10 AM. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to day two or day five or day seven, depending on when you got to Vancouver. Very good to uh see uh your faces, especially since I hear about some of the damage that happened last night that we're not going to talk about. Um this morning uh once again we're at the Media and Civics track here uh at AtmosphereConf 2026. I'm Chad Kohalyk from the Protocols for Publishers project. Uh you might have heard. Uh and this we're gonna kick off the morning with a disc with a discussion uh with some of our news and journalist uh folks here, and I'm just gonna turn it over to Jim to take over.
Thank you, Chad, and thanks for the work that you do with Protocols for Publishers. I got to meet some of those folks in London a couple of months ago, and um including uh our our fine guests here today. So thank you again. Uh my name's Jim. I work at Bluesky on our DevRel team. Uh if you have questions about how the platform works, you're looking for the other Jim, and he's giving a talk later today. Uh I'm joined by Andra Rininsland and Tyler Fisher, both of whom have over oh, I think we're zeroing in on 15 years of media experience and development experience as well.
Um, just to show you that I'm the old guy. They were getting into media as I was leaving it. So um but uh we're gonna we're gonna talk uh a little bit about um how and why news organizations should build on atproto. Um you'll notice that uh I throw out a bit of a gauntlet about capitalization on atproto there and uh we also realized at the very last minute we maybe should have named this one Meet the Press. But um so the uh the really what we want to do is just kind of like have kind of an open freeform conversation about what we've seen has worked.
Clearly there's a lot of things that are not working with media. Um I think my approach has generally been to harass and harangue anyone who's in media and still on Twitter, and that doesn't seem to be working. So um I'm hoping Andra and Tyler have some better solutions. And um so uh we'll start off with Andra, who um has been working in media uh since uh the early 2010s, and uh you're based in London, that's correct. Yeah, excellent. So I'm gonna hand it over to you. And maybe you can kick us off with um some of the approaches that you have seen that have worked and maybe what's changing a little bit.
Um thanks. Uh yeah, as mentioned, I'm Andrew Renninsland. Uh I run the news feed and trending news feeds on Bluesky. Um what has worked? Well, so some of the things I find that really connect with publishers is uh the identity system is like a really big part of it, um, both in terms of being able to uh set your username to your domain name for your newspaper, as well as um the new verification system, I think is really cool as well for news orcs to be able to verify their own journalists instead of having to wait for some large tech company apparatus to do that for them.
Uh I think it's like a really powerful feature. Um I'd also really love to see journalism societies kind of start uh using more of the affordances of the platform um in that way. Like for instance, like having um you know journalism um journalist unions might be like a really powerful place for doing the verification layer. Um I'm not sure if I answered the question in terms of what's worked. There the there's uh I think in general the uh reach that Bluesky gives news orgs is like really, really good. Um and the kind of traffic that news orgs um are getting from Bluesky is really impressive.
Uh anecdotally, I've talked to a few orgs who have said that uh Bluesky traffic has kind of outpaced a lot of other social networks, um, even ones that are like much, much bigger than Bluesky. And I think that is reflective of just how engaged with news uh the Bluesky community is uh and the Atmosphere in general. And um it it's it's it's interesting how there's kind of been this um movement of people who are really seriously interested in journalism to the platform and I think kind of as builders it's important to think how do we keep the momentum going and how do we um encourage more people to start making use of those affordances because I think kind of at this point, like you're right, like you know, kind of trying to bully people off of Twitter so that they just use Bluesky as uh uh probably a bit of a diminishing return strategy at this point.
Um I think how we win is we start showing how the the affordances of the platform of the Atmosphere uh lend themselves to really uh good journalism and good engagement with uh audience. Um Thank you, Andra. Um so and I I realize I neglected to to introduce folks. So Andra's been working in the industry and and runs um the uh the breaking news feed as you mentioned. One thing that uh that took me a minute about the breaking news feed is that it actually works much better as an input to other feeds. And so when you can start inputting that into something like Grays, then but you've done the work of going through and looking for basically every actual legitimate news organization that's on the network.
And then Tyler, in addition to his previous life working in media for companies like the New York Times, he runs uh an app called SIL. Do we have any SIL users in the house? Fantastic. And uh I won't even mention what SIL kind of resembles from uh previous iterations of this, but SIL is a just a fantastic news aggregation app. And so you log in with your Bluesky account with your um with your Atmosphere account with your Mastodon account even, and then it scrapes your timeline and finds all of the links and then pulls those together so when multiple people are talking about the same thing, it kind of groups them together in clusters and subjects and things like that.
