With this latest deal, Flipboard is looking to build a media ecosystem beyond X

The effort to bring a wider news ecosystem to the open social web, also known as fediverse, is now in the hands of social magazine app Flipboard. Press.coop, the service that created mirror accounts for top news publishers (including Reuters, AP, WSJ, NYT, BBC, CNN, and yours truly), has transferred its collection of nearly 100 accounts to Flipboard, companies announced on Thursday.

Press.coop was founded last year by a diversified company, Hello.coop, owned by Dick Hardt. Like many, he wanted more access to news on the fediverse, especially Mastodon’s rival X, where many of the top publishers hadn’t yet set up shop like they did on Twitter/X. To address this need, Press.coop has matched publishers’ Twitter/X accounts, bringing their tweets to the open social web.

However, when Twitter changed its API rules and raised its prices, that access was cut off. Press.coop was then moved to display publishers’ RSS feeds instead.

Although these mirrored accounts were simply bots that posted publisher stories to fediverse as they affected their news feeds, many gained a following. The NPR account, for example, has gained 10,000 press.coop followers. Others saw little followers.

While the transfer of accounts to Flipboard is not an official partnership or acquisition, in business terms, it serves the needs of news readers, publishers, and Flipboard alike, while freeing up Hart to work on other things.

Flipboard has been making a lot of moves to become an integrated app in recent months. After announcing its integration plans with fediverse and ActivityPub – the protocol that powers Mastodon and other affiliate apps – Flipboard has made it possible for its users to follow Mastodon accounts within its app, as well as follow and interact with others on the open public web. and vice versa. Its creator-created news magazines, meanwhile, are now offered to users on fediverse, expanding their reach.

Flipboard also brought its own editorial efforts to Mastodon with its introduction in 2023 of news “desks” designed to track news in areas such as technology, culture, science, and more, which were not automated accounts. These, too, now regularly post to Mastodon from Flipboard’s Mastodon server, Flipboard.social.

The addition of press.coop accounts expands on that previous effort. By using these integrated Flipboard accounts, publishers on the Flipboard app will be able to see engagement in their Flipboard notifications. Also, their existing Flipboard followers will be combined with followers on press.coop accounts, increasing their reach.

Press.coop itself is shutting down Thursday, Hart announced on the service’s website.

“We noticed that Flipboard was providing a lot of the same content on fediverse, so we decided to partner with them and migrate all press.coop accounts to the associated flipboard.com publisher account or flipboard.social account for those not already on Flipboard,” the site notes. The move should be completed by the end of the month.