The Call for Journalists
We believe journalism constitutes our most effective voice to curate information on behalf of our communities. Our mission is to fortify trusted journalism via blockchain ledgers and decentralized community ownership, and we are calling on journalists to join our mission by adopting web3 tools and engaging in community governance experiments.
Future Drop: If it Bleeds, it leads
The centralization of corporate news media and the emergence of expansive surveillance practices have continuously shaken loose the ability of communities to influence ‘news’ priorities. The People have become the product, and the behaviors of The People are tracked within a constant feedback loop which optimizes outcomes for advertisers, rather than the social good of people. This is a fact. As a former CMO and marketing executive of technology companies, I know the ad tracking and user optimization game better than most. Advertisers are the customers, and the audience is the product. The works published by the corporate media have become the plate upon which we are each served to the highest bidders. Great journalism shines through, but our attention is, in fact, an auction conducted in real time to affect each next action we take on our screens.
Immutable Type is built to flip this relationship on its head. Journalists, not advertisers, are the key contributors within this value chain. When we free the journalists to serve their communities, we free society. Newsroom headcount has been falling for decades, and more layoffs are happening at this moment, December 2022. In contrast, blockchain and web3 technologies are maturing at the right time to create products and services which solve coordination problems, such as journalists and community members prioritizing information curation free of undue influence from external interests.
Immutable Type will offer a publishing and curation platform to this end. Journalism will become fundable by communities directly. Journalists will publish unique pieces of journalism through Immutable Type’s interfaces, which will ‘mint’ a token (NFT) that will persist with perfect provenance on the blockchain for as long as computer systems exist.
Why is this better than a blogpost, a newsletter, or an article in a newspaper? Because the NFT of the journalist’s work is immutable and tradable. Community members will have the opportunity to fund, purchase, resell, and/or vote on works important to them with the confidence the journalist has acted in their own best interest by creating works with immediate and/or long-term value. The resulting work is persistent as a tokenized piece, as it is ‘non-fungible’, therefore any future collector is assured the work is maintained in its original form as the day it was published. Try doing that with a blogpost.
The funding mechanism works in balance with shared interests. If an article is valuable to the community’s interests, a collector will fund the work by purchasing the NFT from the journalist. The funds of the purchase will flow directly to the journalists for the works purchased, or traded, by the community, thus incentivizing creation of new future works the community finds valuable. On the contrary, works which are found to be of little value will fall out of circulation naturally. Journalistic works, furthermore, become perpetual royalty machines for their creators with smart contracts paying off for as long as collectors find value in trading for their work. Journalism becomes collectable, and collections accrue value to the creators and the NFT owners.
One may imagine the opportunity this presents for those reporting truly breaking news with verified sources, or for journalists with personal interest to create long-form works of deep insight about specialized subjects. Communities of all sizes with their own unique voices will find representation from journalists contributing on behalf of its members, as this model allows for wider and more precise funding of events important to those specific community members. A journalist need not build a large newsletter subscriber base to fund their work. They may do so with a group of interested community members willing to fund their work. This is part of the vision of decentralized community ownership — more value emerges from precise coordination and the shared results of localized ownership.
What’s next? If you’re a journalist, please subscribe and follow along. We will open the platform to a beta cohort to test our systems in early 2023, and the “join list” will be announced to the subscribers at that time as well.
Please share this post to your friends and colleagues in the media industry. We will build our system to serve the size of the interest list.
Thank you for reading and sharing.
Damon Peters
Founder, Immutable Type