Publishers and Developers Push for Publishing Protocols to Liberate Local Journalism

24 September 2026

Publishers and developers are coalescing around a vision of making local journalism easier to distribute, authenticate, and monetize across websites and apps. The idea is to fix a problem that today's CMS-driven workflows have created: journalism trapped in proprietary platforms, unable to travel as the same object across different channels and touchpoints.

Publishers feel cut off from their own audiences by CMS platforms.

The Open News Protocol (ONP), laid out in a recent GitHub spec, gets right to the crux. "News today is often locked inside CMS platforms, so every consumer receives a rendering" of the story, the introduction reads. "They never get the actual object itself."

ONP suggests that is a problem not just for consumers, but for publishers trying to syndicate their journalism. As CMS platforms proliferate, every channel becomes "a publisher-specific rendering", the spec argues. Publishers wind up exposing a "multitude of APIs that must be individually maintained" for each channel.

That explains why RSS, simple though it may be, keeps getting mentioned in protocol discussions. The Local Media Association dug into this in a recent article looking at product requirements for collaborative content distribution among newsrooms.

The MVP for a "simple wire system", the piece argued, should be "RSS-driven" so newsrooms can automatically ingest and display trusted content. Beyond feed integration, the end user should see the content as a "widget" that brings them back to the originating site, preserving referral traffic and ad revenue.

The idea seems to be that RSS provides a simpler, lower friction alternative to API integration for newsroom sharing. RSS isn't dead if the pipe from publisher to consumer can be kept open and object integrity can be preserved - and publishers feel ownership as the widget user clicks through.

Open standards as a media policy priority.

It might sound retro to be playing up RSS in 2024, but open standards aren't just tech talk. They're becoming a media policy priority.

The Forum on Information and Democracy and the German Marshall Fund have raised open standards as a priority for improving the discoverability of trustworthy news and international media ecosystems. The Italian Ministry of Innovation has cited the need for international cooperation on open journalism standards as part of a 'new deal' for local and independent media. Mathilde Jolly and Evan Goodman of the German Marshall Fund point to protocol adoption as part of what they call a 'full stack' approach to overhauling public media in the US.

From RSS to open standards: New licensing steps.

That open media policy vision seems to go beyond just syndication. A new licensing push is putting monetary terms alongside distribution.

Press Gazette reported on the 2024 launch of the RSL Standard, a 1.0 specification based on RSS. The addition, according to publishers who have pledged their support, is machine-readable rights and licensing terms that indicate content is free for AI use. A group of RSL Standard supporters, including Reddit, Yahoo and Ziff Davis, established the RSL Collective to enable media companies and individual content creators to enroll in the licensing framework.

The RSL primarily involved US-based tech and publishing companies - according to a GlobeNewswire release, the companies "first to support the RSL Standard and the RSL Collective" included Reddit, Yahoo, Internet Brands, Ziff Davis, Fastly, Quora, O’Reilly, and Medium. The implication is that major players are setting the open news rules many local startups and independents will need to follow.

For local outlets looking to liberate their journalism from the CMS treadmill, the ONP and the traffic- and ad-revenue-aware RSS syndication described by the LMA seem like the place to start. But the RSL's expanding influence from tech and finance power, and its expansion without transparency among member companies, looms on the horizon as concerns about the "open-ness" of open standards grow.