More PfP✨ London Updates and a blizzard of festive links
A bonus edition of the Newsletter with some event announcements and a bunch of links
Happy Festive End-of-Year Season! 🎊
This is a bonus newsletter to send everyone off on their holidays.
Firstly, pre-registration for PfP✨ London (Feb 4-5, 2026) is off to the races. We already have a number of people signed up for the Showcase (you can add your name here) and there is a good amount of applications to join the Stakeholder Forum (apply on Luma here). Those initial applications will be processed before the end of December so people can plan their trips.
Speaker Updates
We are very lucky to have Ben Werdmuller (ProPublica) fly over from the US to act as MC for both the Showcase and Stakeholder Forum. Ben participated in PfP✨ NYC and gave us early encouragement to run the event again in London. An experienced tech leader in the news space, Ben provides a wealth of insight and can serve as an excellent bridge between the learnings we had in New York and European context.
For speakers we are happy to welcome Ændra Rininsland, creator of the 📰 News feed and X-Block and many other atproto projects (see her extensive list of projects), who will take the stage in London to show us how news orgs can build engaging reader experiences on AT Protocol.
There are more speakers to be announced for our Showcase once we get the logistics sorted. As always, see the PfP✨ London event page for all the latest details →
Sponsors Updates
PfP✨ is not a company with paid employees, but a community effort. It takes a lot of work to convene people, organize venues, provide food, etc. We couldn't do it without the support of great partners. In addition to the Newsmast Foundation we would also like to thank the following:
Bluesky is a social app built on the AT Protocol, an open source toolbox for building social apps that can all talk to each other.
Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit building a better technology future — powered by people, open by design, fueled by imagination.
The AT Protocol Community Fund is an independent, community-led fund supporting the AT Protocol ecosystem with infrastructure, open source code development, and community initiatives like meetups and events including ATmosphereConf (Vancouver, March 2026).
If you know of an organization willing to pitch in, please connect us: team@protocolsforpublishers.com
In closing
Finally, like the year's first snowfall, we'll leave you with a gentle flurry of links for some cozy reading—whether you're bundled by the fire or basking on the beach.
Until next year, and in 2026 may all your protocols be open! 🍾
— PfP✨ Team
PS. Although the newsletter will pause, the PfP✨ Team won't. If you have questions or want to make introductions during the holiday season, please do. Response time may be a bit slower than normal, but we will respond. Thank you for your support.
🔀 AI in and out of The News
OpenAI launched the OpenAI Academy for News Organization, a hub for journalists and publishers. The new academy is launched in partnership with American Journalism Project and The Lenfest Institute. The site includes "on-demand training, practical use cases, open-source projects, and guidance on responsible uses." Link →
Associated Press released AP Verify, an AI-powered tool to help journalists authenticate online photos, videos and other digital content. Plug in a link or file and AP Verify runs a series of machine learning and detection algorithms to help a newsroom verify digital artifacts quickly. Link →
The Local in Toronto and The Tyee in British Columbia both released new AI policies within the past week committing to human-made stories, photographs, and illustrations. Journalist Jen St. Denis points out iHeart Radio's new tagline: “Guaranteed human” The Local's AI Policy →, The Tyee's AI Policy →
🪪 License to Bill
The Really Simple Licensing Collective (backed by Cloudflare, Fastly, Reddit, Akamai, Ziff Davis, Yahoo, O'Reilly… and now Creative Commons has been added to the wall of other supporters) hit 1.0 this month. RSL allows a publisher to license each piece of content, for example "blocking" AI crawlers or directing them to a collective licensing agreement that pays out royalties to members. Link →
If you would like to see more licensing options check out Nick Vincent's community curated list of initiatives at datalicenses.org Link →
⚙️ Standards Operating Procedures
It didn't take long for OpenAI to adopt Anthropic's Model Context Protocol, and now the two AI hyperscalers are working together to "standardize" how MCP servers deliver content using interactive interfaces (think charts or forms) into a chat stream. This is the (de facto) standard playbook we have seen before from the likes of the previous generation of hyperscalers. Link →
Relatedly, Anthropic "donated" the open source MCP to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), which is under the Linux Foundation. The AAIF is "co-founded by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI, with support from Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloudflare, and Bloomberg." Link →
W3C Advisory Board member and accessibility expert Hidde de Vries writes about one of the breakout sessions at this year's Technical Plenary and Advisory Committee, asking "Who wins when we filter the open web through an opaque system?" Link →
🎭 The Social Good, The Social Bad
Graze Social — a previous PfP✨ sponsor — launched new experiment ATProtoFans: a way for Fans to support Creators. Fans make a one-time payment and a verified record is stored on both the Fan and Creator PDS. There is no middleman, Creators have a direct relationship to their fans. Link →
“The media outlets of the Fascintern — X, Meta, Google — are all structured to exert strong editorial control according to their business and political preferences. These systems … [are] not at all like a public space.” Robin Berjon walks through two faulty mental models for staying on ”Fascintern” media and calls for clear leadership to leave these private networks for open ones. Link →
🦶 And now for something completely different
dokilei is a clientside editor allowing people to create and publish articles using their preferred decentralized identity and storage. Recently they presented at the W3C Credible Web Community Group. There are some interesting features here for annotation and fact-checking, all built on standards. Try editing the product site yourself! Slides →