So Tyler, maybe you can sit you can talk a little bit about um kind of your experience building SIL and um and some of the conversations that you've had with publishers and what resonates with them. Yeah, uh yeah, so I'm mostly known in the atproto space for SIL. Um most of how I pay my bills is through consulting for uh news organizations. Um I don't work for the New York Times uh but um um have worked for other large uh large national uh news or um uh with SIL, uh certainly my biggest user base is individual journalists um because they are on social media to follow news and communicate and have conversations about news.
Um but also they have actual jobs where they have to write and do reporting. Um so they can't be um on the feed all day. Um some certainly are anyway. Uh there's uh definitely an addictive property of of microblogging. Um but uh I find a lot of journalists are like, well, I you know I've gotta write and go to my meetings and do my thing, but I can come back to SIL throughout the day and see what the conversation has been at a glance uh rat rather than having to scroll the three hours of my timeline that I missed.
Um there was uh first before I say this, uh I want to get a feel for in the room. How many people here are coming from the journalism side? Like you work at a news org or somehow are affiliated with news publishing. Okay, small amount. How many people are more like builders in this space? Okay, almost everybody, great. Um I feel like I can come with this from two perspectives, right? Why news organizations should be buying on AT Pro buying in on atproto, and also why they're not yet. I think I can sort of give both sides of this.
So I think I'm gonna tailor what I say to why they're not yet, um, given who we have in the room. Um so I I think you know having them join Bluesky is great. And like uh Bluesky offers uh better traffic and refer referral traffic than the other platforms because it doesn't downrank links. It has tools like SIL in the ecosystem that even do even more to promote links. You have the ability of custom feeds to like really hone in on a topic or or things like that, or or um as Andra has uh talked about uh many times, like news orcs themselves can build custom feeds that really uh center in on their journalists and their communities, and that's just a really powerful primitive that they could be building on.
Um last week The Verge reported that Google is rewriting headlines with AI in search results. Um I I quo posted their their post about that and said uh this shit is why I'm a journalism on atproto extremist. Um so like I'm I'm I'm a believer, but I also get why they're not. And so when I say I'm an atproto extremist um for journalism, I'm not talking about just be having an account on Bluesky and linking to your journalism. I mean putting your journalism on the protocol, right? Um and like standard.site is a really exciting community that offers us some affordances to do that.
Um but I think there's some things that are missing, right? So um first standard site has no concept of authorship. Um and I think that's uh partially because the folks uh I love the leaflet and pocket and off-print folks, they're focused on like solo bloggers for most of the time, uh whereas news organizations have many authors and then and many contributors, and like you need a way to describe those relationships. What desk does this program work for? Are they a freelancer? Uh we need better ways on protocol of describing those relationships for every individual document and who worked on them.
Uh and then also the content lexicon thing is is a real uh uh problem to be solved. Uh it was announced yesterday that I uh am receiving a small grant from the community fund. Thank you to the community fund.
And I'm trying to work in this space of like how can we describe news content on the protocol and work within uh the bounds of standard.site for that. Um even if we had all that, the thing that is really missing is like a premium news reading experience that's built on top of standard.site. Um I I talk a lot about Apple News on atproto. Um Apple News offers a ton of reach. Um and I I know this because I've implemented Apple News at publications I've worked at where uh we would get a story promoted on Apple News and it would just dwarf the traffic we got to our main site, like orders of magnitude higher.
Um but Apple News offered no way to or other than following the publication on Apple News to deepen your relationship with a reader. And uh so we never were able to get them to subscribe to our newsletters to donate to become members. Like there was just no facility for doing that stuff. I think it's just such a huge opportunity if we can get the content on protocol and tell that story to build uh a news aggregator that is actually owned and operated by news publishers and offers them the opportunity to actually control their distribution layer in a way that they've never been able to in the digital space.
Um so that's my pitch at the moment. One thing I keep coming back to, and when I sit down and actually think instead of just get mad about why there's so many organizations that still really lean into Twitter and even individual journalists, it's it really is just all about the incentives. And so it feels like there's an opportunity to kind of move those incentives away from the traditional centralized protocols that we've got now and uh on to something where there's a lot more ownership. Umra, I'm kind of curious to get your perspective a little bit um thinking about those incentives.
And I I'm wondering if you have seen anything that has really moved the needle like in the feeds that you've created, um, are there opportunities to either give news organizations more feedback or allow them to kind of have some more control over some of those things. Um so like more control over like what specific things um well you know the so the content that they're putting out um whether that's on their own websites or on the protocol, you know, what what are things that we can do at kind of a technical level to help drive those incentives away from platforms like Twitter that you know D deplatform their links or um Facebook, which uh you know deprioritizes has been deprioritizing news for years now.
