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Can blockchain save journalism ?

— probably not before it fixes itself

It´s meant to be short but offer extensive extra reading and sourcing within the report itself, in an experiment to see if a 40 pages report can be consumed more attractively in this manner. Hence, details of examples, sources, links and explanations are kept in sub-articles that will appear if you click the links.

And since I know few people are going take the 87 minutes it takes to read the full monty from beginning to end, I have put the conclusion right after the introduction so the reader can get the gist of it in a few pages and dive in if interested in the details.

And to all the other colleagues, friends and family that has helped with research, design, servers, proof-reading and publishing:
– you know who you are!

Ann Arbor, April 2019

[Estimated reading time 2 minutes, 28 seconds.]

But these stories exemplify some of journalisms challenge to retain its core values and keep its raison d´etre and trust with the audience.

When traditional media houses ruled gatekeeping the news flow no one who couldn’t afford a big printing press could compete and since there was a fair consensus in the establishment on what was true and relevant that was what was communicated to the mass-audience.
Not so anymore.

As a profession journalism has forsaken a lot of its standing with the public, its being challenged in new ways by the powers that be and it´s no longer the publics one-stop-shop for facts in the morning paper or the evening news.

The output of journalism is also being used and distorted in new ways, that the profession isn’t paying attention to or have few means to challenge.

And maybe the trust was never really there.

To regain the trust and become essential for our audience we need to source our reporting better, and show transparency in the process.

I like to think about my audience as my mom. Not stupid, but sometimes underinformed. And absolutely rational. Craving for accurate information, that she might spread in her bubbles, use in the next election or when deciding what she’s buying.

The question here is if we can increase journalism’s integrity and regain the lost trust in our profession with the help of technology.

The short answer is journalism probably doesn’t have a choice. It needs to be ahead of the curve if its not going to be run over by Zuckerberg 2.0 — the next wave of technological inventions that will affect the profession and it´s standing in society.

Or just skip to the …

[Estimated reading time 10 minutes, 43 seconds.]

The common ground in storytelling is shared principles and beliefs — women should not eat their children, for example. Truth is not the most important in storytelling.

Storytelling is a more a powerful vehicle for establishing order than truth. People find a reason to live in their principles and beliefs. So, if those beliefs are upheld, then they praise it. When those beliefs are not upheld (if they are questioned or worse, ignored), they fight to defend it.

The common ground in storytelling is shared principles and beliefs — women should not eat their children, for example. Truth is not the most important in storytelling.

Storytelling is a more a powerful vehicle for establishing order than truth. People find a reason to live in their principles and beliefs. So, if those beliefs are upheld, then they praise it. When those beliefs are not upheld (if they are questioned or worse, ignored), they fight to defend it.

When Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook on a lonely night he inadvertently handed a printing press to the public. Everybody now gets to distribute information to the rest of the world. This has led to a democratization of information — the web has enabled many, many, more to share their view of the world.

But it also undermined the publishing business and the whole infrastructure of gatekeepers, fact checkers, reporters, editors that are the foundations of journalism.

My mom is on Facebook. And she shares what she finds relevant in her feed. She’s now a publisher. That’s a fact that journalists must accept. We lost the privilege of gatekeeping and must start offering our competence to our audience in a way that is useful to mu mum, not just competing with the millions of cute kittens everybody else is throwing at her.

She cares about the society surrounding here. She is educated and knows the importance of facts. At the end of the day she´s rational and I know she cares about truth.

That’s our profession, built on experience in finding the truth, with a defined set of ethics, and skill to make it effectively consumable. But we are not doing it well enough.

Journalism has leaned towards storytelling more than just reporting the truth. Telling the story is obviously a very important part of journalism, but at the core is reliability, otherwise it´s just another novel. But if that is going to change the truth must be verifiable. And that’s where blockchain could be of service.

Almost all information today is digitized, and a lot is available on the net, hence it can be certified and shared with new technologies that are far superior to established methods of authenticating origin and authenticity as seals and stamps on paper.

Automated sourcing, easily accessible for the consumer, like the “Verified by Po.et” stamp on top of this page, could a mean change in what is consumed and spread. Click on the “Verified by Po.et” and it will lead you to the Bitcoin blockchain. An immutable ledger that that proves I posted this and not somebody else.

Our audiences are smart and one-click tools like that properly implemented could help re-establish the confidence of the profession and leave the rumors and urban myths to the undergrowth of the web.

Then again, we must remember that people who have grown up in a world where storytelling is how we establish order, and facts simply support the “believability” of that story, they have sometimes never seen a world where there are “gatekeepers” who focus on the truth. To them blockchains ability to establish origin and transparency, so that a common truth can be established and shared, might be a foreign concept. The question arises is if they are looking for truth. Or are they just looking for order?

But most people are after all like my mother, rational and not stupid. If they can distinguish between a rotten apple and a fresh one, they will make an informed decision. Everybody is an expert on something and confronted with facts I believe most people want to make informed decisions despite their political or religious preferences.

That said, we have a long way to go. America put a man on the moon in 1969 but measles, once eradicated in the US, is still breaking out in 2019 due to non-vaccinated fringe religious groups and anti-vaccine propaganda.

These technologies could be used by journalism in a way that audiences find useful and easy to navigate. The challenge is user experience and the willingness by journos and publishers to leave the “trust me because I’m Bob Woodward” behind on history’s scrapheap.

News outlets must start verifying and sourcing journalism’s output as a rule instead of when being challenged. And to take control of the watermarking. If someone else decides what can be labeled as journalism, the battle is lost.

