Publishers Alliance Commits To Zero-Paywall During Elections

News media have long faced a difficult tension. Many people receive news from an aggregator that gives them access to multiple sources, but aggregator offerings such as Apple News, Google News, and Facebook News, rarely offer publishers good deals, lowering advertising revenue and decreasing subscription conversion rates.

To address this, in 2026, a group of enterprising publishers and technologists joined forces to launch Lede, a news aggregator built atop shared social media infrastructure and governed by and for participating publishers. On Lede, publishers rely on a shared advertising system that can support aggregated advertising deals, and offers a bundled subscription system paying publishers a prorated chunk based on what people read. This system respects people’s privacy, does not share hard-won audience data with third parties, and offers users real options to shape what personal information they share with publishers and advertisers.

Lede stories are published on ATProto and are natively social. They can be integrated into multiple formats in various social experiences. Search is built-in and exposed through the shared index, which facilitates SEO, and facilitates easy access to original content while restricting generative AI content on the same platform.

While the media may never return to its pre-Internet profitability, in this world journalism is funded and revenues are sustainable.

In our headline, the publisher multistakeholder group in charge of governing Lede and its infrastructure has reached an agreement to systematically offer unpaywalled articles during elections in all relevant jurisdictions—because they can afford to.