Well uh one thought I've had um I think this is like originally uh Devin from Grace's idea um is that to really unlock the power of like custom feeds um as a primitive that news or can start using, you need to uh like the discovery um story for custom feeds needs to be improved in some way. Um I'm not entirely sure how the best way of doing it, but uh I think Devin's suggestion was to allow um if you create a feed to have it be uh to kind of pin it more front and center on your user profile.
Say you are a news org and you create a feed of all of the journalists at your news org, and it's a way that you can see at a glance what all the journalists at your news org are talking about. At the moment it's buried like four tabs deep onto your profile, and most people don't ever kind of you know click through to that. I feel like have like little you know pin posts like maybe above your other pin post being like, oh by the way, we have a we have a custom feed if you want to engage with our journalism that way.
Um that might encourage more news orks to kind of start using that affordance. I think in general, um news orgs are a bit slow to discover the affordances that um A atproto offers. Um I think in I I kind of have a bit of a suspicion that if they weren't kind of initially incentivized to use uh domain handles, um one of the aspects of uh the feeds that I run is I require some kind of verification and prior to Bluesky having a uh the decentralized verification system that they have now, um, the only way you could really do that was via domain handles.
Um and so in order to verify titles, I require they have a domain handle, and I kind of suspect that if they weren't kind of like incentivized to to use that feature, they might not have and we'd have a lot more news orgs with BSky.social handles. So um, you know, kind of as developers, one thing we can do is start using the affordance ourselves and showing how they can be used in a productive capacity. And I think kind of once we start doing that, it'll be a lot easier for news orgs to start using them themselves, but also again, discovery is I think one of the biggest challenges facing it.
Yeah. Discovery is a huge issue there. Tyler, I'm curious as somebody who builds uh discovery platform in some ways. What are some are there affordances that we can either help with on the protocol, or are there things that publishers can do that would help make their work more discoverable outside of you know the the big five platforms? Yeah, um a challenge I have in SIL is getting metadata about the link, um, which is really silly because in the head of every HTML document is on news sites especially are open graph tags and JSON LD. And the whole purpose of those tags is that so platforms like mine can describe them.
However, this is largely due to LLMs. I can no longer get that data because I get blocked every time. So I do all kinds of crazy browser proxying stuff with Cloudflare and whatever to like try to force them to render the page. But it gets harder every day. Um and so again uh journalism on anti-proto extremists, if I had a standard site record to reference, this wouldn't be a problem. Um I can just go get that. Um so that that's you know part of my end goal is um having uh the the ways we get link metadata on the web are broken by AI now.
Um so I think the protocol offers an opportunity to put that in a new space that is effectively a big decentralized database in on the internet. Um so I'm really excited about that opportunity. Um I talked yesterday uh in uh in a talk I gave about atmospheric clients that um atmospheric clients in order to win people over have to be immediately interesting. Um so when you come to SIL, if you've already invested a ton of time in the people you follow and you have a good network, SIL is immediately interesting. If you haven't, it's not. Um so I've been thinking about how if you're brand new to the Atmosphere, or like you know, you're you're here but you only follow 20 people or something, how can I uh point you in the direction of trustworthy news from SIL and say, okay, follow these feeds, these starter packs uh or whatnot.
Um I can't maintain all those feeds and starter packs by myself, I would lose my mind. Uh so what's the community-driven approach to um uh uh maintaining all that and it would be great if news orgs you know uh did that themselves and be like here's the here's the New York Times journalism starter pack, right? Uh and here's their custom feed of all their stories uh and and everything their journalists are talking about. That would be great. Um so yeah, uh journalism might deparate extremists. The answer is always the protocol. Um the uh point that you make about uh open graph tags is like really interesting.
I I ran into that um last week when I was working on the news classifier at Edmontalk yesterday, I talked about labeler I've created that tries to uh scan the open graph tags of news articles on the news feed and applies a genre label. So if it's like sports or entertainment or hard news or whatever to it, and like yeah, getting open graph tags of all things is really challenging. What I actually ended up doing is I ended up um just uh kind of using Cardi B, which if unfamiliar is uh Blue Skies uh preview link previewer service that kind of pulls the metadata and kind of the reason why that works is like I think news orgs have seen incoming requests from this Cardi B.bSky dot social domain and have like kind of like uh allow listed it, which means that it can kind of get through those.
But yeah, it's I would love to see standard site become more of a thing that news orgs can use to promote this information. Speak of the devil in a shallow pier. Standard side is mentioned, look who shows up. So in the in the last few minutes that we've got here, we've got a room full of people who build and a few media folks. Um I guess I'm curious from y'all's perspective, what are the things that this crowd can go out and build that we think either realistically or just completely pie in the sky. I I have a bet with myself that uh this is gonna be the year of an atproto native CMS.
