Aendra Rininsland 1:58 So you have to clip this one. 2:07 Can I ask you something? 2:10 Yes, please. 2:12 Can I— you want to just tell me? 2:14 I want to where you're at, where everything would be best. 2:22 You never know where this— Can people hear me? 2:38 Thank you for your patience. 2:55 Cool. 2:56 Can people hear me now? 2:58 Wicked. 2:59 OK, awesome. 3:00 So please bear with me, I'm kind of breaking a little bit and following two of my heroes from the industry, and also I've basically had to completely revise my entire talk on the fly as a result of the earlier keynote. 3:12 So let's do this. 3:13 Yeah, so this is like about the third-ish time I've given this talk, but I've done it for completely different audiences the other two times. 3:21 The first time was for a group mostly of publishers in London at Protocols for Publishers. 3:25 Second time was for more of a journalism tech audience, mostly like journalism consumers, and this one's more for builders and people who are in this space. 3:35 And kind of the idea I'm going to be talking about is how can journalism start using the tools available in the atmosphere to start creating its own algorithms, and I'll talk about why it's important. 3:47 First off, a little bit about myself. 3:48 I work and have worked in news media since 2013 or so, but my background has always been kind of journalism and/or tech. 3:57 Kind of on some level. 3:59 I moved from Canada to London in 2011. 4:04 I also went to the UBC at one point. 4:05 It's really cool being on this campus again. 4:08 But I ended up in London. 4:09 Currently I work at a financial newspaper doing fancy charts mainly. 4:16 And but I've worked, I've had bylines in various papers including Financial Times, Times and Sunday Times, Economist, Guardian, etc. 4:23 And yeah, so I arrived in kind of like the decentralized social media space because I find it really interesting in terms of how do we— how can the space be used to present an idea of journalism that can be seen in ways that are censorship-resistant, that gives publishers more control over how their content is distributed, etc. 4:46 And so I started initially on Mastodon. 4:48 I was I created an instance on Mastodon called foreststate.media way back in 2018. 4:54 I think it was the very first journalism-related instance on the Fediverse. 4:58 I might be wrong about that. 4:59 Please correct me if I am. 5:01 It didn't really go anywhere. 5:03 I got maybe like 5 users and I shut it down literally the week that Musk took over Twitter, which was probably a good move in hindsight. 5:12 I kind of, you know, fell out of love with with ActivityPub as a way of distributing journalism because there are some topographical kind of issues with the network that I kind of found frustrating. 5:24 And then I, you know, I got a Bluesky invite in 2023 and I've really enjoyed being on the Atmosphere. 5:33 I've built a few different things, probably most notably the verified newsfeed and also the trending newsfeed. 5:40 Which I'll be talking about a little bit in a second. 5:43 Um, so yeah, uh, approaching this from two ways. 5:49 Uh, ATPro needs journalists. 5:52 I think that journalism is a very core function of any social media platform. 5:58 My theory of change, uh, and you need to have all the following for an effective social media network that kind of is a center of conversation. 6:07 You start with the creatives, the shitposters, the people who are doing artsy fun things on this brave new platform that no one's really ever heard of yet. 6:16 And, you know, those are kind of like the people who start the platform, who build interest for it, who pull interest from other people who will eventually join. 6:29 Academics are another big part of a healthy social network, seeing all this The stuff at AT Science yesterday was just like super, super cool. 6:38 It's really exciting to see so much work happening kind of in that space. 6:42 Any journalists, because journalists talk about what's happening on these platforms, they are a big part of why they're seen as being socially relevant. 6:53 And journalists kind of follow the creative types eventually, and following the journalists you also get politicians. 7:00 And I see politicians as a big driver of people joining the social network because people want to talk to their elected representatives, elected representatives want to talk to the constituents. 7:14 It's important for the health of the ongoing social network. 7:18 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. 7:25 People like to follow celebrities because they're curious what the people who they're excited about are. 7:29 And like, lastly, pornography is also like a really big part of what makes a healthy social network in my mind. 7:34 And I think that I have an idea for a talk maybe I'm going to do next year about why I think that's the case. 7:41 But anyways, I'm going to talk 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 by for-profit social networks like Twitter, X, Facebook, et cetera. 8:01 And this chart is from Magnitude Media using a data source called Junkopedia, which looks at social media traffic. 