Jim Ryan 24:42 10:00 AM. 24:43 Good morning, everyone. 24:45 Welcome to day 2, or day 5, or day 7, depending on when you got to Vancouver. 24:52 Very good to see your faces, especially since I hear about some of the damage that happened last night that we're not going to talk about. 25:01 So this morning, once again, we're at the Media and Civics track here at AtmosphereConf 2026. 25:07 I'm Chad Gaholic from the Protocols for Publishers project. 25:10 You might have heard. Tyler Fisher 25:12 And this— Jim Ryan 25:13 we're gonna kick off the morning with a discussion with some of our news and journalist folks here. 25:20 And I'm just gonna turn it over to Jim to take over. Aendra Rininsland 25:24 Thank you, Chad. 25:24 And thanks for the work that you do with Protocols for Publishers. 25:27 I got to meet some of those folks in London a couple of months ago, including our fine guests here today. 25:33 So thank you again. 25:35 My name's Jim. 25:35 I work at Bluesky on our DevRel team. 25:38 If you have questions about how the platform works, you're looking for the other Jim, and he's giving a talk later today. 25:43 I'm joined by Andra Rinnensland 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. 25:55 Just to show you that I'm the old guy, they were getting into media as I was leaving it. 25:58 So, but we're gonna, we're gonna talk a little bit about How and why news organizations should build on @proto. 26:09 You'll notice that I throw out a bit of a gauntlet about capitalization on @proto there. 26:14 And we also realized at the very last minute we maybe should have named this one Meet the Press. 26:18 But, so, really what we want to do is just kind of like have kind of an open free-form conversation about what we've seen has worked. 26:26 Clearly there's a lot of things that are not working with media. 26:30 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. 26:38 So I'm hoping Andra and Tyler have some better solutions. 26:42 And so we'll start off with Andra, who has been working in media since the early 2010s. 26:50 And you're based in London, that's correct? 26:52 Yeah, excellent. 26:53 So I'm gonna hand it over to you, and maybe you can kick us off with some of the approaches that you have seen that have worked, and maybe what's changing a little bit. Tyler Fisher 27:05 Thanks. 27:06 Yeah, as mentioned, I'm Andrew Renningsland. 27:08 I run the news feed and trending news feeds on Bluesky. 27:12 And what has worked? 27:14 Well, so some of the things I find that really connect with publishers is the identity system is like a really big part of it, both in terms of being able to set your username to your domain name for your newspaper, as well as The new verification system I think is really cool as well, for news orgs to be able to verify their own journalists instead of having to wait for some large tech company apparatus to do that for them. 27:41 I think it's like a really powerful feature. 27:43 I'd also really love to see journalism societies kind of start using more of the affordances of the platform in that way. 27:50 Like, for instance, like having, you know, journalism journalist unions might be like a really powerful place for doing the verification layer. 27:58 I'm not sure if I answered the question in terms of what's worked. 28:01 There's a— I think in general the reach that Bluesky gives news orgs is like really, really good. 28:10 And the kind of traffic that news orgs are getting from Bluesky is really impressive. 28:14 Anecdotally, I've talked to a few orgs who have said that Bluesky traffic has kind of outpaced a lot of other social networks, even ones that are like much, much bigger than Bluesky. 28:23 Blue Sky. 28:24 And I think that is reflective of just how engaged with news the Blue Sky community is, and the atmosphere in general. 28:32 And it's interesting how there's kind of been this movement of people who are really seriously interested in journalism to the platform. 28:41 And I think kind of as builders, it's important to think, how do we keep the momentum going? 28:45 And how do we encourage more people to start making use of those affordances? 28:51 Because I think kind of at this point, You're right, trying to bully people off of Twitter so that they just use Bluesky is probably a bit of a diminishing return strategy at this point. 29:03 I think how we win is we start showing how the affordances of the platform, of the atmosphere, lend themselves to really good journalism and good engagement with audience. Aendra Rininsland 29:17 Thank you, André. 29:19 I realize I neglected to introduce folks. 29:21 So Andra's been working in the industry and runs the breaking news feed, as you mentioned. 29:27 One thing that took me a minute about the breaking news feed is that it actually works much better as an input to other feeds. 29:33 And so when you can start inputting that into something like Graze, then— but you've done the work of going through and looking for basically every actual legitimate news organization that's on the network. 29:44 And then Tyler, in addition to his previous life working in media for companies like the New York Times, he runs an app called Syl. 29:54 Do we have any Syl users in the house? 29:56 Fantastic. 29:58 And I won't even mention what Syl kind of resembles from previous iterations of this, but Syl is just a fantastic news aggregation app. 30:07 And so you log in with your Bluesky account, with your Atmosphere account, with your Mastodon account even. 30:16 And then it scrapes your timeline and finds all of the links. 30:19 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. 