Journalism 2.0 — The Decentralized Way
Recently, the number of interviews via telephone, e-mail or in-person has increased. It has bothered me personally, that for years, hardly anything has changed in the industry of journalism.
There are in desperate need of innovative ideas, as the world around them is changing drastically.
Status quo:
- Either you contact the journalist or you get contacted by them.
- The interview is carried out via phone or in person. In my experience this takes at least two hours or more.
- A lot of what has been said is not published 1:1 and most of the time changed dramatically. Clickbait articles are a huge issue.
- For a city/region, there is often times only one person in charge.
- Articles are, therefore, if published, highly subjective.
- Writing an article from the perspective of a journalist is very time consuming.
- Dozens and dozens of good stories aren’t published due to limitations of human resources, money and time.
The Idea Part I — Mobile Story Hunters:
- A user registers for a regional area such as New York or Chicago.
- In the application-phase, we look into the qualifications of each person and either reject or accept them. For instance: if somebody is a highly respected Twitter user with a lot of followers, who is posting on a regular basis, the chances are higher to get accepted. If a person doesn’t use social media much or can’t write properly, the candidate is probably getting rejected.
- The “Hunter” starts hunting and looks for interesting stories.
- Other users can follow the Mobile Reporter and see everything this person posts about the city. The stories can be published via text, photo or video.
- Max. 50 reporters for each city. Depending on the size, the number can increase/decrease.
- Users can suggest “Hunts”.
The Idea Part II — Micro Payments:
- Consumers pay a fixed amount of money every month to access the stories. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say this is $9.99 per month. This is immediately credited to the customer as “coins”. We receive a commission of 30%.
- Users can use these coins to pay the “Story Hunters”. Each story is capped at $0.10 per user and hunter, so that the influence of a single person is limited.
- The more hunters and users, the more stories and revenue.
- Users can discuss the stories internally in the app via regional groups.
News are decentralized, the system is much faster, everyone is up-to-date and get’s to see their city via different angles, through competition the stories get better, the mobile reports make money and instead of one single reporter, there are dozens of micro reporters publishing interesting stories.
I’m a huge fan of transparency and sharing great ideas to collect feedback. After coming up with this idea internally at Bynd, I decided to publish this and get your feedback. What do you think? Your feedback is very valuable to me.
