PfP✨ Toronto Speaker Lineup

Over on our social media (🦋 Bluesky | 🐘 Mastodon | 💼 LinkedIn) we have been posting speaker announcements. Now we have the full lineup!

For the Showcase on Monday, October 5th:

• The Green Line publisher Anita Li and head of product and growth Temitayo Akinyemi on how can independent newsrooms build modern, audience-centred products and sustainable business models without relying on Silicon Valley’s platform dominance.
• Violet Cortes and Cole Capilongo of Hypha survey the state of the art in digital provenance—techniques for tracing a digital asset's lifecycle—and demo a tool that traces image histories on Bluesky, adding context to the scroller's experience.
• Seher Shafiq, global community programming lead at Mozilla Foundation will be discussing the use of open weight AI models and the alternatives to large centralized models.
• Nikita Roy, founder of Newsroom Robots Lab and co-author of The Science of First: Catching Early Signals Before They Become News, will explore emerging approaches to value exchange, access and monetization in an agentic ecosystem, and consider the strategic questions news organizations should be thinking about as the landscape evolves.

For the Stakeholder Forum on October 6th we have a special guest speaker:

• Christine Lemmer-Webber, co-authour of ActivityPub and Executive Director of the Spritely Institute will present the threats and opportunities for work in our space, especially given various recent international developments.

Big thanks to our speakers and to our partners that make this event happen:

Learn more about each of the speakers on the event page:

Protocols for Publishers ✨ Toronto
Toronto 🇨🇦
October 5-6 2026

Learn more and register →

It's been a few weeks since our last roundup, so this one is packed with some of the bits you may have missed amongst all the news of rogue AI and the renaming of lakes.

🤖 AI

Politico has moved to a headless CMS called Sanity, leveraging AI 'which can be used to build prototypes and apps as well as help “connect dots” between work being submitted by journalists globally.' https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/digital-journalism/how-politico-has-boosted-ai-innovation-by-moving-to-one-headless-cms/

Local Media Consortium has launched an AI accelerator to "help local media companies assess AI readiness, identify opportunities for implementation, and shape future training, resources and services." The initiative is supported by the Knight Foundation and is run in partnership with Stellis AI, an AI adoption consultancy. https://www.localmediaconsortium.com/post/local-media-consortium-launches-ai-accelerator

WSJ ran a billionaire op-ed that used AI without disclosure, sparking a debate over transparency. Editors from around the US had thoughts: https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/08/are-newspaper-opinion-sections-embracing-ai-written-op-eds/

Creative Commons examined its guidance for its six licenses and two public domain tools to see if it still holds up in an era of AI. CC has concluded that it does. https://creativecommons.org/2026/09/03/guidance-on-using-cc-licenses-in-an-ai-ecosystem/

💬 Social

Robin Berjon argues for active democratic control over social media infrastructure rather than passive defensive measures: democracy is losing because it's trying to defend democracy on platforms owned and controlled by authoritarians. Key phrase for PfPers: "social media isn't just another media — it's the leading distribution channel for other media too" https://berjon.com/media-media/

Bluesky has launched the alpha of its extension to the AT Protocol that enables "non-public data" to be published to the network, aka the "Atmosphere." Until now, all content published to the AT Protocol network has been public, including "every post, every follow, every like, every block." This new extension, dubbed "Atproto Spaces" will unlock a whole new category of applications built on AT Protocol. https://atproto.com/blog/atproto-spaces-alpha

CrowdTangle was an important social listening tool for Facebook used by journalists and researchers to track and fight the spread of viral disinformation. In 2024 Meta shut it down since it made the company look bad. The researchers had a funeral. With no blessed tool from Meta researchers struggle to see what is going on inside the Facebook silo. Now new AI-powered tools are crawling Facebook and other platforms to help journalists and fact-checkers. https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/09/two-years-ago-meta-killed-crowdtangle-can-a-new-ai-tool-fill-the-void/

Chicago Public Media has launched Chicago.com, a "community platform" that will run a network of online social communities for Chicago neighbourhoods. The platform is built using New_ Public's Roundabout which is built on the open social AT Protocol. https://werd.io/chicagos-social-network-is-a-huge-bet-for-news-i-think-its-the-future/

Peter Nowack interviews Ben Waldman founder and chief executive of Canadian social media app Gander (built using the AT Protocol). They discuss the challenges of digital sovereignty when building a modern app that does not depend on US digital services. https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/can-gander-social-pave-the-way-for

🤝 Trust

The new web standard Originator Profile (OP) embeds a cryptographic signature in website to verify a news site with the aid of a browser plugin. OP is being used by Japanese news orgs like Yomiuri Shimbun, Asahi Shimbun, and NHK as a method to battle misinformation. https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/08/japanese-publishers-are-fighting-imposter-news-sites-with-a-cryptographic-signature/

Semafor exposed a network of YouTube channels with nearly identical videos using paid actors reading sensationalized AI-assisted scripts that target progressive politicians in the US. Just one had 14 million views. The US midterms are coming. https://www.semafor.com/article/09/02/2026/paid-actors-ai-writing-how-a-new-kind-of-video-business-cashed-in-on-americas-divided-politic

The DW Akademie (Deutsche Welle's center for media development, journalism training, and knowledge transfer) has released The Hype Literacy Toolkit for Journalists, a self-paced course to help journalists understand hype, and how to question the promises and apocalyptic visions of industries such as AI, Quantum, and space travel. https://akademie.dw.de/hype-literacy/

The Technology Freedom Cooperative uses decentralized storage protocols to back up important investigative information such as police records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Data is stored across 20 servers in 4 countries, a defensive archival strategy in case of hostile administrative takedowns. https://www.techpolicy.press/technology-freedom-cooperative-to-build-infrastructure-for-human-rights-and-justice-groups/

💰 Money

YouTube released an AI-powered tagging system for Creators to automatically tag products in videos and link them to Amazon affiliate links. https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/462969877/start-tagging-amazon-products-with-the-youtube-shopping-affiliate-program-%25F0%259F%259B%258D%25EF%25B8%258F?hl=en

🗓️ Events

tbd/con is a virtual conference for people who have more questions than answers about AI. There are 150+ people coming together in 21 sessions over two days to think about who AI actually serves, what it does to information ecosystems, whether safety and openness can coexist, and how we can work together. (Disclosure: Chad from Team PfP✨ is a co-organizer). Sep 23-24, Online. https://www.tbdcon.ai

Hacks/Hackers AI x Investigative Journalism Forum with The New York Times. Sep 25, New York. https://luma.com/ai-investigative-journalism-forum-2026

The next FediForum, the semi-annual online unconference for open social protocols such as ActivityPub and ATProtocol. Oct 6-7, Online. Check out the list of proposed topics and register at: https://fediforum.org/2026-10/

News Product Alliance Summit 2026. PfP✨ Toronto speaker Nikita Roy and PfP✨ London MC Ben Werdmuller will both be speakers! Oct 21–23, Chicago. https://newsproduct.org/summit

JournalismAI Festival "is the premier gathering for journalists, newsroom leaders, and technologists to share what AI really means for publishers, in practice, not theory." Nov 17-18 London and Online. https://www.journalismai.info/festival

Atmosphere Conf 2027, the third edition of the AT Protocol community conference, has been teased for Europe Late April 2027. Sign up for updates at and learn more https://news.atmosphereconf.org/3mv6jew7jyc2v