You are what you read, watch, and listen to ..

I've spent 20+ years as a working journalist. The majority of that time was spent thinking about how to report the news and get information to people.

When I began as a writer/researcher at FactCheck.org in 2005, my job was fact-checking political ads. I regularly spent time calling up researchers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics to ask about the factual claims in various political ads. And a nearly equal amount of time looking through page source code for .avi files to scrape and host on our site.

When I left the Washington Post as Managing Editor in 2024, I was responsible for 350+ journalists working on visual journalism and audience distribution strategy. I sat in news meetings where visual forensic investigators created some of the greatest journalism with the most cutting-edge methods around -- an entire Pulitzer Prize package explaining

The AR-15's place in America,

Untangling TikTok's algorithm with 19K UGC submitted pieces and some sharp data analysis.

A visual investigation of what an LLM can and can NOT create.

What a privilege to sit in newsrooms and watch stories like these get pitched and sharpened. Best job in the world.

But most people don't have that kind of time. There's more genuinely interesting, genuinely useful stuff on the internet than we could read in a lifetime — and probably more than we could even sort through in a day.

An ... Atlas?

Distilling it down to a digestible, compelling sense of what each of us actually needs continues to be a Sisyphean task. That's one of the reasons my co-founders Liz Kelly Nelson, Ryan Kellett, and I sat down about a year ago and... made a list. A map. An Atlas.

At the The Independent Journalism Atlas, we occasionally joke that we're making lists upon lists upon lists. Lists of great journalists in your town. Lists of great journalists on the beats you care about, or the platforms you spend your time on.

That last list is particularly germane here, publishing on my Leaflet blog on the ATmosphere.

The Protocol of it all

If you're reading this through the Leaflet reader, or arrived via a Bluesky native link-back, you may already have some familiarity with protocol-based publishing. In short: Bluesky is built on a protocol called AT Protocol, part of a larger movement to build technology on open protocols instead of walled-garden platforms.

Protocols, not platforms — as Mike Masnick presciently wrote in 2019, in a seminal paper for the Knight First Amendment Institute. And if you're looking for a super short, plainspoken, non-technical explanation, the Hustle has a nice quick writeup here.

Over the last several years, that theoretical framework has produced real communities, real products, real businesses — though real questions about their sustainability remain.

This past March, I went to ATmosphereConf and gave a talk on how journalism might fit into that equation. My takeaways: journalism is going through its own decentralization. We just use different words for it. Let's build together!

After listening to other talks at the conference and across follow-up conversations in the months since, we were inspired to build Bluesky Creator Intelligence — a running, verified map of the journalists actually working on Bluesky right now.

As of our last snapshot, we're tracking 565 verified journalists active on the platform, with a discovery set spanning general news, media/power, government accountability, politics, and tech, down through sports, business, climate, and health.

It's a curated discovery layer — a way to see who's reporting where, on what. Kinda like Bluesky Starter Packs. EXCEPT, it doesn't map creators just on Bluesky. This list-of-lists is a directory of journalists on Bluesky who also have other journalism products on other platforms and/or the open web.

We think that data is the value we can offer to the ATProto community in particular. When I was in Vancouver at ATMosphere, I regularly heard questions about "The Application layer."

How can you bring people over from non-protocol based applications to protocol-based spaces? My short answer: market-based solutions beat ideological ones for user adoption. More plainly: Content creators and the parasocial relationships they have with their audiences are THE human bridge to protocol based publishing.

Beyond Protocls

Last Fall, I wrote a blog post about journalists working with technologists, "LeARn tO cODe, they said." Based on a slur against journalist, but viewing a better future, I wrote:

"These are fellow travelers on the same path confronting the same existential questions. They are mission-aligned allies we can and should be building alongside."

The disruptions hitting software development are creating potential allies — people who understand the economics of individual practice, who are building audiences around their expertise, who bring a different skillset and problem-solving perspective, who are navigating the same platform dynamics.

I wrote that last Fall in my friend and co-founder Liz's newsletter which has an audience of journalists trying to navigate the creator economy.

Now I repeat it here on my ATProto blog alongside my tool. What do folks want to build? For whom? With whom?

I think journalists and technologists have an awful lot of good to do in the world when they band together.