I don’t know man, chat apps and systems like Twitter and Mastodon aren’t a good place for journalism. I had to stop using both, its just full of chats and any kind of messages from all over the place, including advertisements and links and what not. Not a good place to discuss anything. To me these are just advertisement platforms.

It sounds like the linking is automated, just website approval is manual:

In the future we would like to make the feature available to all without a manual review process. For now, if you’re part of a news organization, please reach out to us at hello@joinmastodon.org so we can enable it for your website.