8:10 And it breaks down the most partisan-leaning political accounts on X in February. 8:17 And suffice to say, one of those circles is able to kind of impact the discourse a little bit. 8:25 If only it's a bit bigger is all I'm saying. 8:31 And I guess, you know, kind of why I 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 social media for sourcing news coverage. 8:52 And that's a big part of the day-to-day life of journalists. 8:55 And my personal belief— and I should mention that pretty much everything I'm saying is just completely all just my opinions, not reflective of any employer I've ever had— 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 elevate and incentivize far-right content. 9:19 So ATproto needs journalists, but also I think journalism needs ATproto. 9:28 I think ATproto solves a lot of the fundamental needs that you have for social network as a media organization, and I'll get into a few of those in a second. 9:41 Why I think this is the case: a lot of these charts are from the Reuters Digital News Report. 9:48 They track something called news avoidance, and I'm going to show some 3 different charts or different metrics. 9:53 This is from the 2024 edition because I couldn't find this longitudinal kind of data for 2025 yet. 9:58 But so this shows the proportion of people who report using no sources of news in the last week. 10:06 They just completely managed to avoid all the news headlines. 10:10 And in the last like 10 years, it's grown by about like roughly 10%, especially amongst younger age cohorts. 10:17 Further, you have, um, the amount of people who are extremely or very interested in news has declined substantially since 2015, to a point where the 18 to 24 demographic, only 33% are extremely or very interested in news. 10:35 This is from the 2025 data showing just the breakdown globally of news avoidance. 10:42 40% of all people surveyed are avoiding the news. 10:46 It's even bigger in like the younger cohorts. 10:48 In the 25 to 34 cohort, a full 43% of readers are actively avoiding the news. 10:55 So like, what's driving this? 11:00 I kind of feel in some ways that I think 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 newsworthiness or public understanding. 11:16 And as a result of that burnout, you have people who are moving to AI as a primary source of news. 11:23 This is the proportion that used AI chatbots for news in the last week. 11:27 This is also from the Reuters Digital News Report. 11:30 And it kind of is towards about 10% kind of globally. 11:38 And further, news leaders understand this challenge. 11:44 50% think it's going to be like a slow burn kind of impact on the industry, and 20% thinks it's going to be the next big thing. 11:50 So regardless, about 70% of news leaders think it's going to have an impact on the industry. 11:57 And yet despite all this, social media continues to be a major source of news, and in fact it's growing. 12:05 If you look at that orange line, that's the US. 12:08 In 2025, the US joined what Reuters refers to as the Social First Club, which is countries where a majority of people get their news primarily initially from social media. 12:20 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. 12:33 This is alluded to in the last talk, and I'm gonna go through it like very, very briefly, but this is my brief and incomplete recent history of algorithmic fuckery. 12:43 So this only goes back 20 2015. 12:48 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. 12:54 But these are the ones that kind of impact me. 12:56 Google Accelerated Mobile Pages, AMP, is one of them. 13:00 They— Google said, hey, if you use this new technology that makes news faster to download and read, we'll boost you in terms of PageRank. 13:08 And I think that had a pretty negative effect on the quality of news that was being served by Google. 13:14 As mentioned in the last talk, there was pivot to video. 13:16 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. 13:26 And it was devastating for an entire generation of journalists. 13:32 And I, I'm not sure if kind of like the younger core journalists have really even fully recovered from at this point. 13:38 2022, you have Musk taking over Twitter and deprioritizing outgoing links, which has had a major impact on news news traffic. 13:46 In 2023, you had Facebook blocking Canadian titles because of the Online Media Act. 13:53 Um, can't get Canadian news on Facebook no more. 13:56 And in 2024, you start to see, uh, AI overviews start to become a thing on Google, which has had a really massive impact on the traffic that news orgs receive from organic search. 14:08 Um, for this one, I've also added like a 2026 edition There's a few more things. 14:12 These are kind of like just loosely related. 14:14 They're not quite on topic with it, but you had like TikTok being sold to Oracle. 14:19 So you have a major upcoming channel for news be sold to a company for ultimately political reasons in a very politically fraught moment, let's just say. 14:33 You also had Congress pressuring Apple News over leftist bias. 14:36 So you have— so in both these examples, you have a government that is pushing technology providers to change how their algorithms work in order to better align with that regime's interests. 