As AI transforms digital discovery, how can independent newsrooms build modern, audience-centred products and sustainable business models without relying on Silicon Valley’s platform dominance? Drawing on The Green Line’s new website architecture, product roadmap and Action Journey®, our model for moving audiences from passive information consumption to meaningful civic participation, this session will explore how we’re using first-party and zero-party data, ethical AI and privacy-first features to deepen direct relationships with readers. We’ll also share how those relationships underpin our revenue diversification strategy, as we work to grow memberships, sponsorships and consulting into recurring streams while maintaining editorial independence and using grant funding as a catalytic rather than a defining source of revenue. Presented by The Green Line publisher Anita Li and head of product and growth Temitayo Akinyemi.

Unsourced and synthetic content is flooding the internet, and social platforms aren’t taking action. Trust in quality journalism is eroding. How can we show users where content comes from? How can we prove a photo originated in your newsroom and not someone else's? New technologies can help. Hypha has spent five years embedded with leading research teams in this field. We'll 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. Presented by Violet Cortes & Cole Capilongo of Hypha.

Seher Shafiq leads global community programming at Mozilla Foundation (the non-profit behind Firefox) to co-build a tech future that puts people first. Seher has a background in grassroots community building and civic engagement, and is an experienced writer and speaker whose commentary has been featured in radio, print, and TV with CBC, TVO, Global News, CTV CP24, Toronto Star, Al Jazeera, and more. She will be discussing the use of open weight AI models and the alternatives to large centralized models.

As AI agents increasingly shape how information is discovered, accessed and used, publishers are beginning to rethink the infrastructure and business models that underpin digital news. This session 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. Presented by Nikita Roy, founder of Newsroom Robots Lab and co-author of The Science of First: Catching Early Signals Before They Become News. Nikita has led many AI upskilling efforts in journalism including launching the AI Journalism Lab at the City University New York. Nikita serves on the boards of the Online News Association and the Canadian Association of Journalists, and is co-chairing the CAJ's 2026 national conference in Ottawa. See more of her bio and talks here →

Christine Lemmer-Webber leads a discussion of the changing geopolitical and technical landscape and which technical systems and approaching are rising to meet this moment. Christine has devoted her life to advancing user freedom. Realizing that the federated social web was fractured by a variety of incompatible protocols, she co-authored and shepherded ActivityPub's standardization. She has also contributed to many other free and open source projects, including co-founding MediaGoblin. Christine established the open source Spritely Project to solve known problems in existing centralized and decentralized social media platforms and to re-imagine the way we build networked applications — work that now continues at the Spritely Institute under her guidance as Executive Director.