Goodbye, Denver Post. Hello, Blockchain
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This features the worst elements of public (e.g. the BBC), private (e.g. the Wall Street Journal) and patronage (e.g. the Washington Post) media.
Letting token owners “vote on whether...websites violate the company’s journalism standards” explicitly removes editorial independence. Worse, it ties editorial control to tokens/votes which are bought with money. Worse still, since ownership is pseudonymous, there is no way to detect someone (e.g. a wealthy individual, company or foreign government) amassing control across disparate wallets. Pseudonymity also makes shaming owners for bad behaviour difficult or impossible.
There are thousands of restaurants in New York. That doesn’t mean I don’t eat out.
The people who I know who subscribe to news subscribe to multiple publications. The set of people who (a) want limited access to lots of publications and (b) would pay for them is limited.
Point being we can answer this question. If you put ownership on the blockchain, we can’t. It’s exactly what we have today, but worse.
For your shift, is anonymizing control in exchange for a clear ledger of control a bad deal? I'm not sure. Seems like an interesting idea at least, and given the current state of our media I'm more than happy to see any idea trying to change the game.
>given the current state of our media I'm more than happy to see any idea trying to change the game.
Sounds like an intuitive statement until you really think about it for a second. Then, you realize that it's a reckless and possibly dangerous approach to problem-solving.
If you start down the solution path by asking the question "how could things get any worse?", then it's very likely that you'll find out.
sorry, had to comment as it’s still in recent memory.
I'm somewhat entertained by the posters in this thread shitting on media organisations. You need to understand: the business model for a whole pillar of democracy is gone.
$5 and your sarcastic comment will buy you a cafe latte, but the very last thing journalism needs more of is disruption. It's been disrupted every quarter for ten years straight and now reporters in Colorado are clinging to the goddamn blockchain because it's the last shitty hope left.
You can propose that journalism needs to reinvent itself, but this is not an original insight. Smart people have been trying for years, and it's really hard to make a public good sustainable on the web.
So if you're sitting in a really nicely paid high-tech job somewhere in SV, realise that you are the origin of this problem. A problem that causes damage to democracy in numerous countries. Maybe a little less arrogance?
This move is very concerning to me. The best I can say about it is that if people are willing to buy coverage, hopefully that will directly pay for more coverage in general (a rising tide lifts all journalism). But it clearly removes the editorial independence that has been THE hallmark of serious journalism since serious journalism existed.
Case in point, almost all of open source software exists because someone else paid for it, and releasing it as FOSS didn't directly contradict their business interests.
Its just being exposed for what it is... the only new thing is discussion about it became common enough to pass the threshold for you to hear about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
Tech companies aren't responsible for the decline in quality of journalism. They are responsible for shining light on how bloated and bad they were all along.
Checking facts and multiple sources on news stories was a major undertaking before the internet. Media has always been biased and bad, it's just that the internet is shedding light on how bad it is.
Transparency and widely available information is the pillar of democracy, not news organizations.
For example, Seymour Hersh clearly possessed journalistic independence in his story on the SEAL team assassination of bin Laden. However, at least initially, public response to his story was lukewarm and the Obama administration in particular and the press broadly spent a lot of time and pages trying to discredit the story. In this-- and many other cases-- public trust and reputation is orthogonal to journalistic independence.
Not that I disagree with your two sentences. Clearly this is an attempt to somehow "technologize" better journalism given the low quality of reporting in the run up to the 2016 election.
But if you take "journalistic independence" as your input and reflexively give "reputation and public trust" as your output, something is broken in your journalism parser.
Big conspiracies require more proof. This is not Watergate level where there was corroborating evidence behind the FBI assistant director's reveal to the Washington Post.
Seymour Hersh thinks US special forces members are like the bad guys from that Da Vinci Code book and are actually working for Opus Dei, and this why they would be so good at keeping the Hersh conspiracy hidden. Hersh did good with My Lai but that doesn't mean he can coast on his laurels forever.