14:50 And then just this month, you have Google trialing, basically replacing human-written headlines with AI headlines. 15:00 And we also have the Superhuman Experts controversy where they Grammarly effectively had this new feature that they've since killed where it would offer writing advice from your favorite journalists. 15:14 Just the problem is they didn't ask the journalists if they could use their names. 15:17 So basically what I'm trying to get at with all this, I'm trying to make a point here, and my point is ultimately, why do we still trust big tech with news distribution? 15:27 There's lots of reasons why we probably shouldn't at this point. 15:32 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 on people's front lawns. 15:42 That was a very core function of the newspaper, and it related to distribution. 15:48 Since then, in the internet era, we basically handed that entire part of the business to tech companies whose interests are often not aligned with that of journalism or that of just public information. 16:01 So with that, a couple questions. 16:04 One, wouldn't it be cool if journalism wasn't held hostage by large tech companies and the billionaires who owned them? 16:10 And furthermore, wouldn't it be cool if journalists and news orgs had a say in how users discover news content? 16:16 And lastly, wouldn't it be cool if there was more transparency about why users are seeing news topics on social media? 16:22 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, you can't really interrogate, and you don't really know why you're receiving the news. 16:33 And furthermore, why is this the news of the day? 16:36 Um, wouldn't it be cool if we could kind of work to improve all of these things together? 16:41 And to some degree, uh, I think custom feeds are an answer to that. 16:46 Um, and it's one of those things that I think we're going to have to do some work as builders in this, um, in the atmosphere to try and teach newspapers how to use this technology. 16:59 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. 17:05 They can start doing it today, and frankly, very few have. 17:11 So these are two feeds I built. 17:12 This is probably what I'm best known for. 17:15 On the left, you have the OG reverse chronological news feed. 17:19 Which has about 300-ish-odd news orgs in it. 17:24 And on the right, you have the trending news feed, which is the same but using a very arbitrarily weighted trending algorithm. 17:33 I just chose random numbers for the trending news feed when I initially set it up. 17:37 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 weights to see which delivers the most user satisfaction for consuming the news. 17:53 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. 18:03 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 pushed in front of them by like the major traditional media. 18:20 So the newsfeed, my newsfeeds together, we have about 80,000 DAUs. 18:23 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. 18:33 But it's a start. 18:35 It proves it can be done. 18:37 And I think that's a point that we need to start start bringing to NewsOrg the fact that you can do these things now. 18:46 This is— and furthermore, you can do things that, like, you can do fairly easily. 18:50 This is my Graze page for the newsfeed, and there's a button that I've circled up top saying Remix. 18:57 And if you want to create your own version of the feed, say you want to exclude The Onion from it— the one satirical paper I have in the newsfeed is The Onion. 19:05 I kind of just take it as given that In 2026, you should probably know that The Onion is a satirical paper. 19:11 I still have people constantly asking to remove it, though. 19:13 If you want to, though, you can remix the feed, remove The Onion from it. 19:15 There you go. 19:16 I won't, though. 19:17 I love The Onion. 19:19 Or say you want to change like a sorting option, or say you want to make it so that, you know, image posts aren't allowed. 19:25 You can do that. 19:26 You can click Remix. 19:27 It will create a new version of my feed in your account. 19:31 It will still use the same list of orgs and whatnot. 19:34 And you can then have that as a personalized, improved source of news. 19:40 And similarly, Graze recently released a new feature called— it effectively uses a similar algorithm to the For You feed to find personalized content. 19:50 And in like 5 minutes of work, I created a new version of the feed that is like very personalized to my news viewing habits. 19:58 And anybody who uses Graze can just do this. 20:02 And news orgs that create their own feeds can create different ways in which users can view that content. 20:10 How am I doing for time, by the way? 20:13 Sorry. 20:16 Okay, cool, thank you. 20:20 So yeah, so these are two examples of like ways that news orgs or feeds could work in a kind of more localized capacity. 