmosphere more generally. Um why should media orgs create custom feeds?
Uh because it connects their journalists with their audience. If you make one for your paper, like the FT Staff feed I mentioned, um you you can give them this very close kind of like summary of everything that your journalists are talking about, which again, if if you're a subscriber, you might care about. Um if you have multiple verticals, for instance, um you can use a custom feed to unify them into one place, and so even if you have multiple accounts or are publishing various other places, you can consolidate them into like a singular feed. Um you can also highlight top content, you can use pin posts to do promotions or to like highlight a particular editorial um kind of like campaign or something of that nature.
Um really love to see is uh custom feeds being used as a way of promoting, say, subscription deals. Um say you have a uh a subscription um sale going on. You could use a rotating post to just put a little note being like, hey, you want to see this content without a paywall, buy a subscription over here. Um lots of cool things that like a news org could do with a custom feed um that maybe they're sleeping on and we need to tell them about. And most importantly, all this stuff is like kind of free to use.
It doesn't require a huge capital outlay from a news org, most of which are increasingly cash-strupped, um, to be able to try these things and to do these things. Um that I would love to see is journalism societies start to use custom feeds, not just newspapers, but kind of the civil society organizations around journalism. So like uh in the UK we have the NUJ, which is the National Union of Journalists, and we also have Ipso, which is one of our many press regulators. Um organizations that are kind of connected with journalism but don't produce a lot of journalism themselves quite often.
Um they could use some of these technologies to do really cool things. Um say you're like a union of journalists, right? You do your yearly renewal um and you send out your form, hey, are you still a practicing journalist? Where are you at? Could you get some details updates? You got a form saying what is your Bluesky handle? And then suddenly you have a big database of all of the journalists in your organization who have Bluesky handles, put them all into a uh custom feed and suddenly have a really good source of like independent journalism from the journalists who are either working at titles or are freelance.
One of the I think biggest kind of things that like I I wish the news feed could do better would be to surface freelance journalists and and can uh surface individual contributors kind of in that space. Um I kind of bubble catch the idea of you know verifying every single journalist who came to me on Bluesky asking to be add to a feed, so I didn't really do individual journalist feed, but be really easy if you're like you know a journalist union for instance. Um there's lots of kind of various things you could do with that.
You could here here's a wild idea. Say like you're a journalism org like the NUJ, like I mentioned, um, and you get trusted verifier status. Suddenly you can verify independent journalists who are working and might not have access to the verification facilities that like a major newspaper would have. Um I think there's like a lot of tools for specifically independent titles and for small publishers that um the Atmosphere provides that we really need to start talking um to news orgs about because it could really change how they do things and really kind of um improve some of the you know uh give them more traffic and be able to use the platform better.
Um another point that I've been trying to make a little bit over the last little while is I I kind of feel increasingly that journalism in 2026 is more than just reportage, it's not simply taking view from nowhere, reporting the facts journalism all the time. A lot of time like in my mind in some ways, as doing journalism in 2026 means helping the audience navigate this news climate. Uh Steve Bannon in 2016 had the expression filling the filling the zone with shit. Which is basically the idea of um creating so much just nonsense in the press that people don't really know where to focus or know where to like focus their attentions on.
And I think kind of some of those slides earlier talking about news avoidance uh is a good indication that that strategy's been kind of successful. So how do we as creators and builders and how do we also as journalists start to use these tools to start unpacking the zone. I've had a few ideas. On the left you have Xblock, which is uh probably I I think it's Blue Sky's longest running third-party labeler. I built this back in I think 2024. Um and it's been running ever since then. It uh labels screenshots from social media platforms, whether it be Twitter or Bluesky itself or threads or whatever.
I mean to your training model because it's basically labeling most things as Twitter right now, but uh it works, and I think um people find it very very useful as a way of um kind of turning down the volume on their social media experience um by not seeing screenshot junking from Twitter, they're able to have a kind of like cleaner, less emotive sort of social media experience. And kind of like you know, my experience with XBlock has informed two new labelers that I've created. They're very much in development, they're a little bit trash right now. Be forewarned if you like subscribe to them.
Um but I'm working on them, they're work in progress, and I'll explain what they are. Um in the middle you had media ownership labeler. Um I have this big list of all the titles in the news feed, and I've tried to manually go through and figure out what their funding model is, whether they're independently funded or whether they have like a big corporate owner, like say Condé Nast or something like that, or whether they're like reader supported. Um what allows you to do it lets you do two things. First thing is uh you can have just like a little badge on every news title saying like what their funding model is.
So if you're just scrolling the news feed and you're kind of curious, you can see that. The other cool thing is if you want to block all of Rupert Murdoch's papers, you can do that. Um last one is news classifier, and this is like an idea that I've had for like a really long time. I've wanted to find a way of classifying the content being emitted by the news feed. Um it uses uh and I I only actually managed to figure out how to do this. I the side has been circling my head for about like a year now.
