The Media Resurrection: Blockchain, Journalism and Value on the Web

For the better part of two decades, we’ve been told that media is dying, thanks in large part to the internet and new applications and platforms.

But as I’ve said many times in the past, it’s not the journalistic components of media that is dying; it’s the business of journalism and the strategies tied to the revenue and growth support of much of media that are dying. Fear around this change is happening mainly because we don’t yet know what happens after something like the business of journalism dies, so we resort to taking that fear, concern and urgency and repairing something that we already know, something that is familiar and safe, as unsatisfactory as it may currently be.

In order to force something new, to force change, maybe what we need is for all of the elements of the current journalism business model to weaken. Perhaps once revenue and growth channels for media and journalism reach a tipping point of being under immense stress, it will drive a new way of thinking. A new way of collaborating. And a new way of sustaining.

Promoting “Good” Journalism

But beyond philosophies, the reality is, of course, much more complex. The problem is not that we need to sustain and manage the business of journalism from disappearing entirely. It’s that “good” journalism — the kind that is based on quality research, rides on decades of ethics and covers relevant issues (as opposed to, say, celebrity families we didn’t realize were feuding) — is not necessarily the type of content that generates solid revenue and enables news outlets to survive and, perhaps, even prosper.

Not all media is created and valued equally. The value attributed to media-at-large doesn’t differentiate between news vs. lifestyle topics or video vs. text and social media. Everything is valued the same, even though the efforts behind different types of media work and the investments tied to them are all different.

As I wrote a couple months back, when we talk about journalistic value, we often harp on sociological indicators (fact checking, ownership, sourcing) and not investment indicators. This makes it hard to put a tangible value in journalism. What if there was more transparency behind the cost of creating the work? Or in this case, some measurable components that financially discern different types of contents, depending on the mediums they’re delivered over.

We emphasize and expose the cost for reporting, fact checking, travel expenses, sourcing costs and other components of content creation. This puts real money behind the integrity of content, satisfying and revealing both tangible (investment) and intangible (sociological) value.

As seen, the effort doesn’t correlate with the value and, thus, funding these efforts is becoming increasingly harder as the value is no longer set by what media thinks people need. It is now set by what media thinks people will purchase, consume and drive value toward. It’s also a recognition that not everyone sees “good” journalism in the same way. The lenses that consumers wear are different and, while response may be subjective, we need content and journalism indicators that expose the objective elements — the facts.

Can we blame technology for the current equal valuation of “good” journalism and any other media content? To an extent, sure. Digital technology is a major reason that the journalism business is now running uphill. That doesn’t make it wrong. It makes it a challenge.

Products must evolve based on the platforms and media they’re dictated through. As much as emerging innovation is a challenge that journalism faces, it’s also what will drive the next generations of its worth. It’s about innovating not just at a creator level but at a consumer level as well.

How do we not just depend on existing, dying models to iterate on and have the flexibility and funding to try something new? By developing new methods of helping good media and journalism rise above the noise, we can, in turn, help good journalists (along with their editors and publishers) turn profits. In other words, we can reconcile quality journalistic content with the need to drive business value.

Sound ridiculous? Let me explain.

Why Good Journalism Doesn’t (Often) Pay

It’s a sad fact of the digital age that, for news outlets — or almost any type of media organization, for that matter — producing well-researched, well-written, accurate content is often not the best way to make money.

That’s true for a variety of reasons. One is that the ways in which consumers find content today typically has little relation to the quality of the content. The algorithms that decide which news stories rise to the top of our feeds have limited ability to determine how reliable the news stories actually are. Sure, Google makes much ado in its guidelines for webmasters of the importance of publishing quality content, but it does almost nothing to define what “quality” means. And we’ve moved beyond the days when cramming articles with keywords was the end-all, be-all of achieving a high page rank.

Nonetheless, SEO is alive and well, albeit in a more sophisticated form that no longer depends on social content sharing as a “firehose” for content. The stories that readers are most likely to see — and that, by extension, are most likely to generate revenue for their authors and publishers — are those that do what the algorithms command.