20:30 Like, so my two feeds are very, very global. 20:32 They're world news orgs, reverse chronological or trending as it is. 20:36 But you can also do things that are more specific to your news org and to that audience. 20:41 On the left is the Financial Times staff feed, which is a feed that I may have helped with. 20:46 And it's effectively anybody who the Financial Times account follows in one feed. 20:53 And like, I kind of love it. 20:54 Like, I use it like myself, like on a daily basis. 20:56 It's one of the first feeds I check in the morning. 20:58 Because it has all the contributors for the FT, you can see what are those journalists talking about at a glance in one place. 21:06 And you can pin 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. 21:14 Similarly, you have Rich Ferro's Minneapolis Ice feed, which I think is like a great example of using feeds in like a hyperlocal context. 21:21 Taking a topic that is really relevant to the local community and taking a combination of news content, local writers, individuals who are impacted, and putting into one place. 21:31 And I think that there's like a lot of really interesting use cases like this that local news can do. 21:36 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. 21:44 And so with that, I think I think a big part of what we need to do as builders is start popularizing this technology and trying things and just building feeds. 21:55 And whether it's using Graze or like Surf is also really, really exciting. 22:00 I mentioned Graze a lot, but Surf is super, super cool. 22:02 I've been playing with that a little bit. 22:04 Love the interface for it. 22:05 The new thing they mentioned earlier could also be cool. 22:12 Ultimately, there are many, and there's also like, yeah, so anyways, there's a lot of routes to create custom feeds now, and I think, you know, I would encourage people to just start building things. 22:24 If you don't have a source of news that you need on HTTP/Proto, just build it. 22:30 You can just do things and share with people and tell people 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. 22:42 It's kind of not exactly obvious for people who are new to Bluesky or to the atmosphere more generally. 22:51 Why should media orgs create custom feeds? 22:54 Because it connects their journalists with their audience. 22:56 If you make one for your paper, like the FT staff feed I mentioned, you can give them this very close summary of everything that your journalists are talking about, which again, if you're a subscriber, you might care about. 23:11 If you have multiple verticals, for instance, you can use a custom feed to unify them into one place. 23:16 And so even if you have multiple accounts that are publishing various other places, you can consolidate them into a singular feed. 23:23 You can also highlight top content. 23:24 You can use pinned posts to do promotions or to highlight a particular editorial. 23:30 Kind of like campaign or something of that nature. 23:34 One thing I would really love to see is custom feeds being used as a way of promoting, say, subscription deals. 23:40 Say you have a subscription 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? 23:49 Buy a subscription over here. 23:50 Lots of cool things that like a news org could do with a custom feed. 23:56 That maybe they're sleeping on and we need to tell them about. 23:58 And most importantly, all this stuff is like kind of free to use. 24:02 It doesn't require a huge capital outlay from a news org, most of which are increasingly cash-strapped, to be able to try these things and to do these things. 24:13 And one thing also 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. 24:23 So like 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. 24:33 These are organizations that are kind of connected with journalism but don't produce a lot of journalism themselves quite often. 24:41 They could use some of these technologies to do really cool things. 24:45 Say you're like a union of journalists, right? 24:47 You do your yearly renewal and you send out your form, hey, are you still a practicing asking journalists, where are you at, could I get some details updates, got a form saying, what is your Bluesky handle? 24:57 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 custom feed, and suddenly have a really good source of like independent journalism from the journalists who are either working at titles or freelance. 25:10 One of the, I think, biggest kind of things that like I wish the newsfeed could do better would be to surface freelance journalists and surface individual contributors kind of in that space. 25:21 I kind of balked at the idea of verifying every single journalist who came to me on Blue Sky asking to be added to a feed, so I didn't really do an individual journalist feed. 25:30 It would be really easy if you're like a journalist union, for instance. 25:36 And there's lots of kind of various things you could do with that. 25:40 You could, here's a wild idea, say like you're a journalism org like the NUJ like I mentioned, 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. 