The DNAinfo/Gothamist shutdown and the future of journalism
by Tom McGeveran, Civil board member
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The news this week that Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of DNAinfo in New York and Chicago and recent buyer of the Gothamist network, was shuttering the whole operation came as a shock everywhere DNAinfo and “-ist” had a footprint.
It’s been popular to observe on social media that the billionaire-funder model for supporting journalism is inherently unstable, and increasingly untenable as the fundamentals of the journalism business seem to be in free fall. It’s true.
An additional shock was to learn that the entire DNAinfo/Gothamist archives appear to have been flushed from the internet. More recently Ricketts’ camp has indicated that the archives will be back up and hosted permanently, but the details of the arrangement are not yet worked out — and we have heard this before, after the shuttering of other publications both print and digital, only to have them disappear when even paying for and maintaining those servers seemed too much.
It used to be that libraries could be relied upon to preserve a permanent record of journalists’ work in print; there is no real equivalent in the digital media space. And if billionaires can’t be relied upon to fund ongoing news operations, can they really be relied upon as the sole responsible party for ensuring that the work of journalists survives into the historical record? Ultimately this “first draft of history” needs to survive the daily news cycle to fulfill its mission. We who work in digital journalism have been too willing to leave it up to central authorities and moneyed individuals’ goodwill to ensure that remains true in perpetuity.
I was talking about both of these issues as recently as Wednesday with the team that is working on Civil, a new journalism platform that seeks to address both of these fundamental issues at their source. (I began talking to Civil as an unpaid, personally fascinated adviser on the project early this year; I’m now a full partner in the project through my company, Old Town Media.)
Civil’s aims are no less than to rewire the fundamental principles of funding and preserving journalism, placing that responsibility in the hands of groups of journalists and readers themselves across a decentralized network built on the blockchain.
There are two central elements to this project:.
The first is to create self-sustaining journalism by using a new cryptocurrency that acts differently from conventional currency, creating a specialized economic environment that encourages great journalism, and non-independently wealthy journalists, to flourish. It also creates the mechanisms for funding these newsrooms with a broad range of supporters, and the mechanisms for governing the whole ecosystem with a view to long-term sustainability.
The second is to create a permanent, indelible, version-controlled record of the journalism Civil enables using a decentralized network of servers forming what is called a blockchain — supported by many, controlled by none.
Civil sees these elements as inseparable and mutually reinforcing, with crucially important ramifications for the way the journalism of the future will work.
Admittedly, the way all this will work is pretty complex — but we’re here to help you understand how this all works.
We encourage you to reach out to the team directly by joining our community on Slack, following and engaging us on Twitter or sending us an email.
And while we are still a few months from launching this new platform, there are ways you can get in on the project right now.
Civil has committed significant funding to a project we are calling the “First Fleet,” in which we’ll fund newsrooms that are ready to get up and running now, with a combination of conventional money and pre-sale of Civil tokens. We want this network to have lots of great journalists on board at launch, and we’re taking applications from journalists who’d like to get seed money to form newsrooms, find funding for specific projects, or just put their shingle up to report on specific beats.
Our first “First Fleet” newsroom is the digital publication Popula, spearheaded by Maria Bustillos. You can read a bit about Popula in our recent press release about First Fleet, and more about why Maria and her team are launching on Civil here.
But we’ve got room for lots more, so we want to hear from you about your ideas.
You can apply to the First Fleet here (it’s a very simple form) and we’ll get back to you quickly. You can also write to us at firstfleet@joincivil.com with specific questions, and we’ll answer everyone directly.
Come join us, and help us build the next generation of digital journalism.
