November 12, 2024

Alas, the Blockchain Won’t Save Journalism After All

Civil’s representatives said they could help fix two crises that afflict the media: one of trust and another of financial sustainability. Both, they posited, were within the power of the blockchain to heal.

Financial sustainability first: Civil’s newsrooms (18 listed on its site so far) are welcome to use traditional business models (like subscriptions, paid for with dollars), and many, like the Colorado Sun, Block Club Chicago and Popula, an “alt-daily” with a worldly mind-set, have chosen to do so. But as citizens became convinced of Civil’s value as a publishing platform, they could opt in to the network by purchasing Civil tokens. These would buy them some control, making them, essentially, shareholders. They could “tip” journalists with tokens or portions of tokens, request stories or even suggest the creation of whole newsrooms dedicated to specific subjects. As the news organizations got stronger and stronger — ostensibly, with the input of citizen-shareholder-readers — others would purchase tokens, the value of the tokens would increase, and the entire community, journalists and readers alike, would prosper.

At the same time, Civil representatives said, the much-lamented if near-perennial and also possibly invented problem of trust in journalism would be solved by the blockchain technology’s inherent function as a database.

Vivian Schiller, a former president and chief executive at NPR and head of news at Twitter, is now the chief executive of the Civil Media Foundation, the organization in charge of “upholding the principles of the network.” She wrote, in a blog post, that Civil websites would have an icon in their upper right hand corner that would function as a journalistic equivalent of the “Good Housekeeping seal of approval.”

“We have a plug-in that allows you to sign your work,” said Mathew Iles, the chief executive of the Civil Media Company, which is separate but related to the foundation. “This is important: We’re going to be able to show citizens that you in fact did write it.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/style/blockchain-journalism-civil.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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