My expectation is this will transfer wealth from blockchain zealots to journalists. It is telling, however, that the best defense I can rouse for this project is “the novel elements will probably fail”.
A better alternative would be to let token owners vote on what story to research next.
Sinclair made a blunder and showed the world that there was no independence, at least in their company. It was even set on a local level. It sets a very plausible model for other large media/news companies.
The CVL token is used to vote on whether or not the community believes a newsroom follows well understood journalistic standards (more information about these standards can be found in our "constitution" - https://blog.joincivil.com/the-civil-constitution-beta-64460...).
We use a system known as a Token Curated Registry (https://medium.com/@ilovebagels/token-curated-registries-1-0...) that incentivizes people to vote judiciously according to a shared understanding of values and not simply according to their own political leanings. TCRs also have built in mechanisms that reduce the ability of wealthy individuals/parties to unilaterally attack the integrity of the registry, as well as mechanisms to recover from such attacks if they do occur. We've further refined this idea by creating an independent non-profit body known as the Civil Council made up of well respected journalists and academics that can step in in situations where a vote was clearly motivated by political bias and not made in good faith.
We are also working very hard to ensure that our tokens are distributed to parties that are going to use them in good faith. We'll have more to announce on that front soon!
Being "whitelisted" or not on our TCR does not determine whether or not a newsroom is able to publish. Newsrooms are independent and have full editorial control of their content. Being on the TCR is a (we hope valuable) credibility indicator for newsrooms. The idea is that when you see an article by a newsroom that is on the TCR, you'll know that they have been vetted by the community and are very likely a trustworthy source.
TCRs are a new and experimental system, and we don't claim that our first implementation will be flawless and fix all the issues in the news media landscape. But we will iterate and improve it and firmly believe that some form of TCR can be used to help people understand their news sources better, increasing media literacy and trust, in a way that can scale worldwide.
-- Nick Reynolds
Can you give any examples you can share? You have state/non-state actors which have mass resources to use to their advantage directly or indirectly (e.g. troll farms). What prevents people from buying these CVL tokens and/or creating multiple accounts to bias your ledger? It's not like they really are taking a hit on these transactions unless they're above $5-$10. The Internet Research Agency had a small budget compared to other actors which were in the millions.
It also could go the other way for voting against reputable journalism. Is there prevention in this area as well? It seems like the Vote Quorum could be abused in this area.
It seems like it might be much easier to challenge your system around voting with an algorithm rather than the social engineering that occurs on social platforms.
Though I might come off critical, I'm excited to see how this turns out. I'm pretty new to blockchain and don't understand it all. Though, I did see the "Attacks against token-curated registries and mitigations" in your whitepaper. How expensive are these coins?
Second, even if they are able to acquire some huge percentage of the tokens, the public nature of the blockchain means we (the public) can actually do some pretty fancy analytics to determine if there's collusion between accounts and identify bad actors (if not by name, at least by account). The community can then decide to "fork" the bad actors out of the system (Essentially the community can deploy a new token that is identical to the old token except the bad actors' account balances are zeroed out. If everyone decides to switch to using the new token, the bad actors' old tokens become worthless and they just spent millions of dollars to slightly inconvenience people).
Specific details of our initial token distribution (how many tokens does 1 ETH buy, etc) are forthcoming, but after that initial distribution, the price of the tokens is determined by the market forces. It's those market forces that (theoretically) make the TCR actually "work" as token holders are incentivized to make the registry as "good" as possible and increase demand for the token (because people want to be on the registry).
-- Nick Reynolds
To control a central hub of communication for society, that's pocket change.
> we (the public) can actually do some pretty fancy analytics to determine if there's collusion between accounts and identify bad actors
If you're going to invest hundreds of millions of dollars, gaming the process properly won't cost much more.
>We are also working very hard to ensure that our tokens are distributed to parties that are going to use them in good faith
If you have the ability to determine who would use them in good faith, then why do they need to pay for the privilege? Also, this implies that those who would explicitly use them in bad faith may still obtain influence. And, where does this leave the people who would use them in good faith but cannot afford to buy them?