After all, there’s a reason why The New York Times, which many would regard as one of the higher-quality news outlets around today, sometimes uses different headlines for the online and print versions of the same articles. Its editors know that online, you have to write headlines that drive traffic and revenue, even if those headlines aren’t the most interesting or valuable from a reader’s perspective.

We’ve entered an era of creator dependency on consumer action. The same methods we use to drive value have now infiltrated and influenced our efforts, weakening the value of a publisher’s voice. There is also a battle in the middle, of whether or not voice matters and whether or not there is still opportunity to influence public opinion or if we’ve polarized too far. This is why the next wave of the web is about reputation, and not just what’s recent and what’s relevant. We need to know the ingredients of what we consume. It’s necessary for our health.

Let me give another example, based on my personal experience. As I explained in a recent panel discussion at the Distributed 2018 conference, back in 2009, when I was working at The Huffington Post and Michael Jackson had just passed away, the initial draft of our first big article covering the news had a headline along the lines of “Michael Jackson Passed Away Due to Drug Overdose, Doctor Investigated.”

The headline communicated rich contextual information that most humans’ interest in the topic would find valuable. But by the time we published the piece, the headline had shrunken to “Michael Jackson Dead”. Why? Because that was the headline that our SEO specialists determined would drive more traffic based on the types of Google searches people were doing at the time.

And this technology and practice that we pushed as a successful way to do distributed publishing is the exact technology and practice that is plaguing the industry today. It’s what enabled anyone to be a social publisher and use tactics that help gain more traffic, gain more engagement and all the actions tied to how we reward content in today’s day and age. In a way, the emerging social publishers are in a mea culpa scenario, where the tools they used to disrupt publishing have gone too far, misused and mis-engineered to go beyond “OMG cat” videos.

Clickbait isn’t the only issue standing between readers and good journalism. Other challenges include programmatic advertising, which uses complex, proprietary algorithms to decide which advertisements readers see. Those algorithms might prioritize a variety of factors above content quality or relevance. As a result, when they form part of the gateway to news content or the basis for generating revenue from articles, it can be anyone’s guess (well, anyone except the people who control the ad placement algorithms) which consumers will see what content or who earns a fair profit. This is another reason why there’s frequently little reward for journalists to write good content.

The final major challenge worth mentioning is the fact that big digital platforms like Google and Facebook end up with the lion’s share of profit from news content. The reason why is obvious: Many consumers find and read articles on these third-party sites without ever visiting the sites of the news organization that actually produced them — let alone paying for subscriptions to those organizations.

Stuck in the Current Model

You can blame Facebook, Google and the like for this reality, but it’s hard to see how things will change given the technology currently available to us and the way we use it. I don’t foresee consumers changing their behavior and getting their news from its original source. Even if they wanted to, identifying the original source of a given piece of content is often tricky once that piece has been shared and re-shared, possibly without proper attribution of the source. And while plans for social media sites to share more of their revenue with media organizations are nice, it’s doubtful that this move will ensure that high-quality content producers earn all of the revenue they deserve.

This is an opportunity to better understand what the value is, and whether that value is what it should be. Are we currently putting an emphasis on the wrong values, specifically in media, and if so, what direction should we drive toward in order to put a light back on the work that is so necessary to a free and open information ecosystem? Are subscriptions and advertising a catchall and a worthy model for the effort of our collective innovation? Or, similar to most of the other attempts, are these just gut renovations on broken foundations?

There have been successful risks taken that have worked, outside of the ideals of how a media company “should” make money. The Washington Post has Arc Publishing. Vox has Chorus and Concert. Forbes has a 2,000-plus contributor network. The idea is that storytelling is integral to good tech, and if you can construct a product and find market fit within your existing organization, then you must double down on the fundamentals and operations of what make it unique, beyond your platform.

