The Roadmap to Permanence
“Why blockchain?” is often the first response we get when discussing Civil’s mission to introduce a new model for journalism. It’s a fair question. What does blockchain, the technology behind Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies, have to do with journalism?
At its core, blockchain unlocks two key features: self-governance and permanence.
The former refers to disintermediating advertisers, publishers and other third-parties from the journalism process. It ensures that editorial decisions are driven solely by journalists and how they want to serve their readers. Blockchain — and more specifically, Ethereum — makes this possible with smart contracts: software that executes a transaction when specific requirements are met (e.g., Party A agrees to pay Party B $100 if the New England Patriots win the Super Bowl; once the agreement is made, it’s inalterable — but it will only be transacted if and when the Patriots win).
We’ll be sharing more detail on how we’re employing the CVL token to ensure self-sustaining governance mechanisms in this space in the coming weeks. For a high-level overview of Civil’s self-governance structure and how we’ll financially incentivize good behavior, check out our FAQ section.
How Blockchain Introduces Permanent Archiving
Permanence is the other major feature that blockchain-based models introduce for journalism. It’s prohibitively difficult for journalists to preserve a permanent archive of their work, as servers are traditionally controlled by publishers or large media conglomerates. If those actors decide to pull the plug on an archive for one reason or another, they alone control the kill switch. In 2017 alone, DNAinfo and Gothamist, two of the leading, local news-focused publications in the U.S., were abruptly shut down by their billionaire owner. Eight years of archives were taken down in a single day, and were only restored after vociferous public protest. Similarly, a battle is raging for Gawker’s archives more than a year and a half after the publication ceased operations as a result of a lawsuit secretly backed by another billionaire.
This is all to say that archives are incredibly vulnerable — and ensuring the permanence of our shared historical record has been a pipe dream at best for most journalists. Blockchain is a game-changer in this regard: it introduces the ability to store immutable (unchangeable) records across a massive, decentralized network in which no single party can make a change without consensus from the larger majority of independent users.
Civil’s goal from day one has been to provide a platform that will allow journalists to permanently archive their content while also ensuring the best possible user experience. We want to give readers a seamless, fast experience while also ensuring that archives will live on for eternity, and cannot be removed or easily altered.
So, how do we do this?
Ensuring a Story’s Permanence on Civil
When Civil launches, journalists, whom we refer to as “Newsmakers,” on the platform will have access to a custom CMS. Pushing content out through the CMS will automatically add a record of the article on the Ethereum blockchain that confirms the time it was published and its author. Doing so will also store the content on a Civil-managed server to ensure low latency retrieval (aka, ensure articles load in milliseconds). Newsmakers can also store an article’s full text if they desire: the CMS will include a button that gives journalists the option to publish the story permanently to the Ethereum blockchain. Doing so will include a small gas charge (paid for in ETH — permanently archiving content will average approximately $0.92 USD per article, at the time of this writing), and will represent the Newsmaker signing a smart contract. Civil does not take any transaction fee; its CMS is merely a UI that lets non-developers easily interact directly with Ethereum. In either case, the contract declares that information is available at a given address, and that it was uploaded by the specific Newsmaker. Storing this information on the Ethereum blockchain means that it will be virtually impossible to alter.
Put another way, at Civil’s launch, content will be stored in one or both of these ways:
- On a central server managed by Civil: this ensures that changes to articles (updates, corrections) can easily be reflected, and that readers can more easily search and access content nearly instantaneously for a better overall experience. Its publishing record will also be permanently stored on the Ethereum blockchain (“Article ID#123 is available at https://xyz/123")
- On the Ethereum blockchain: no one party is in control of the data. When a Newsmaker checks the “Ethereum archival” button, it will store the pointer and also write the full text of the article to the Ethereum contract “log”. Note that Newsmakers will also be able to update articles based on new information on Ethereum in a non-redundant way, only paying additional gas for content being added.
After launch, we intend to create a larger developer ecosystem that will open up additional ways to ensure the permanence of content on the Civil platform. Newsrooms will always have “Civil Storage” out of the box. They’ll have the option to customize further by either building their own engine or, in the future, selecting another option developed within the Civil ecosystem. Services will implement a common API interface, but where and how to physically store content beyond the Civil platform is up to the Newsmaker, and will be aided by our developer community. They’ll likely be built on top of other decentralized storage systems like IPFS. Newsmakers will make their decisions based on how they want to prioritize price, latency and availability, and developers will be incentivized to build additional tools for permanently archiving content.
While Civil’s initial CMS will only support permanently archiving text articles, we’ll soon add tools that allow Newsmakers to archive more complex datasets, photography, video and other multimedia.
Why so many options? Every Newsroom has different requirements, and we don’t want to force a solution on them. If what Civil provides doesn’t work for their needs, we want to offer an infrastructure that enables them to build a custom solution or use a solution from our ecosystem. Providers can implement archival services either for a fee or as a service to the community. We will encourage these services to be fully decentralized to “billionaire proof” the content.
This is part of our larger ecosystem plan, which we intend to open up to developers once our platform is live. Here’s a look at how we’re currently envisioning this will look:
As always, we welcome feedback from our community. Please email me with any feedback you’ve got on our approach — and join our growing Slack community.