In general and in spite of precautions you describe, it has the distinct feel of buying access, which is not something of which the world, and certainly journalism, is in short supply.
Putting a newspaper on a blockchain, to the extent the idea is even coherent, does not exempt it from the economics that makes journalism unremunerative.
This is not to say that we cannot use crypto currencies to perform activities that were traditionally performed by journalists. However, this will look more like anonymous information bounty markets or prediction markets.
But even prediction markets need someone to subsidize them, willfully taking a loss to provide liquidity. I think there is a good case to be made for using demurrage to do this. But for this to work there has to be actual long term economic value on the blockchain, which most lack.
While our TCR will not solve the economics of journalism on its own, we believe it will help provide transparency into the inner workings of newsrooms and increase media literacy in ways that could encourage more people to fund journalism organizations. Furthermore, we think it can vastly improve discoverability especially for smaller (but still ethical and reliable) news organizations.
From there, it's about giving newsrooms tools to run and monetize their business how they want. For some this might look like traditional newspaper subscriptions, for others we might see more experimental monetization schemes that are only feasible on the blockchain (such as bounties).
-- Nick Reynolds
p.s. - Have you looked into TCRs generally? There's a fair amount of overlap with prediction markets, you might be interested in learning more about the incentive system.
Uhm...
Doesn't this all look like, basically, company shares? Doesn't this mean that the problem has just been shifted but potentially not solved ?
It's not obvious when ownership is a thousand pseudonymous private keys when there's a conflict of interest. If a random article about a random company looks a little more negative than it should be, who knows if the current pseudonymous owners are shorting that company?
Publicly-disclosed ownership of the media by the rich has a ton of disadvantages, yes. But I don't the blockchain solving any of those disadvantages, and I see it introducing a new one that is specifically avoided by publicly-disclosed ownership by the rich.
I'm not arguing for this blockchain solution, I think it makes things worse exactly as you said.
[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-d...
[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-joins-p...
(Which isn't to say everyone knows that either—a lot of people seem to take the Times equally seriously—but solving the problem of bad-faith media existing is another one entirely, and quite probably the answer is it shouldn't be solved at all.)
The "good news", such as it is, is that that part of the article is bullshit. They won't grant you the holders a say in the paper's editorial processes. That control will instead reside with the person actually funding the paper, which will be...
...the billionaire Joseph Lubin. Meaning they've already got the same issue that the Denver Post suffered.
It's genuinely difficult. One friend suggested "a coin for space travel". Nope. Mars coin is a thing. What about a coin for students? Nope. A coin for Kanye West. Nope. A coin for porn? Nope, of course that already exists. There's even a coin for keeping track of blockchains.
Not yet, I guess?
Seriously, though, pedophiles make great canaries. Everyone hates them, even those who create and manage systems for security and privacy. And police love to brag about busting them. For example, we learned about Freenet vulnerabilities and CMU's Tor exploit through pedophile busts.
Newspapers are dying because other kinds of companies ate their advertising revenue.
We can add the Denver Post to a list of old-guard companies desperately grabbing for blockchain straws on their slide to oblivion (Long Island Iced Tea, Kodak).
I'm all for innovation in applied cryptography. But these desperate stories of blockchain cargo-cultism need to stop.
I'm not really sure what you mean by this. Once the Registry contract is deployed on the blockchain, it will continue to function and provide utility no matter what happens to the "Civil Media Company". No involvement on our part is needed to "recognize the voting power" as any individual, entity, or website can use the information contained in the registry however they want. A social media site, for example, could query the registry and decide to render a "credibility badge" when displaying links from a news organization that is whitelisted.
Happy to help clarify if you still have questions.
-- Nick Reynolds
Yes, the key word is "decide". To use your "credibility badge" example, an organization could ostensibly behave like they accurately respect the registry while also surreptitiously ignoring the registry in situations that suit them. You might say, "well those organizations will develop a reputation for dishonesty", which might be true if they get caught, but also isn't at all different from the status quo today where selective reporting and partisan bias are bemoaned loudly and often by every side regarding every issue.