There is also the notion of consumers and the values that consumers bring beyond subscriptions. Many think of consumer revenue as advertising, subscription and ecommerce related behaviors. But with new technologies and opportunities for paid curation, staking and other behaviors, have we yet to crack the surface on what consumer revenue could look like or iterations of its frameworks for future use case? Depending on content, ingredients of it, and where it’s delivered and consumed, the value and financial relationship can vary.

Reconciling Content Quality With Business Value

These are complex problems, and there’s no one trick that’s going to solve them overnight. But there is one type of technology that can do much to help reward news organizations for quality content, a technology that creates immutable records for information, like which news outlet first published an article, when it was published, who its author is and who has viewed it.

Many are playing in this space. This is a true value of blockchain in media, and its ability to pair immutable records with incentivized staking mechanisms. It offers the opportunity to issue claims. Claims are the currency for the next web of media. It’s not just about search and discoverability or engagement and distribution. It’s about verifiability and making it possible to have certain verifiable signals to put measureable, incentivized claims against. This technology, which is what Po.et is building, will empower good journalists and creators in several key ways that directly help to solve the problems identified above:

• Providing a new way for consumers to find content. By registering content in a universally accessible location, we ensure that people can find and read it without relying on algorithms or SEO to shape their view of what qualifies as the “best” content. The content curation is personalized by users, based off of criteria they themselves are looking for. A rank is no longer just about recency and relevancy of your IP. It’s about the reputation of the creator herself. It’s about the true value behind why we read, listen and subscribe to a creator’s ideals. The middle. Much conversation lately is about real vs. fake, truth vs. lies; it’s about exposing the ingredients behind which you consume, to allow more detailed delivery of information on the web.
• Offering a transparent means of tracking which stories are viewed by which people, where and when. This type of transparency is not only critical for building revenue-sharing programs between content syndicates and media organizations that are truly fair, it’s also one of the antidotes to the pitfalls of programmatic advertising, which thrives on “walled gardens” and wilts in the face of openness. Control of information should be in the hands of creators, and enabling those who choose to distribute and limit as they see fit.
• Enabling anyone to stake claims about information they feel should be exposed and verifiable. Claims are the future of the web. It is the gray area, and the value of blockchain technology operates it. The world, its consumers and its creators are not black and white. A majority of the work is in the middle, in the gray area. Claims can be as straightforward as authorship and ownership of content or they can be around fact checking, sources, information funding and distribution. The beauty of an open system is that creators and journalists alike can dictate and develop claims that are most relevant to their work and purpose. Because the decentralized community of content creators and consumers will quickly identify inaccurate claims, consumers will be able to determine where quality news actually originated. This is the system behind staking, the value of incentivized actions to work towards a common goal and promote a network powered by itself, governed by itself and strengthened by its own.
• Offering new ways of measuring the value of content. This approach not only helps us to detect the information behind the information and establish the verifiability of information, but also to assess the value of content based on metrics other than how much time and money were invested in it. When we can measure content effectiveness in ways that are more sophisticated than simply how many page views it drove or how many click-throughs it achieved, we escape the limitations of the old, SEO-dominated content universe. In order to move towards a better, verifiable web, we need to measure value in new ways to support the incoming structures. This will push an emphasis of effort over results and boil down the real reasons behind why consumers engage with particular newsrooms, publishers and content creators. It’s a huge but necessary undertaking; we are racing to the bottom because we’re not valuing and building systems that will hold up journalistic and creator integrity and emphasize the purpose and value of its work at the core.

All of this adds up to a world in which good journalism and great creative translate into good business. It’s the key to wresting control over news from misinformers, manipulators, “clickbaiters” and social media hubs and placing it back into the hands of news organizations that want to produce quality articles about issues that really matter. In the blockchain space, media is now empowered by the commitment to the openness of the project and the network of builders, verifiers and maintainers of a healthy and newfound ecosystem. Understanding strategies of the past and taking lessons from what worked and didn’t work will make the new initiatives stronger. It will enable us to build new systems as modern structures and not merely gut renovations of old, fractured foundations. And we will all get there by building, verifying and developing as a community, in consensus.