Bridges are the New Moats

The deals have been coming fast enough that it's easy to miss a pattern underneath them. Just to cherry-pick a few from the past few weeks/months:

These are all different announcements. But what they share is that they are all bridges being built in the same direction, by people who've concluded that the old fortifications aren't worth defending.

There's also a structural reason this is all happening now. The gated-content model that funded the subscription era is being hollowed out from two sides simultaneously: creators pulling audience trust away from mastheads, and AI eroding the discovery layers. Over the past two years, search engines referrals have declined by 60% for small publishers, 47% for medium-sized publishers and 22% for large publishers, according to Chartbeat data provided to Axios.

The moat is draining. The bridge-building is urgent.

TWO ROOMS, SAME URGENCY

I spent the last few weeks moving between two rooms where this was the underlying conversation, even when it wasn't explicitly stated as such.

The first was Vancouver, at ATmosphere Conference 2026 — a gathering of protocol builders, developers, and community organizers imagining what the internet could become. The second was Chicago, at the Online News Association Conference — journalism mid-transition, full of humility and resilience, still searching. Different rooms, different languages, same underlying urgency about where things are heading and what might hold.

Erin Kissane opened ATmosphere with a talk titled "Landslide / Hold Fast." She traced a line from the 1964 Alaska earthquake — where a saturated substrate turned to liquid under repeated shocks and an entire harbour slid into the sea — to our present information landscape. The analogous structural liquefaction was clearly resonant to those of us in the audience there as I imagine it is to all of you reading this now. Her prescription comes from kelp biology: holdfasts anchor entire communities into stability, create calmer zones in turbulent water, and make space for other organisms to shelter within them.

I had already been thinking about bridges when I heard that talk. Walking out, I realized she was describing the same thing from a different angle. A bridge and a holdfast serve opposite instincts — one is about moving, one is about staying — but in a moment of liquefaction, you probably need both. It being a scrappy, DIY’y gathering, I even dashed a photo of Erin giving her invocation into my presentation and adjusted a few slides.

This was my first time at a developer conference and what stood out to me was how comfortable everyone in that room was with not knowing what comes next. The humility felt …. strategic?

Technical builders proposing and pitching ideas and destinations that were overlapping and competing with each other. The community building infrastructure designed to work regardless of which way things may go. The question that kept surfacing was sharp: is the holdfast in this ecosystem the AT Protocol itself? Bluesky the company? The independent developers building on top of it? The social bonds between the people in the room? These people and projects don't always pull in the same direction.

That tension was most tangible in the product conversations. Rudy Fraser laid out how Blacksky is building community-owned algorithms on the AT Protocol — giving communities control over their feeds, their moderation, and their own governance, so people can be their full, specific selves without ceding that infrastructure to any single company — Bluesky included, Graze — a feed-curation platform that lets curators build paid, subscriber-only feeds on ATProto, and was literally powering the conference's own feed — presented a year of lessons from funding and building in the atmosphere.

These conversations and others reflected the messy realities of building bridges in such shifting grounds: expertise plus community plus portable monetization, anchored in open standards rather than in any single platform's goodwill. And that messiness extended after the conference as community members questioned some of the product annoucnements from the BlueSky team and the newly appointed CEO reached out to talk to developers directly.

Blaine Cook, Twitter's original lead developer, explained what it takes for local communities to govern their own digital spaces in a beautiful talk that braided the concepts of pluralism and network architecture with … the funkiness of cheese.

In Chicago, the humility came from a different place — the accumulated weight of watching an industry hollow out faster than any of us had prepared for.

In Vancouver, I gave a talk about how the aggregation era burned down journalism institutions and how the federated era is emerging from the embers. And as one of the few journalists at the conference, I found myself continually conveying our industry’s shared trauma.

In Chicago, I found myself mostly in the back of rooms watching journalists helping and teaching other journalists. The embers igniting each other. My favorite moments were watching Dave Jorgenson and his Local News International colleagues run a masterclass on digital video production with scores of eager audience members getting into the weeds of camera settings and scripting questions.

