Learn How Civil’s Decentralized Newsrooms Are Reviving Journalism
The CVL Token sale began this week! Find out what’s at stake for the fourth estate and how you can get involved.
The recent tribulations of journalism industry — be it closures of newspapers, attacks on the fourth estate, or the spread of misinformation — have highlighted the necessity for change in a tradition that plays a foundational role in the lives of people all over the world. Civil, a ConsenSys formation endeavoring to build a new economy for journalism, moves forth with its public launch of the CVL Token this week, a major step in the network’s development that has been years in the making.
Civil’s progress so far has already piqued the interest of the legacy media industry, with journalistic institutions like The New York Times, The Financial Times, PBS Newshour, and the Columbia Journalism Review highlighting the ways in which Civil can solve the very issues of ownership structure and distribution models with which even those venerated establishments struggle.
The first 14 newsrooms to run on Civil, including the The Colorado Sun, Block Club Chicago, and Sludge, focused on dark money’s influence over politics, are forging forward already with fully formed editorial missions. Not only are they laying the foundation and infrastructure for the spectrum of decentralized newsrooms that will follow, but the work already produced is equal parts insightful, provocative, and necessary.
At the core of Civil’s blueprint for a marketplace for ethical journalism is the concept of a newsroom. These groups of collectivized writers (or singular writer!) can launch digital publications on the Civil framework that are supported by readers and curated and fact-checked by the community, all of which is capacitated by the CVL Token. Although the CVL Token is used to launch newsrooms, directly support journalists, and challenge publications for veracity and validity, the Civil platform is built in such a way that blockchain newbies and crypto agnostics alike will have no issues accessing and engaging with the newsrooms.
It’s a fine balance wrought by Civil’s remarkable team of journalists, technologists, and media industry upstarts intent on reviving an industry that is more important now than ever. We spoke with Civil Co-Founder and Head of Marketing Matt Coolidge to get some insight into the platform as the CVL Token sale progresses the Civil vision into reality
The tradition of journalism is under duress from so many different angles that it’s hard to know where to begin…
When you look at the state of the industry today and the accepted models that are powering it, there are two major problems. Looking at the ownership structures and/or having to cater to Google and Facebook’s ad duopoly, it’s really hard to generate reliable, sustainable income as a digital news outlet. Someone said on Twitter the other day, and it was meant as criticism: ‘Civil’s approach to journalism is that there’s a building on fire in the middle of the city. Instead of saving the building, we want build a whole new city.’ We think that’s exactly right!
All of the band-aid solutions that we’ve seen over the past ten years in the digital economy that are focused on “saving journalism’ really don’t go far enough. Pivoting to video isn’t going to reverse the fortunes of hundreds of thousands of journalists worldwide. I think it is a much more systemic, deep-seeded issue, where we need to look at the ownership structures and distribution models, neither of which empower journalists as they should. Addressing those fundamental issues is going to be a critical step in reimagining a healthier, more sustainable journalism economy, and that’s precisely what we’re trying to do. .
Can you lay out how this ends up happening to even the most respected publications?
Most newspapers today are controlled by one of three parties, none of whom are journalists: media holding companies, hedge funds or private equity firms. None of these organizations have models that incentivize funding the production and distribution of journalism at the expense of other business conerns. In most cases, that’s the maximization of profit margins, fiduciary responsibilities. Whether or not a newsroom is profitable is immaterial.
Simply put, we think that’s pretty screwed up. Take, for example, The Denver Post. It was once venerated as one of the greatest daily papers in the US, and, in recent years, served the community as the only major daily in the region. Even as their newsroom was gutted — they went from 300 to 60 full time journalists in under four years — they were turning a profit. But it wasn’t big enough. They were owned by this company called Digital First Media, which is in turn owned by a hedge fund called Alden Capital, which is notorious for swooping in and buying newspapers as ‘distressed assets’ and profiting from gutting their rotting carcasses, as opposed to trying to fund more and better journalism, which could actually improve the product at hand. This is a pattern that manifests all over the world, and the standards of journalism are falling away as a result.
How does Civil do things differently?
We are trying to introduce a new ownership structure to journalism. Think of it as a co-op model, in which participants in the system — those with CVL tokens — control the network.We have 14 initial newsrooms that have formed on Civil, that we’ve given startup grants to kick off operations and partner with us on this “crazy” blockchain-based publishing project. There are more than 100 journalists who are already publishing on Civil. We’re focused first and foremost on building an active network of participants, all of whom join the Civil economy because they care about journalism, and want to play a more direct role in the process of creating, distributing and supporting it, at a time when a new approach is sorely needed.
We’ve designed CVL as a consumer token (working closely with the Brooklyn Project) for this exact reason. This is not a project for speculators (in fact, we’re actively preventing anybody who wishes to acquire CVL for purely speculative purposes from doing so). We want Civil to become one of the first truly consumer-facing applications of blockchain technology, with the focus on what the app enables — not the value of the CVL token.
So is Civil just for crypto nerds? How are everyday people going to get on board?
If you’re somebody who just wants to read and support journalism on Civil, blockchain or crypto is absolutely not a barrier to entry. You can pay a newsroom with a credit card, just as you would WSJ or the NYT for membership or subscription models. Take a look at some our our existing newsrooms for a better sense of that experience.
The blockchain andcryptocurrency angle comes into play for anybody who wishes to participate in the network’s governance, or who prefer the peer-to-peer transaction model afforded by CVL tokens. We call this concept “The Waterline.” There will also be additional, CVL-based applications around licensing (see our recently announced collaboration with the Associated Press for more context here), curation (NevaLabs — from the founders of Storyful — is a key partner here) and membership in the near future, too.
In time, and as this network (and our general comfort level with blockchain and cryptocurrency as a society) grows, we envision more and more people transacting in the CVL economy. But again, we see no reason to turn away so many individuals who want to read and support newsrooms, simply because they’re not comfortable with the concept of blockchain or cryptocurrency.
To learn more about Civil, the CVL Token, and the decentralized newsrooms reviving journalism, head to civil.co
Disclaimer: The views expressed by the 75+ authors above do not necessarily represent the views of Consensys AG. ConsenSys is a decentralized community with ConsenSys Media being a platform for members to freely express their diverse ideas and perspectives. To learn more about ConsenSys and Ethereum, please visit our website.