Elsewhere you said
> We've further refined this idea by creating an independent non-profit body known as the Civil Council made up of well respected journalists and academics that can step in in situations where a vote was clearly motivated by political bias and not made in good faith.
Isn't this still centralisation? Either the Civil Council would not be necessary, in which case it's odd that you're setting it up, or it's still a centralised entity that has the final say and you might just as well skip the blockchain - or is my understanding incorrect/incomplete?
Decentralization is a spectrum, not a binary. While a centralized entity plays a part in the process, ultimate authority rests with the voters. The Council also has a plan to decentralize itself over time and voters will eventually be able to vote on removing or replacing the Council.
And what does hosting news "on the blockchain" even mean in any practical sense? That I'll have to install a crypto-mining client just to read their articles? Or that they won't use normal webservers to host their content?
The subscriptions are surprisingly valuable. Paygo not so much.
Usual caveats apply: on average, in my experience, YMMV, etc etc.
blendle.com
I'll be watching it with interest.
It looks like the tokens basically give some level of editorial control; therefore, wealthy individuals/organizations would be able to assert control over what gets published. And because of the anonymity, it wouldn't even be clear who is asserting this control.
When you hit publish, you better be prepared for that article to exist undeniably for eternity.
I'd like to see a twitter with the same features. Of course, blockchain isn't absolutely necessary here. You could sign a post with PGP 20 years ago and achieve the same.
I fail to see how any of those is relevant to the use of a blockchain. Mirroring a newspaper’s website gives you content archival, which in turns gives you censorship protection (unless the censor can attack all mirrors). A blockchain gives you those advantages because it relies on mirroring (the transactions).
What problem do you think this is solving?
...actually I think the original quote said something about crypto, not pancakes, but I don't think it changes the underlying meaning. Why do you need a distributed, trustless database to run a local paper?
> The new publication will have a conventional website whose data will be written permanently into a MySQL database.
Whups, sorry, that actually was meant to say "...into the secure digital ledger known as the blockchain." Which...okay. 1) I think they mean "a blockchain", and 2) why do we...care? Is this so people will notice if the article is edited? Why not just push the content to a public git repo when it's published? Maybe sign the commits?
> People who purchase the CVL token, a form of cryptocurrency, will have a say concerning the projects hosted by Civil — meaning that they can vote on whether one of its websites violates the company’s journalism standards
So in other words, it's a lot like...a public company, that owns a newspaper, that then strips out every hint of editorial control, and then lets its shareholders directly have a say in every detail of what gets printed? So it's like...literally an attempt to create a newspaper even worse than the one they're quitting in order to form this one?
> Matthew Iles, the chief executive of Civil, said that by selling ownership stakes to the public, the company seeks to eliminate the possibility of one company or a small group of investors exerting power and influence over a journalistic organization and compromising its mission — exactly what many employees of the Denver Post accused Alden of doing.
By selling ownership, they think they're stopping one rich person from amassing a major ownership stake, as happened when their last newspaper sold ownership and allowed one rich person to amass a major ownership stake? What must it feel like to live with this level of blinding naivety?
The good news, such as it is, is that ownership of the tokens doesn't actually give anyone control over the newspaper, meaning that this is actually just meaningless hype. But, by the same logic, there's also no reason to actually buy the tokens. They have value only to the extent they allow editorial independence to be violated. So either they'll be valuable (but will undermine the journalistic ethics of the organisation), or they'll be worthless. There's no upside here.
It's early Monday morning in this part of the world, and I literally cannot figure out if this is an overly subtle troll or merely the dumbest idea I've heard in quite some time. This basically seems to be an attempt to use inappropriate technologies in order to carefully craft a "solution" that will make the problem worse. If you're worried about local newspapers being financially unviable and subject to intrusive editorial control...how does this do anything but make it worse?
It's just another coin capital scam. Launch a crypto coin, get suckers to buy it, go yacht shopping.