The million-dollar question for journalism is if it´s ready to start offering its unique competence for what it’s worth and not just succumb to publishers who inherited printing presses or the tech giants who today dominate and control the flow of information. Unfortunately, there are not many signs that journalism is mature enough to take on that challenge.

Most are busy worrying about their current job or looking for new markets for their skills. The remaining are either trying to compete with the endless parade of kittens published on Facebook or working for some of the publishing houses that still hold high standards and can afford to keep investigating until the story is ready to go.

Mastheads like Dagens Nyheter, Kristianstadsbladet, NPR and Swedish Television represent culture, management, line-by-line processes, economy and have a long history of doing the kind of fact-checking and truth-seeking that Facebook and others are attempting.

The core product of the mastheads is not airtime or paper, its journalistic integrity. And its control of that value that’s at stake.

And the audience is not the political party preferred by the publisher, or the government that misuses the trust given to it by the people. It’s the people.

They care and act on the misinformation. When the media failed in uncovering that a sole lying Iraqi refugee, “Curveball”, was the only source behind the reasons for invading Iraq where half a million people consequently died they failed the people. But the dead are remembered, and the failure is noted.

Also remembered are the men wearing yellow jumpsuits were ingeniously called “enemy combatants” in quotes by the White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. Men who are really prisoners of war in a new kind of conflict, being waterboarded, tortured, in defiance of the Geneva convention built on 60 million dead in WWII.

The press accepting the Orwellian subterfuge and prisoners in chicken cages on a no man’s land in the Caribbean has fueled public anger both in the West and in the Arab world. That anger has supported the rise of evil forces like Al Qaida and the Islamic state. We are living with the consequences.

Mastheads, brand names, still have a major impact. Wikileaks Diplomatic cables took off when The Guardian used its correspondents to evaluate the hundreds of thousands of revealing diplomatic cables from the US State Department, not by Julian Assange publishing them on his blog. It was journalists sifting through, evaluating and publishing in a coherent way that made the difference.

When Ronan Farrow researched the Harvey Weinstein story and NBC decided against publishing. the real brand name, Ronan Farrow himself, went to The New Yorker. The rest is history and proof that the core value is journalistic prowess and not a brand.

The mastheads need to shape up in upholding these promises if they are to remain middlemen in the equation.

“All the news that’s fit to print” must mean just that. They need to factcheck, factcheck again, and employ an immense degree of transparency in what they do. They could benefit from the blockchain, and they are experimenting with it. The New York Times recently advertised for a blockchain project manager.

Journalists know the ground rules of the profession: they report only what they can best gather is the truth, always use two independent sources, are transparent with the origin of information and correct mistakes.

They have just haven´t cared enough and haven’t been challenged. Until now.

But can journalists survive without the mastheads? It´s like the local farmer trying to survive without Walmart selling his good apples. Civil, and to some extent Po.et, and other blockchain initiatives, gamble that if the “apples” are fresh, journalism could sell its certified product in the digital sphere. Civils idea that journalists could put their content on the blockchain and get paid in crypto currency from its audience is possible, but in practice it´s a long shot.

They all know that apart from the “Don’t wanna knows” like Trump all want the truth. But in what format will it be distributed on? Our current situation resembles the battle between VHS and Betamax. Betamax was technically superior, but VHS still won.

The same billion-dollar answer is what everybody is racing for in the blockchain industry.

But who verifies it? How will this work in practice? What about answers to major philosophical issues like who´s going to be the final arbitrator of truth and what is “good information”?

Wikipedia’s evolvement from a free-for all publishing platform to a curated, some would say censored, model is an interesting parallel. They nowadays apply a transparent and documented process where information is edited so that it is sourced with a footnote that links to a reliable source, not necessarily being factually correct. Which means the editors can focus on verifiability, not truth.

Civil’s failure to launch in the fall of 2018 is an easy way to discredit the whole idea, but, a difficult lens to analyze whether blockchain will help journalism or not. Civil failed due to the difficulty of purchasing the tokens needed to have voting power to enforce standards. But people should not need to understand what blockchain is to use it — they need to quickly and easily purchase tokens. Ideally without even realizing they’re purchasing units of value that are tracked using blockchain technology.

I do think some people wanted Civil’s tokens, the demand was there. I clearly wanted some. The question becomes: is it scalable beyond some aficionados? Would my mom purchase Civil’s tokens if it was easier? And are people willing to PAY for potentially more accurate news?

Money has so far not been a problem in blockchain development with Bitcoin soaring to $19,000 in 2017. Now at $ 4,000 many of the initiatives have lost funding but Po.et says their incubator Bitcoin Magazine continues to provide support and Civil’s funder ConsenSys made a lot of money on their expertise in blockchain and infused $3 M in Civil’s recent relaunch. But eventually the technology must support itself.

More importantly, journalism needs to decide if it needs a technological solution to solve its problems.

I think it could benefit. But not all agree.

Jonah Engel Bromwich of The New York Times turned his thumb downwards in November 2018 after Civil’s Initial Coin Offering capsized:

“For now, Civil is essentially just another media operation with venture capital funding. The money underwriting it, from ConsenSys, remains, you know, regular money. The company uses some blockchain technology underneath the hood, including a plugin for its publishing software. But the technology remains difficult to comprehend, and, for any news-consumer’s purpose, irrelevant.”

Then again, Bromwich is on the inside pissing out, from within the warmth of Sulzberger’s Times Square mansion bought with money from a Mexican telecom mogul.

All journalists can´t work at The New York Times, the kids of the future don’t read it and can’t even tell one old media brand name from another.

They are on the outside, together with my mom, and still need to get the facts right.

Fredrik Laurin 2019–04–25

Special Projects Editor, Swedish Television

2018/19 Knight Wallace Fellow

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