30:26 So Tyler, maybe you can talk a little bit about kind of your experience building SIL and some of the conversations that you've had with publishers and what resonates with them. Speaker D 30:38 Yeah. 30:38 Yeah. 30:38 So I'm mostly known in the anti-piracy space for SIL. 30:43 Most of how I pay my bills is through consulting for news organizations. 30:50 I don't work for the New York Times, but have worked for other large, large national news organizations. 31:03 With Syl, certainly my biggest user base is individual journalists because they are on social media to follow news. 31:10 And communicate and have conversations about news. 31:14 But also they have actual jobs where they have to write and do reporting. 31:20 So they can't be on the feed all day. 31:24 Some certainly are anyway. 31:26 There's definitely an addictive property of microblogging. 31:31 But I find a lot of journalists are like, well, I've gotta write and go to my meetings and do my thing, but I can come back to Syl throughout the day and see what the conversation has been at a glance rather than having to scroll the 3 hours of my timeline that I missed. 31:48 There was— first, before I say this, I want to get a feel in the room. 31:53 How many people here are coming from the journalism side, like you work at a news org or somehow are affiliated with news publishing? 32:01 Okay. 32:01 Small amount. 32:02 How many people are more like builders in this space? 32:05 Okay, almost everybody. 32:06 Great. 32:07 So I feel like I can come at this from two perspectives, right? 32:10 Why news organizations should be buying in on AT Proto and also why they're not yet. 32:15 I think I can sort of give both sides of this. 32:18 So I think I'm going to tailor what I say to why they're not yet, given who we have in the room. 32:25 So I think, you know, having them join Bluesky is great and like BlueSky offers better traffic and referral traffic than the other platforms because it doesn't downrank links. 32:38 It has tools like Sill in the ecosystem that even do even more to promote links. 32:42 You have the ability of custom feeds to really hone in on a topic or things like that. 32:48 Or as Andra has talked about many times, news orgs themselves can build custom feeds that really center in on their journalists and their communities. 32:58 And that's just a really powerful primitive that they could be building on. 33:02 Last week, The Verge reported that Google is rewriting headlines with AI in search results. 33:09 I quote posted their post about that and said, this shit is why I'm a journalism on AT Proto extremist. 33:17 So like, I'm a believer, but I also get why they're not. 33:22 And so when I say I'm an AT Proto extremist, for journalism. 33:27 I'm not talking about just having an account on Bluesky and linking to your journalism. 33:32 I mean putting your journalism on the protocol, right? 33:35 And like Standard.site is a really exciting community that offers us some affordances to do that. 33:41 But I think there's some things that are missing, right? 33:43 So first, Standard.site has no concept of authorship. 33:48 And I think that's partially because The folk that I love, the Leaflet and Pocket and Offprint folks, they're focused on like solo bloggers for most of the time, whereas news organizations have many authors and many contributors. 34:02 And like, you need a way to describe those relationships. 34:05 What desk does this person work for? 34:07 Are they a freelancer? 34:09 We need better ways on protocol describing those relationships for every individual document and who worked on them. 34:16 And then also the content lexicon thing is a real problem to be solved. 34:21 It was announced yesterday that I am receiving a small grant from the Community Fund. 34:24 Thank you to the Community Fund. 34:27 And I'm trying to work in this space of like, how can we describe news content on the protocol and work within the bounds of standard.site for that? 34:42 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. 34:51 Um, I, I talk a lot about Apple News on AT Proto. 34:55 Um, Apple News offers a ton of reach. 34:59 Um, and I know this because I've implemented Apple News at publications I've worked at, um, 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. 35:12 Um, but Apple News offered no way to, other than following the publication on Apple News, to deepen your relationship with a reader. 35:21 And, uh, so we never were able to get them to subscribe to our newsletters, to donate, to become members. 35:28 Like, there was just no facility for doing that stuff. 35:30 I think it's just such a huge opportunity if we can get the content on Protocol and tell that story to build 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. 35:51 So that's my pitch at the moment. Aendra Rininsland 35:55 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 really is just all about the incentives. 36:07 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 onto something where there's a lot more ownership. 36:20 André, I'm kind of curious to get your perspective a little bit thinking about those incentives. 36:24 And I'm wondering if you have seen anything that has really moved the needle, like in the feeds that you've created, 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? Tyler Fisher 36:44 So like more control over like what specific things? Aendra Rininsland 36:47 Well, you know, so the content that they're putting out, 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, de-platform their links, or Facebook, which, you know, deprioritizes— has been deprioritizing news for years now. Tyler Fisher 37:13 Well, one thought I've had, I think this is like originally Devin from Graz's idea, is that to really unlock the power of like custom feeds as a primitive that news orgs can start using. 