> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://werd.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Notable links: November 13, 2026 - URL: https://werd.io/notable-links-november-13-2026/ - Published: 2026-11-13T22:50:23.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-13T22:50:23.000Z - Description: New tools and a clear approach to leadership. Let's build. - Author: Ben Werdmuller - Tags: Link roundups *Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.* *Did someone forward this to you?* [*Subscribe for free*](https://werd.io/notable-links-november-6-2026/#/portal)*.* --- ### [The Two Rails of Leadership](https://pointc.co/the-two-rails-of-leadership/) I’ve been thinking a lot about my entrepreneurship journey lately — and how I can draw lessons from it to help journalism — and this piece from [Corey Ford](https://pointc.co) landed at the right time. > “Culture and strategy are the two things a leader is responsible for designing; everything else is delegable. \[…\] Your job as a leader isn't to come up with the next big thing. It's to build the culture, the people, and the process that can continually do this: a team whose velocity of learning outruns the pace of change. That capability lives on the culture rail. The strategy is what it produces.” I basically punched the air. The thing is, so many of us have got into the trap of either managing the incremental changes that we feel are needed to keep the lights on, or defining ourselves by the product we create rather than who we create it for. In doing so, we build inward-looking cultures that put us in danger of losing touch with the world we’re trying to serve. Corey’s example of the newspaper is apt: do you produce words on a page, or do you serve a specific need for context and understanding? Only one of those answers will survive change. Someone asked me recently what I thought the business model for news should be, and I responded that *it’s the wrong question to start with*. The question is: how can we be most valuable to the people we’re trying to serve? I’m constantly referencing [Gina Chua](https://restructurednews.substack.com/), who points out that we should care more about saving what journalism does for us than the specific institutions that produce it today. A culture centered on providing the *effects* of journalism will stand the test of time; one centered on institutionalism will not. Can existing media institutions recenter themselves around solving needs rather than finding ways to optimize the same products, workflows, and ideas? I don’t know the answer; it’s certainly not a given. But I do know that it starts with building the right culture. And if those institutions *can’t* adapt their cultures — well, we’ll just need to build new institutions. --- ### [Introducing the Atmosphere Community Cooperative](https://atmosphere.coop/updates/introducing-the-atmosphere-community-cooperative) AT Protocol is the underlying protocol that powers [Bluesky](https://bsky.app), [Chicago.com](https://chicago.com), [Sill](https://sill.social), [Surf](https://surf.social), [Leaflet](https://leaflet.pub/), and many other social apps and services. It’s designed to be open, decentralized, and interoperable: the idea is that no one entity owns it, and any tool built on the protocol is theoretically interoperable with all the other tools. It’s one piece of an emerging, diverse open social web that’s free of monopolistic control. At the News Product Alliance summit last month, [Joe Germuska and I presented on AT Protocol with Frank Sharpe and Andjela Padejsky from Chicago Public Media](https://schedule.newsproduct.org/#/session/a-free-press-needs-free-protocols-building-collective-power-through-open-technology-recnrZtIDflIlhgCd). The protocol has allowed them to build Chicago.com more efficiently: they know two codebases they write on the protocol will work together. It’s also proven to be useful scaffolding for LLM-assisted development, which has allowed their development team to punch above its weight. There hasn’t been much attention paid to the protocol in spaces like journalism: our presentation and events like [Protocols for Publishers](https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/08/the-next-internet-for-news-publishers-gather-to-discuss-protocols-over-platforms/) are the exception. Nonetheless, I’m certain it will be an important building block. But a building block that can be manipulated by a single owner introduces risk that newsrooms and other mission-driven organizations shouldn’t tolerate. (Consider what happened to Twitter.) Independence is vital; without it, a building block becomes a single point of failure. Now the folks behind AT Protocol ecosystem pillars like the annual [Atmosphere conference](https://atmosphereconf.org/speak) have filed to form a co-operative organization. > “As we look toward the third AtmosphereConf in 2027, we’re happy to announce that we’re transforming into a cooperative dedicated to supporting the health, growth, and stability of the Atmosphere. > > This is the first post from the Atmosphere Community Cooperative, a new global cooperative based in Canada that is governed by and for the community, for the good of the ecosystem and the people inside it.” This is a big deal for lots of reasons. The first is that it further formalizes the idea that a bunch of AT Protocol support and governance is independent of Bluesky. The protocol itself is already [supported by a working group at the IETF](https://atproto.com/blog/kicking-off-the-atp-working-group), and the directory of identities [is forming as an independent Swiss Association](https://atproto.com/blog/plc-directory-org). This, then, is a third independent ecosystem org, ensuring that it’s not just the protocol that’s decentralized, but governance and support of it, too. I do also think it’s really interesting that the Atmosphere Community Cooperative will be a real co-operative organization, adhering to [international co-op principles](https://www.ica.coop/en/cooperatives/cooperative-identity/), and established in Canada. Between this, the Swiss Association, Bluesky’s Delaware Public Benefit Corporation status, the IETF working group, and other participants like Dutch public interest organization [the Modal Foundation](https://www.modalfoundation.org/), there is a plurality of geographies, organizational approaches, and communities involved in the protocol’s development and success. That feels like much-needed *organizational* innovation in addition to the technical gains. All of which makes AT Protocol safer to build on. --- ### [Medium is launching a new note-taking app called TK](https://www.theverge.com/tech/1029676/medium-tk-notes-app) [](https://www.theverge.com/tech/1029676/medium-tk-notes-app) Medium is launching its new app, [TK](https://tk.xyz/): > “The company is launching a new app, called TK, that combines note taking and journaling with something resembling a private social network. The app is meant