According to our unofficial counting, ONA had more creator-focused programming than any previous conference — at least 14 dedicated sessions.

Ryan Kellett, Liz Kelly Nelson, Jeremy Gilbert, and Kate Skelly gave practical insights into how news creators and institutions can "find the we." Liz moderated a conversation with Sara Goo from the Washington Post, Devin Smith from the Wall Street Journal, and Adrienne Johnson Martin from MLK50 about how each of these different institutions are applying different approaches: the Post building an entirely new creator network, the Journal developing in-house talent to work more like creators, MLK50 partnering with a creator in residence. Three different bridges. Pontoon, suspension, drawbridges.

On the ONA panel I moderated — Chicago in Focus: Building Bridges with Independent Voices — Tracy Baim captured the whole thing in a sentence. Forty-one years in Chicago community journalism, co-founder of Windy City Times, now leading Press Forward Chicago. "The alternative," she said, "is becoming the mainstream."

It sounded like a benediction. When alternative media does its job — when it builds trust, covers what institutions won't, and shows up consistently for its community, it is no longer marginal. It becomes the essential resource of it’s community. And in an era where finding and serving niche communities becomes more feasible as the economics of 1,00 true fans becomes more and more universally feasible ….. and as the aggregation era gives way to a federated one, the next builds will resemble that path more.

WHAT THE PATTERN MEANS

The through-line across all of these announcements — Newpress, Pivot/Vox, the WaPo creator network, Lenny, Graze, ATmosphere, ONA — is that trust has migrated from mastheads to people, and the people who understand this are building structures around it. In December, I wrote that creator-journalists are decentralizing from institutions and platforms. What we’re watching now is the next phase: the bridging. Not a reversal of decentralization, but its maturation.

Three-quarters of news executives told the Reuters Institute they'd be getting journalists to behave more like creators in 2026 — but that framing still puts institutions at the center of the story when it’s the human layer that is clearly ascending.

Consider Trustfnd, founded by Michaël Jarjour — former Twitter partner manager who decided to build something that made journalism stronger against "even its worst enemies." Trustfnd lets independent journalists create newsletter bundles across platforms, sharing audience funnels without merging operations. Jarjour's framing: "a network effect as a service." It's a different kind of bridge. Independent entities that move like one when it's useful, and independently when it's not. They announced their first bundle just last week:

What the Independent Journalism Atlas exists to build is the discovery and standards infrastructure that makes the ecosystem legible — to funders who can't find the creators they want to support, to institutions that want partnerships without exploitation, to audiences who want to follow journalists across platforms. The rise of creators is blurring the line between journalists, creators, and media companies, and the infrastructure that helps people navigate that terrain is exactly what's been missing.

Bridges need on-ramps.

THE HARD TRUTH

Practically: if you're working in journalism right now, the hollowing out of the industry means there are vacuums all around you.

Build bridges within it to cover more ground. Build bridges out of it to amplify your impact.

But bridge with intention toward ambition and values, not just toward survival. The creators who are succeeding are the ones who built something accumulative — a beat, a source network, a community, a corpus — and then made it portable. Lenny didn't just open his archive; he built something worth opening and has a clear articulated strategy of asking his product-minded fanbase to build with his work.

The moats of the last era were built around content — behind paywalls, inside algorithms, locked to platforms. The bridges of the next era are built around trust — portable, parasocial, accumulated over time.

Swisher and Galloway bet their relationship with an audience was worth more than a $40 million guarantee. Johnny Harris built a 7.5-million-subscriber channel after leaving Vox — and then built Newpress to build up other journalists following through his flywheel. The bridge is the same in each case: trust, accumulated over time, made portable.

Tracy Baim built Chicago community journalism through four decades of economic pressure, platform shifts, and cultural upheaval. The structure she built is still standing. That's what a holdfast does. You can't buy that.

But you can build from it.

////

Justin Bank is the co-founder of The Independent Journalism Atlas, a principal at Better Media Studios and he blogs/substacks at BankonJustin.