Um so not just plugins that will will publish a standard site document, but um you know a full-blown CMS. You know, beyond just like the blogging tools are great, we love you guys. But um, you know, something that that can that is actually useful in Tyler, you were mentioning one of the challenges um is that a news organization is composed of many people. And um, and so the idea of saving individual documents to everybody's PDS doesn't really track. And so Tyler, maybe I'll start with you and then we can finish up with Andra. Like, you know, what are the things that this crowd can build that'll make the work that you do easier and better, but also that will make the internet uh a less crummy place.
Yeah, so the project I got a grant for I call wire service. Um and originally what the first thing I did with wire service and the thing that the community fund uh got in touch with me about was a WordPress plugin from uh WordPress to standard.site uh it works, but then uh automatic came out with our own you should use theirs. Um I don't actually want to maintain a WordPress plugin. So um but I think we do need like a full A2 proto CMS would be amazing. CMS migrations are so hard and take years uh for larger news organizations to pull off.
So I'm at the moment more interested in uh how do we get the publishing tools they're already using to speak standard.site so which is why I started with WordPress, but Ghost would also be great. Um Drupal, I don't know, people still own Drupal, maybe Drupal. Um great. Yeah. Awesome. Then we need the then we need a Drupal plugin. Um so yeah, I've I'd love to see uh more uh tools that help people from wherever they already are uh uh speak atproto. Um so that's that's what I'm you know thinking about with wire service uh in addition to like the lexicon, the sort of middle piece of the content lexicon and the um the renderer, the the premium news experience.
Yeah, um all of that. Uh and like uh you know I I quite often describe um newsroom development as like CMS development on hard mode uh and it's so many you know requirements that you have in a newsroom CMS are like the sort of thing you would uh not really think about if building like a piece of blogging software. So yeah, uh totally agree that kind of building things where people already are so that you can start talking like the dialects of um the Atmosphere is I think a really good starting point. Uh what I would personally like to see builders uh do in terms of like this space is experiment with labelers.
Um labels are such a cool technology, they're not super hard to set up. They're they're a little bit finicky to set up. I'll I take the back. They're a little bit finicky to set up, but like once you kind of get them like you know, talking to the app and everything else, they're you know you you can run a basic labeler like pretty easily. And um what that allows is something that like you can't do on any other social platform. You can you know write annotations to other people's posts and let other people subscribe to those annotations.
Being able to annotate like random pieces of content on network like that and happy we'll be able to subscribe to that. That's a really cool feature. And not only do you get that, but you also get like you can use in like a moderation capacity. Um I'd really love from like Bluesky in terms of that technology would be uh two things. One, uh links and descriptions, uh like in like label descriptions, um, my media ownership labeler. I would love to create like a micro site that's you know detailed information about the media ownership of like the companies that it uh labels.
Um but there's no way to kind of do you know links via label descriptions yet. But the other thing is being able to do like one-off labels. Uh I I think if like you could create one off labels that can at the moment, like a label definition, it's like if you create a label called uh something, um they'll have the same description every single time that label is labeled is attached to a piece of content. Whereas um I would love to be able to like attach a unique label to pieces of content that can add to because that would open up the way to do some really cool stuff in the space, for instance, like uh fact checking would be like uh one use case for that.
Um you could uh as like a fact checking org, you could add a label to post that um kind of almost like a community notes sort of thing a little bit. Um at the moment that's like really challenging. Kind of what you'd sort of have to do would be to create like a micro site and have people post like you know, paste the link to the post or whatever. It'd be messy. Um so yeah, like kind of like one-off labels would be like a really I think cool feature as well. Excellent. That's fantastic. We are just about at time.
Uh Jonathan Warden, who uh is here, I keep running into him, and he's giving a presentation. It might even be next um about he he essentially forked the the Bluesky app view and created his own. He calls Blues Notes, and he did just that. He added kind of a community notes feature, and um so we're trying to figure out work with him. We've got our own product roadmap, so we're trying to figure out how we can possibly web wedge something like community notes in there. Um really appreciate Andra and Tyler coming up and uh and presenting.
I hope my hope from this presentation is that y'all will go away and have at least one amazing idea for how we can help improve the media media ecosystem because it's not just gonna happen on its own. Um so we need to get we need folks to get out there and build stuff. So um please come talk to us, ask questions, um, we'll be on the hallway track just like everybody else. So thanks again for coming out. Appreciate it. Thank you very much.