to get you writing more, and help you share that writing with friends and fans. And it’s part of a much bigger idea about blogging, and a much broader thesis about the state of the internet.” I’ve been [using it for a while](https://tk.xyz/@benwerd) and it reminds me of some of my best experiences on the internet. It also contains a bit more AI than you’d expect to see in a writing app, but it doesn’t hinge on those features: for some people they’re useful ways to add more information, fill in blanks, or do some smart retrieval from notes you’ve already written, but you can get a great experience from TK without using it at all. The Verge article notes that it’s a bit like group chat, and I think that’s right. The way I’d put it is this: if Medium (or any blog, including this one) is a magazine where complete pieces are published, TK represents the messy conversation, note-taking and idea-sharing that exists before that point. That’s an imperfect description, though, because a lot of this really is conversation: something that will *never* be a published thought. Some of the interactions remind me of LiveJournal at its height, which is probably the biggest compliment I can give to any new service. That’s also why I’m not worried about it not operating on an open social web protocol. It’s intentionally closed for the right reasons, in the same way that my group chats are closed. These are ideas that I want to share with select people, not the world. And because of that, I’m more likely to be open, be wider with my thoughts, and share less-finished ideas. All of those are good things. And then, should you publish: yes, put it on your own domain, or somewhere like Medium, depending on your values and preferences. I like it very much, is what I’m saying. --- ### [Spacefast and beyond](https://spacefast.com/blog/spacefast-and-beyond/) [Spacefast](https://spacefast.com) is instructive as one of the first truly AI-native infrastructure services I’ve seen, and as a genuinely useful service that solves a bunch of problems for people building with AI, particularly at the enterprise level. As [the announcement post](https://spacefast.com/blog/spacefast-and-beyond/) says: > “In a world where writing code is as easy as talking to a magic box, it is still not as easy as it should be to build or share what you made. Services we use were built for a different time.” The idea is that if you’re using agents to build prototypes, you can tell them to save their work to Spacefast and it’ll take care of all the hosting, databases, etc transparently in the background. It also includes version control, so prototypes can be rolled back to previous iterations really easily. The whole thing is accessible both via an AI interface and over the web. To set it up, you just drop a prompt into your AI service of choice, and it does the rest for you. I plugged it into Claude and it went away and set everything up; meanwhile, I could follow progress through the web interface. [I asked Claude to build a one-shot web page that makes my Bluesky posts fall like rain.](https://bluesky-rain.space.fast/) Publishing was indeed seamless. The web app Claude made defaulted to private, but I was able to make it public really easily. A second app, [a homepage for US news](https://truthtopower.space.fast/) based on my [Speaking Truth to Power feed](https://speakingtruthtopower.surf.social/), was not quite as smooth, but I was able to adjust and fix the problem quickly. And then you have an easy way to build prototypes using AI and share them, without really having to worry about any of the infrastructure. At the enterprise level, that includes SSO and top-level access policies, so you can let people play and share prototypes internally without running the risk of any of that work being shared them *externally*. That saves enterprise organizations (including newsrooms) from having to set any of that up themselves. I’m talking about prototypes because I think that’s what this is particularly suitable for. Longer-lived applications, even if they run internally, should be code reviewed and held to a higher level of scrutiny. (It must be said that hosted apps run on Automattic’s infrastructure, so they *could* be shared much more widely — but there are safety and maintenance implications to consider.) But if you’re building something to show a few colleagues, or external people as part of your user research, I think Spacefast genuinely makes the process far easier and safer for businesses than it was before. It also solves a problem for Automattic. As more people vibe code sites, fewer people will use WordPress. Putting a service like Spacefast in place, and establishing it early, helps ensure that people will stay in its ecosystem. --- ### And more: Here are some of the articles I didn't get a chance to go into in depth this week. #### [A strategic shift for Online News Association](https://www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/a-strategic-shift-for-online-news-association,264436) ONA has long been a gathering post for digital folks in news, but there won't be a conference in 2027 and its staff is being laid off. One stated reason is that both professional development and sponsorship budgets have sunk, which is probably the most worrying thing to me about this announcement. In a time of crisis we need *more* opportunities for new skills and collaborations, not fewer. #### [Top 50 US news websites: Four in five see traffic drop in October](https://pressgazette.co.uk/media-audience-and-business-data/media%5Fmetrics/most-popular-websites-news-us-monthly-3/) Only nine of the fifty biggest US news sites avoided a year-on-year decline, in the month before a midterm election. The steepest drops are brutal: 60% at Newsweek, 47% at Politico. Substack is listed as one of the outliers, but why is it in this list to begin with? #### [How to fight back against AI-generated local news and pink slime: double down on civic engagement](https://dankennedy.net/2026/11/13/how-to-fight-back-against-ai-generated-local-news-double-down-on-civic-engagement/) AI-generated news sites are taking on local news: first in news deserts, and now in places with established newsrooms. Some of it is barely-disguised partisan content. The solution for human journalists: "be at the farmers’ markets, organize events, serve as a public forum, give people a chance to meet and greet your journalists, and be really a part of the fabric of the community." #### [Postal Service Surveilled Protest Activities Online With Little Rules, Oversight](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/11/postal-service-surveilled-protest-activities-online-little-rules-oversight) "The U.S. Postal Service used social media surveillance to monitor and report on protests across the political spectrum, government records show." It turns out it has an "internet Covert Operations Program", or iCOP for short. This seems to run counter to its usual description as an independent agency.