News on the block

8 min readJan 15, 2019

As a team covering the blockchain economy, we’ve been intrigued by Civil, a media startup with a lofty goal of restoring the news business to its glory days. That’s when journalists shared quality news content and were closer to readers. But the traditional news market has been declining for decades. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of newspaper reporters dropped from a peak of 458,000 newspaper in the 1990s to as low as 180,000 in 2016.

Description: employment trend in news market

In the digital age, this industry struggles to deal with a broken revenue model. The culprit? Many point to third party platforms dominated by Facebook and Google. Their machine learning algorithms drive how consumers and their networks digest news content. Publishers and businesses cater to these social platforms due to their massive global reach (aka network effect).

The Internet restructured the news economy with zero-sum outcomes. But can new technology restructure it again to a state that’s more democratic and sustainable, while giving the lever of control to journalists and readers rather than powerful middlemen?

That’s the backdrop of our interview with Dan Kinsley, the tech lead of Civil. The conversation focuses on their vision of a decentralized marketplace for newsroom. He explains how Civil uses novel ways so that newsrooms can have a platform to disseminate news directly with readers while having the community ensure accountability for news quality.

It’s been a rocky road for Civil. Since our interview, their market strategy has evolved drastically. After failing to meet its crowdfunding goals in the initial coin offering amidst a crypto bear market, the team now wants to make it easier for the community to own the native cryptocurrency and launch independent newsrooms, all of which are critical to forming a new media ecosystem.

This interview is edited for brevity and clarity.

(Itunes, Spotify, Stitcher)

What I didn’t realize was part of the problem with politics and everything right now is because there’s not a good model for ethical journalism. We’re just seeing these echo chambers of discourse forming around Facebook and Google. — Dan Kinsley of Civil

Do you think the declining news industry is getting better or worse?

It’s getting worse. There are two major issues facing the industry: (1) ownership; (2) distribution. Journalists have lost control. The vast majority of newspapers are now owned by hedge funds and private equity firms. They don’t have an incentive to invest in quality journalism because it’s at the expense of returning profits to the shareholders. This mentality is leading to waves of endless layoffs in the US and worldwide. Since 2000, more than 200,000 journalists have left the industry.

On the distribution side, Facebook and Google have cornered the digital advertising market. They control more than 80% of digital ad spend. They have tremendous control and influence over journalists. They could tweak the algorithm and drastically impact their business and viewers.

Journalists are at their mercy. They’re not interested in doing ethical journalism either because that could come at the expense of revenue. What we’re trying to do is restore control back to content producers, the journalists and the publications, as well as the readers and the people paying for this content.

How is Civil trying to solve this? What does it mean to create a decentralized newsroom platform?

We’re trying to build a new economy to incentivize ethical journalism where journalists and people who care about journalism are setting the rules. We’re doing this through a mechanism called the token curated registry, a white list of publications that agree to follow the rules and will be held accountable to these rules. These rules have been part of the industry for awhile, but we codified it and called it the Civil Constitution.

If they don’t follow these rules, anyone in this economy has the right and responsibility to challenge their existence on the registry. The control of platform is in the hands of the token holders.

How is Civil different than alternative media models like National Public Radio, subscription models like the New York Times or Financial Times. What about Patreon with market tiered access?

One is trying to provide payment mechanisms for publications, whereas Civil is providing more of a network of publications. We don’t want to get in the way for how a newsroom monetizes, whether it’s monthly subscriptions or paywalls. Civil wants to build a way for journalists to own the content, as well as distribute it and syndicate it and have more control over their business model.

How does Civil plan to make the user experience good enough to convince the audience use the platform to consume news? How does it plan to compete with third party platforms (e.g. Facebook, Google, Twitter)?

It’s about educating people about the issues in journalism right now. A vast majority of people didn’t understand that publications aren’t profitable and are struggling. Most of the value that’s extracted are going to the platforms like the Googles and Facebooks and the hedge funds — not the people originally producing the content.

What Civil can facilitate is an awareness of the issues and then allowing people to vote with their dollars and to say: I’m opting out of the status quo and i choose to support hese publications that are being ethically produced and citing their sources. It’s like the organic food movement. We’re creating organic journalism. We’re helping to support that and giving people a way to opt into this new model.

How can a newsroom join the Civil network or ecosystem?

You would need to buy Civil tokens, fill out an application and agree to follow the rules of the Civil registry. You stake your Civil tokens to the registry. All token holders play this economic game: this newsroom by being on the registry, will they increase Civil’s credibility by producing ethical quality content, be good stewards of the platform, or will they undermine the credibility of the list by spreading mistrust?

Token holders can decide to challenge that newsroom’s existence on the registry by matching tokens. It becomes a voting period where token holders play that economic game. There’ll be a winner and loser. There’ll be an appeal period for anyone who feels that this wasn’t the correct outcome. They can appeal to the Civil council who can vote to overturn the popular vote. This serves as a check and balance on the popular vote.

What engineering aspects do you like most about working with Civil?

Civil is at an interesting intersection of blockchain and user experience. It’s the design aspects that excites me. We’re discovering what the design patterns are for blockchain interactions. It’s fascinating to design for normal people who care about journalism and explain why blockchain matters and how do they use these tools to accomplish their goals of supporting the publications that they care about and curating this network of ethical newsrooms.

It’s interesting to see how this tech is evolving. Each month the tools gets better. We’re learning how to explain this technology to normal people.

We need to put users first and solve real user problems and not put our goals above the users. Everything we do we must put in front of users and ensure we’re solving the right problem for the right people.

Why do you personally care about journalism?

I don’t have a background in journalism but I’ve been curious about it. It’s come to a headwind. What I didn’t realize was part of the problem with politics and everything right now is because there’s not a good model for ethical journalism. We’re just seeing these echo chambers of discourse forming around Facebook and Google.

Quality journalism holds these politicians and institutions accountable. I feel responsible now for making sure these people have a voice and these powers are held in check. Just learning about this have really gotten me fired up about everything that’s wrong about this space right now.

There’s been a lot of interest and ‘bad press’ about Civil’s market launch. During your time with Civil, what pitfalls or highlights stand out for you?

In hindsight our model for the token launch wasn’t the best. Our token is a consumer token. It has a number of different restrictions we put in place to ward off speculation . We put a lot of hoops to jump through to participate in this token sale.

We almost got 3,000 people through this process. That’s a lot of people, but our goal was to raise $8M from the token sale. The problem was we took this playbook that worked really well for other token sales and applied it for a consumer token framework in the worst time to do a token launch, in the state of Ether and crypto. We failed at that. We made things pretty difficult for the average user. We made them jump through a lot of different brands they’re not familiar with.

We didn’t do a good enough job of laying out and guiding our users through this proccess. Our token sale failed. We have a new path forward, and it’ll be much simpler. What happened before was we put up all these walls before you could participate. Now we’re letting you participate first then put in the walls and giving you a better ladder. Civil is not going away.

What have you learned as an entrepreneur going through this journey?

As an entrepreneur, there’s a saying: if you’re proud of the product that you’ve launched, then you launched too late. But it’s interesting with blockchain products, I’ve learned that you need to do this big bang launch, not just a minimum viable product, but a fully baked platform.

It’s a different thought process. I learned a lot about being user-focused. These are hardest user experience in the industry right now. I think explaining these concepts to people — I’ve learned a lot from the designers on my team. It’s made me a better engineer. I’m happy to have them get me through this process. As an entrepreneur, it’s the most fun tech to work on right now. It’s changing daily. You have the brightest minds in the world working on these problems. It’s so much fun to see what everyone is working on — not just with Civil.

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