Introducing Civil Studios
Today we’re announcing the formation of a new company: Civil Studios, a journalism-focused venture-builder for the decentralized web.
A little over a year ago, when I and my partners in Old Town Media first met Matthew Iles, the founder of the Civil Media Company, I wouldn’t have understood a word of that jumble. So I’ll take a step back to describe how we got to today.
Matthew told me and my partners, Josh Benson and Katherine Lehr, that he wanted help developing something radically constructive: a journalism marketplace that isn’t controlled by billionaires. He proposed to put new developments in blockchain technology at the service of journalism by building a marketplace in which quality publications could survive and grow without compromising editorial integrity to accommodate capricious owners, manipulative third-party content distributors or ad models that only pay off at unattainable scale.
It seemed to us then a wild idea. And as someone who admittedly slept through all the alarms in the late ’90s that led to the development of the contemporary Internet, I was not uniquely well situated to understand, at first, how blockchains and cryptocurrencies could revolutionize the way we work and organize and inform each other. Once we dug in, though, we found the learning curve was short. Yes, there’s a lot to understand and process about how a new, decentralized web can rewrite the rules of the Internet economy to create intentional communities of all kinds. But the space is in its infancy, and there’s not all that much to study except for what you can build and try for yourself.
That’s one reason we sometimes encounter skepticism when we talk about the project (well, that, and the fact that the space has conspicuously become a magnet for get-rich-quick actors). But it’s also precisely what’s so exciting about it: the opportunity to take part in a world-building project. Civil’s mission is to create an environment that places real value on real journalism, something the current internet economy either fails at or only achieves by a series of messy proxies, haphazard and precariously aligned. For people like us, who have been committed to journalism for our whole professional lives, it seemed crucial that working journalists be placed at the forefront of emerging technology for the production and distribution of media, so that the rules don’t get written without us.
Our first tasks working with Civil were very pragmatic: partner with talented people willing to take on the risks and rewards of starting journalism businesses on this new platform, to learn what it can do and to make great journalism free of many of the depredations of the contemporary digital economy — with financial and technical support from Civil to get them started. That “First Fleet,” as we’ve been calling them, is almost all on board now.
We’ve also been deeply engaged in the theoretical underpinnings of Civil’s marketplace, working closely with the founders on the governance structures that will allow publications to flourish, establish direct and trusting relationships with their audiences, preserve a permanent archive of the work (the precarious state of the journalistic record on the web is one of the great scandals of 21st Century journalistic practice), and remove bad actors from the stage (everyone from purveyors of falsehood in the guise of journalism to greedy owners sapping the life out of their newsrooms to powerful platforms whose “partnerships” always seem to be revealed as failures, or even scams).
That leads us to today. Old Town Media and the Civil Media Company are forming a joint venture, Civil Studios, whose mission will be to invest in news businesses that will further test the possibilities for journalism that can benefit from blockchain technology.
Civil Studios is designed with four main defining characteristics:
- Civil Studios works on projects that have journalistic value
- Civil Studios works on projects at the intersection of blockchain and media
- Civil Studios is a laboratory for finding and promoting sustainability and profitability in journalism
- Civil Studios has a major focus on journalists as founders
One of the beautiful things about the decentralized web is the radically new business models it has the potential to engender. The Civil Media Company is embodying that experiment itself: when the gates open on the Civil platform, the Civil Media Company, through its token economy, is essentially handing the keys to the kingdom to its users. It’s taking that idea a step further, even, pursuing what Civil’s cofounders envision as an “ecosystem model” for Civil.
Civil Studios will be an independent, for-profit company that will share a lot of qualities with many of the venture-builder firms that have proliferated so successfully on the conventional web.
Its mission is to study and accelerate the potential for blockchain technology to reinvent journalism. With initial funding from the Civil Media Company to be announced this summer, Civil Studios’ central activity will be to fund and pilot ambitious works of journalism for the Civil platform that will test its limits across journalistic disciplines, formats, and business models.
Civil Studios will seek out white spaces with big potential upside at the intersection of media and new technology, testing multiple theories of how blockchain and journalism can work together simultaneously, in most cases by starting with smaller investments, then reinvesting in successful projects to push them further and to greater success for those businesses and, as a result, for the Civil platform. We hope to do nothing less than create the vanguard of new journalism for the next generation of the Internet. If we do it right, we expect that the first blockchain-journalism project to win an Emmy or a Peabody or a Pulitzer will be one of our portfolio businesses.
The unusual position of Civil Studios, however, is in its own incentives and how they align with those of the founders we’ll be working with. Creating successful, founder-controlled businesses on the Civil platform will accelerate the overall growth of the Civil network. This allows Civil Studios to pursue opportunities with founders who want to maintain control of their vision and their destinies. In this, we take a lot of inspiration from the modus operandi of the Civil Media Company itself, and from some of the more founder-focused venture builders out there.
Civil Studios will be a platform company in a different way, too. Providing coordinated services to help reduce barriers to entry for journalism businesses allows them to focus sooner and more clearly on their editorial mission, without spending on services, technology and strategic input they can share with other startups. As Civil Studios and the businesses it works with learn what works and what doesn’t, those lessons can be shared among companies we work with to reduce risk, cost and heartache, and to reach real results faster.
We’ll never push a company to achieve scale for its own sake — or purely for ours. We mean our commitments to our companies to unfold over the long term. We believe the most compelling journalism businesses grow organically, developing deep, trusting and long-lasting relationships with the people they serve; and that that’s the best foundation for reinvestment and growth.
We’ll have a lot more to say about our funding, strategies, and investment philosophy in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, we look forward to hearing from you. Journalists of all kinds from documentarians to podcasters to straight-up news and investigative reporters who want to do something genuinely new to the front of the line, please!
We’re also looking forward to working as partners with other funders who share our vision for genuinely innovative ways of investing in the new internet economy that improve the lives of journalists and the people they serve.
You can contact us at civilstudios (at) joincivil (dot) com. And bookmark http://news.joincivil.com/Civil-studios/, where we’ll be posting more information and updates soon. We can’t wait to get started.