37:27 You need to— like the discovery story for custom feeds needs to be improved in some way. 37:34 I'm not entirely sure how the best way of doing it, but I think Devin's suggestion was to allow— if you create a feed, to have it be— to kind of pin it more front and center on your user profile. 37:47 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. 37:56 At the moment, it's buried like 4 tabs deep onto your profile, and most people don't ever kind of, you know, click through to that. 38:05 If you like have like a little, you know, pinned post, like maybe above your other pinned post, be like, oh, by the way, we have a, we have a custom feed if you want to engage with our journalism that way. 38:14 Um, that might encourage more news news orgs to kind of start using that affordance. 38:19 I think in general news orgs are a bit slow to discover the affordances that ATproto offers. 38:30 I think in— I kind of have a bit of a suspicion that if they weren't kind of initially incentivized to use domain handles— one of the aspects of the feeds that I run is I require some kind of verification, and prior to Blue Sky having the decentralized verification system that they have now. 38:51 The only way you could really do that was via domain handles. 38:54 And so in order to verify titles, they required to have a domain handle. 38:57 And I kind of suspect that if they weren't incentivized to use that feature, they might not have. 39:04 And we'd have a lot more news orgs with bsky.social handles. 39:07 So as developers, one thing we can do is start using the affordances ourselves and showing how they can be used in a productive capacity. 39:16 And I think once we start doing that, it'll be a lot easier for news orgs to start using them themselves. 39:21 But also, again, discovery is, I think, one of the biggest challenges facing it. Aendra Rininsland 39:27 Discovery is a huge issue there. 39:29 Tyler, I'm curious, as somebody who builds a discovery platform in some ways, are there affordances that we can either help with on the protocol, or are there things that publishers can do that would help to make their work more discoverable outside of, you know, the big 5 platforms? Speaker D 39:47 Yeah. 39:48 A challenge I have in Syl is getting metadata about the link, which is really silly because in the head of every HTML document is— on news sites especially— are Open Graph tags and JSON-LD. 40:03 And the whole purpose of those tags is that so platforms like mine can describe them. 40:07 However, this is largely due to LLMs. 40:12 I can no longer get that data because I get blocked every time. 40:17 So I do all kinds of crazy browser proxying stuff with Cloudflare and whatever to like try to force them to render the page. 40:27 But it gets harder every day. 40:30 And so again, journalism on the internet is too pro-extremist. 40:34 If I had a standard site record to reference, this wouldn't be a problem. 40:37 I can just go get that. 40:41 So that's, you know, part of my end goal is having the ways we get link metadata on the web are broken by AI now. 40:54 So I think the protocol offers an opportunity to put that in a new space that is effectively a big decentralized database on the internet. 41:03 So I'm really excited about that opportunity. 41:07 I talked yesterday in a talk I gave about atmospheric clients that atmospheric clients, in order to win people over, have to be immediately interesting. 41:18 And so when you come to SILL, if you've already invested a ton of time in the people you follow and you have a good network, SILL is immediately interesting. 41:25 If you haven't, it's not. 41:28 So I've been thinking about how If you're brand new to the atmosphere or like, you know, you're here, but you only follow 20 people or something, how can I point you in the direction of trustworthy news from Syl and say, okay, follow these feeds, these starter packs or whatnot. 41:46 I can't maintain all those feeds and starter packs by myself. 41:48 I would lose my mind. 41:50 So what's the community-driven approach to maintaining all that? 41:55 And it would be great if news orgs did that themselves and be like, here's the New York Times journalism starter pack. 42:05 And here's their custom feed of all their stories and everything their journalists are talking about. 42:10 That would be great. 42:11 So yeah, journalism anti-pro-extremist. 42:15 My answer is always the protocol. Tyler Fisher 42:18 The point that you make about Open Graph tags is really interesting. 42:21 I ran into that last week when I was working on the news classifier. 42:26 At my talk yesterday, I talked about a labeler I've created that tries to scan the Open Graph tags of news articles on the news feed and applies a genre label. 42:35 So if it's like sports or entertainment or hard news or whatever to it. 42:39 And like, yeah, getting Open Graph tags of all things is really challenging. 42:44 What I actually ended up doing is I ended up just kind of using Cardi B, which if unfamiliar is Blue Skies preview, link previewer service that kind of pulls metadata. 42:55 And kind of the reason why that works is like I think news orgs have seen incoming requests from this cardi.bsky.social domain and have like kind of like allow listed it, which means that it can kind of get through those. 43:08 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. Aendra Rininsland 43:18 Speak of the devil and he shall appear. 43:20 As Standard Site is mentioned, look who shows up. 43:23 So 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. 43:29 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? 43:38 I have a bet with myself that this is going to be the year of an @proto-native CMS. 43:44 So not just plugins that will publish a standard site document, but a full-blown CMS. 43:50 Beyond just like— the blogging tools are great. 