Um I only managed to figure out how to do it about a fortnight ago. Um this is kind of driven by getting a lot of requests um for can I get the news feed but without sports or the news feed without entertainment. And it's kind of hard because news orcs publish all genres of content under like the same account name. Um so I have a very very light uh BERT text classification uh model um that's looking at the OG tags of news orgs or news posts that are being emitted by the news feed uh and it tries to add a label to them uh which is useful for downstream tooling.
Say you want to create a version of the news feed without sports, you can do that um pretty easily using Grays. Um it uses uh contrails, which is a Graze feature that um gives you like a web socket of all the content being emitted by a particular custom feed uh and it it it's it makes the infrastructure side of it like a lot easier to deal with. Okay. I think that's it. Um thank you. If you want to try remixing the news feed, Graze.social slash feeds slash 396. Again, encourage everyone to like try and create their own news sources and try and like use this technology to create a better understanding of news.
Uh I'm open to questions if anyone has them, but I'm in trouble answering questions. Hi. Excellent. Okay, so we have a few minutes to answer some uh to take some questions. Do you have a question? All right. Thanks, Andrew. Um quick question what you think about permission data and what that offers, perhaps new subscription products, maybe bundled subscription products so people can subscribe to a custom feed and get content that they wouldn't find on like on the main on the open uh I don't know, a subscription product basically that could be sold, could you actually generate revenue for news organizations.
So like kind of like yeah, so I think a big part of it is like the private data story for uh atproto, like until there's like more you know, private data I think will facilitate more uh and like permission data, I think is how they're referring to it, uh, will facilitate that kind of thing a lot better. Um there's already some stuff you can do with Grays. Um Gra I think Grace has like some kind of like Patreon integration. I'm not entirely sure that works, but I think the idea with that is to be able to post into the feed you need to be a Patreon subscriber, so it's kind of like a subscriber feed.
And so I think there were kind of things like that that you know could um be useful approaches. Again, the like the lack of permission data kind of uh makes it challenging to do subscribers only sort of stuff, I think, kind of on the platform. Hello. Um I have uh a question around. So um we would love to work with more uh newsrooms, journalists, all of it. Um and I think one of the difficult things that we have when we're messaging to them, and maybe you can help me with is that uh um and I haven't worked with newsrooms, so this is mostly from like indie publishers, maybe on Substack, like that kind of thing.
Um that reach is really everything. Like it has to get you more views. If it does that, everything else kind of is good. Well, maybe not good, but fine. Um and the Atmosphere ecosystem is not yet at a scale where I can promise someone like 2x views or anything like that. Um, but all this feed stuff is incredible. Um how do I talk about that in a way that respects that kind of like discovery portion and highlights the things that we can do. Yeah, that's a big question. That one's really hard because um you know, convincing news orgs to switch en masse to um Bluesky and particular potentially even like exclusively to Bluesky.
First of all, the exclusivity thing isn't gonna happen because news orgs are like that. Um but also the um you know the more reach the platform has, the easier it is to make this case to news orgs. And right now Blue Sky's reach is not what it the commercial platforms is. That's that's just the long and short of it. Um I think part of it is we need to increase that that user base. Um and my feeling is that one way to do that is by creating better news reading experiences. If you create a newsreading experience that you know privileges people's time and um doesn't um kind of overwhelm them nearly as much.
That might be like one route in which we can start building more traffic on like atproto um for news consuming experiences. Um what surf's doing really you know excites me because it's a way of doing something that's not just on atproto but also on Activity Pub and um pulling together these disparate sources of content in a way that is like kind of engaging, but also like very you know respective of your mental energy. I really like how they have filters on um surf to hide politics content or Elon Musk. Um I think like yeah, I I think part of it is we need to just create better news reading experiences and people will start gravitating towards them.
Um but yeah, the the question of getting news orgs onto the platform is challenging. I think like yeah. Uh one thing I do with the newsfeed like initially was uh require that all the orgs in it have domain verified handles. It's called the verified news list uh newsfeed because I required anybody in it. This is before blue ticks were a thing on Bluesky. Um I required them to have a domain handle um so I can actually verify they are who they say they are. And um I think in doing that that pushed them to use a primary affordance of the platform, um, which kind of sort of gave um had to put a bit of effort to do that.
They had to talk to their tech people to do the DNS entry. Um they had to, you know, once you've invested that much effort into a platform, it's you know it it's harder for someone to just be like, oh, we're not getting enough traffic from here, not just like you know, kill that entire account. So I don't know, I think kind of encouraging news or to use primary affordance of the platform like custom feeds, like labelers. It's one way we start to build interest kind of in that space. I think a little bit. Not sure if I've entered your question, but it's a bunch of scattered thoughts.
It's a problem.