25:56 I think there's like a lot of tools for specifically independent titles and for small publishers that the Atmosphere provides that we really need to start talking to news orgs about because it could really change how they do things and really kind of improve some of the, you know, do more traffic and be able to use the platform better. 26:19 Um, another point I've been trying to make a little bit over the last little while is I kind of feel increasingly that journalism in 2026 is more than just reportage. 26:29 It's not simply taking view from nowhere, reporting the facts journalism all the time. 26:34 A lot of the time, like, in my mind, in some ways, as doing journalism in 2026 means helping the audience navigate this news climate. 26:45 Steve Bannon in 2016 had the expression "filling the zone with shit," which is basically the idea of creating so much just nonsense in the press that people don't really know where to focus or know where to focus their attentions on. 27:04 And I think kind of some of those slides earlier talking about news avoidance is a good indication that that strategy has been kind of successful. 27:11 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? 27:20 I've had a few ideas. 27:23 On the left you have XBlock, which is probably— I think it's Bluesky's longest running third-party labeler. 27:29 I built this back in, I think, 2024. 27:33 And it's been running ever since then. 27:35 It labels screenshots from social media platforms, whether it be Twitter or Bluesky itself or Threads or whatever. 27:42 I need to retrain the model because it's basically labeling most things as Twitter right now, but it works. 27:48 And I think people find it very, very useful as a way of kind of turning down the volume on their social media experience by not seeing screenshot junking from Twitter. 28:01 They're able to to have a kind of like cleaner, less emotive sort of social media experience. 28:06 And kind of like, you know, my experience with XBlock has informed two new labelers that I've created. 28:11 They're very much in development, they're a little bit trash right now, be forewarned if you like subscribe to them. 28:17 But I'm working on them, they're work in progress, and I'll explain what they are. 28:21 In the middle you have media ownership labeler. 28:24 I have this big list of all the titles in the newsfeed. 28:27 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. 28:39 And what it allows you to do, it lets you do two things. 28:43 First thing is you can have just like a little badge on every news title saying like what their funding model is. 28:48 So if you're just scrolling the news feed and you're kind of curious, you can see that. 28:52 The other cool thing is if you want to block all of Rupert Murdoch's papers, you can do that. 28:58 Last one is News Classifier, and this is like an idea that I've had for like a really long time. 29:01 I've wanted to find a way of classifying the content being emitted by the news feed. 29:07 It uses— and I only actually managed to figure out how to do this. 29:10 This idea has been circling my head for about like a year now. 29:12 I only managed to figure out how to do it about a fortnight ago. 29:18 This is kind of driven by getting a lot of requests for for, can I get the news feed but without sports? 29:24 Or the news feed without entertainment? 29:26 And it's kind of hard because news orgs publish all genres of content under like the same account name. 29:34 So I have a very, very light BERT text classification model that's looking at the OG tags of news orgs or news posts that are being emitted by the news feed. 29:46 And it tries to add a label to them, which is useful for downstream tooling. 29:49 Say you want to create a version of the news feed about sports, you can do that pretty easily using Graze. 29:55 It uses Contrails, which is a Graze feature that gives you like a WebSocket of all the content being emitted by a particular custom feed, and it makes the infrastructure side of it like a lot easier to deal with. 30:11 Okay. 30:13 I think that's it. 30:17 Thank you. 30:18 If you want to try remixing the news feed, grace.social/feed/396. 30:23 Again, encourage everyone to try and create their own news sources and try and use this technology to create a better understanding of news. 30:30 I'm open to questions if anyone has them, but I'm terrible at answering questions. 30:36 Hi. Speaker B 30:41 Excellent. 30:41 OK, so we have a few minutes to take some questions. 30:44 Do you have a question? 30:46 All right. 30:47 Thanks, Andrew. 30:49 Quick question, what you think about permissioned 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 the open— I don't know, a subscription product basically that could be sold, could actually generate revenue for news organizations. Aendra Rininsland 31:11 Yeah, so I think a big part of it is like the private data story for AT Proto. 31:15 Like until there's like more, you know, private data I think will facilitate more, and like permission data I think is how they're referring to it, will facilitate that kind of thing a lot better. 