43:52 We love you guys. 43:53 But something that is actually useful in— Tyler, you were mentioning one of the challenges is that a news organization is composed of many people. 44:04 And so the idea of saving individual documents to everybody's PDS doesn't really track. 44:09 And so Tyler, maybe I'll start with you, and then we can finish up with Andra. 44:13 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 a less crummy place? Speaker D 44:23 Yeah, so the project I got a grant for I call Wire Service. 44:26 And originally, the first thing I did with Wire Service, and the thing that the community fund got in touch with me about, was a WordPress plugin from WordPress standard.site. 44:36 It works, but then Automattic came out with their own. 44:39 You should use theirs. 44:40 I don't actually want to maintain a WordPress plugin. 44:44 But I think we do need— like, a full A2Pro CMS would be amazing. 44:48 CMS migrations are so hard and take years for larger news organizations to pull off. 44:53 So I'm at the moment more interested in how do we get the publishing tools they're already using to speak standard.site. 45:01 Which is why I started with WordPress, but Ghost would also be great. 45:05 Drupal, I don't know if people still know Drupal. 45:07 Maybe Drupal. 45:10 Yeah, great. 45:11 Yeah. 45:12 Awesome. 45:13 Then we need a Drupal plugin. 45:17 So yeah, I'd love to see more tools that help people from wherever they already are speak AT Proto. 45:27 So that's what I'm thinking about with wire service in addition to the lexicon, the sort of middle piece, the content lexicon, and the renderer, the premium news experience. Tyler Fisher 45:41 Yeah. 45:43 All of that. 45:44 And like, you know, I quite often describe newsroom development as like CMS development on hard mode. 45:52 So many requirements that you have in a newsroom CMS are the sort of thing you would not really think about if building a piece of blogging software. 46:03 So yeah, totally agree that kind of building things where people already are so that you can start talking the dialects of the atmospheres is, I think, a really good starting point. 46:13 What I would personally like to see builders do in terms of this space is experiment with labelers. 46:19 Labelers are such a cool technology. 46:20 They're not super hard to set up. 46:22 They're a little bit finicky to set up. 46:24 I take that back. 46:25 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, you know, you can run a basic labeler like pretty easily. 46:33 And what that allows is something that like you can't do on any other social platform. 46:42 You can, you know, write annotations to other people's posts. 46:46 Posts and let other people subscribe to those annotations. 46:48 Being able to annotate like random pieces of content on the network like that and have people be able to subscribe to that, that's a really cool feature. 46:54 And not only do you get that, but you also get like, you can use it in like a moderation capacity. 46:59 What I'd really love from like Bluesky in terms of that technology would be two things. 47:05 One, links and descriptions, like in like label descriptions. 47:10 My media ownership labeler, I'd love to create like a microsite that's you know, detailed information about the media ownership of like the companies that it labels. 47:19 But there's no way to kind of do, you know, links via label descriptions yet. 47:22 But the other thing is being able to do like one-off labels. 47:27 I think if like you could create one-off labels that— at the moment, like a label definition, it's like if you create a label called something, they'll have the same description every single time that label is is attached to a piece of content. 47:43 Whereas I would love to be able to attach a unique label to pieces of content that can annotate because that would open up the way to do some really cool stuff in this space. 47:54 For instance, fact-checking would be one use case for that. 47:58 You could, as a fact-checking org, you could add a label to posts that, kind of almost like a community notes sort of thing a little bit. 48:06 At the moment, that's like really challenging. 48:08 Kind of what you'd sort of have to do would be to create like a microsite and have people post, like, you know, paste the link to the post or whatever. 48:15 It'd be messy. 48:17 Um, so yeah, like kind of like one-off labels would be like a really, I think, cool feature as well. 48:21 Excellent. Aendra Rininsland 48:23 That's fantastic. 48:23 We are just about at time. 48:24 Uh, Jonathan Warden, who, uh, is here, I keep running into him and he's giving a presentation. 48:31 It might even be next. 48:32 About— he essentially forked the Blue Sky app view and created his own he calls Blues Notes. 48:38 And he did just that. 48:39 He added kind of a community notes feature. 48:41 And so we're trying to figure out, work with him. 48:44 We've got our own product roadmap, so we're trying to figure out how we can possibly wedge something like community notes in there. 48:51 Really appreciate Andra and Tyler coming up and presenting. 48:54 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 ecosystem, because It's not just gonna happen on its own. 49:05 So we need folks to get out there and build stuff. 49:07 So please come talk to us, ask questions. 49:10 We'll be on the hallway track just like everybody else. 49:13 So thanks again for coming out. 49:14 Appreciate it. Jim Ryan 49:15 Thank you very much. 49:25 And Blue Notes is the next, next session. 49:28 So I'll see you guys back here for that. 49:31 Thank you very much.