31:24 There's already some stuff you can do with Graze. 31:28 Excuse me. 31:31 I think Graze has some kind of like Patreon integration. 31:34 I'm not entirely sure how 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. 31:39 So it's kind of like a subscriber feed. 31:41 And so I think there are kind of things like that that could be useful approaches. 31:46 Again, though, the lack of permission data kind of makes it challenging to do subscribers-only sort of stuff, I think, kind of on the platform. Speaker C 31:57 Hello. 31:58 I have a question around— so we would love to work with more newsrooms, journalists, all of it. 32:07 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. 32:22 Like, it has to get you more views. 32:26 If it does that, everything else kind of is good. 32:29 Well, maybe not good, but fine. 32:30 Um, and the Atmosphere ecosystem is not yet at scale where I can promise someone like 2x views or anything like that. 32:40 But all this feed stuff is incredible. 32:43 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? Aendra Rininsland 32:58 Yeah, that's a big question. 32:59 And that one's really hard because— you know, convincing news orgs to switch en masse to Bluesky and potentially even like exclusively to Bluesky. 33:10 First of all, the exclusivity thing isn't going to happen because news orgs are like that. 33:15 But also the, you know, the more reach the platform has, the easier it is to make this case to news orgs. 33:23 And right now Bluesky's reach is not what the commercial platforms is. 33:27 That's just the long and short of it. 33:30 I think part of it is we need to increase that user base. 33:35 And my feeling is that one way to do that is by creating better news reading experiences. 33:41 If you create a news reading experience that, you know, privileges people's time and doesn't kind of overwhelm them nearly as much, that might be like one route in in which we can start building more traffic on, like AT Proto, for news-consuming experiences. 34:00 What Surf's doing really excites me, because it's a way of doing something that's not just on AT Proto, but also on ActivityPub, and pulling together these disparate sources of content in a way that is kind of engaging, but also very respective of your mental energy. 34:17 I really like how they have filters on Surf to hide politics content or Elon Musk. 34:23 I think part of it is we need to just create better news reading experiences and people will start gravitating towards them. 34:34 But yeah, the question of getting news orgs onto the platform is challenging. 34:38 I think, like, yeah, one thing I did with the newsfeed initially was required that all the orgs in it have domain verified handles. 34:50 It's called the verified news list, news feed, because I required anybody in it— this is before blue ticks were a thing on Bluesky— I required them to have a domain handle so I can actually verify they are who they say they are. 35:04 And I think in doing that, that pushed them to use a primary affordance of the platform which kind of sort of gave— had to put a bit of effort to do that. 35:20 They had to talk to their tech people to do the DNS entry. 35:23 They had to, you know, once you've invested that much effort into a platform, it's, you know, it's harder for someone to just be like, oh, we're not getting enough traffic from here, let's just like, you know, kill that entire account. 35:34 So I don't know, I think kind of encouraging news orgs to use primary affordance of the platform platform like custom feeds, like labelers. 35:40 It's one way we start to build in trust kind of in that space, I think, a little bit. 35:44 Not sure if I've answered your question, but it's a bunch of scattered thoughts. Speaker B 35:47 It's a problem for many bits and pieces. 35:52 We have a lot of news folks here. 35:54 Please, like, connect. 35:55 Connect with Protocols for Publishers as well. 35:57 We know we're trying to reach out to news organizations and help them, you know, figure out how they can leverage the Atmos atmosphere on top of all the other things that they're having to do. 36:06 So, uh, yeah, excellent question, and, you know, a lot of really great, um, solid ideas. 36:12 I think we're going to wrap it up here. 36:13 I don't know if you all can tell, there's like something going on outside here, and we're like trapped in this nest, and I don't know what's going to happen. 36:20 And I know that there's supposed to be some closing remarks. 36:22 We're at the end of the day, so thank you, news nerds, for coming out. 36:25 Um, thank you so much, Andra, for your presentation. 36:28 Again, thank you very much. 36:30 Andra's around, please find her. 36:32 Uh, you're around tomorrow, right? 36:33 Yep, yep, please find her in the hallways. 36:35 And thank you all, and we shall see you over there. 36:38 And then I'll see you tomorrow. 36:39 Tonight, there— don't forget, there is a party downtown tonight, uh, so please, uh, check that out. 36:45 Um, and we will be back here for more civics and media tomorrow.