Building On-chain Journalism
Damon Peters
Founder at ImmutableType || 2x CMO || Former VP Overstock.com || Marketplaces & Auctions || Growth
Greetings to the LinkedIn family!
I've been publishing natively on Substack for a couple of years now and will begin cross-posting TL;DR summaries here for my friends on Linkedin.
Welcome to ImmutableType
ImmutableType.com is our project to build purpose-built blockchain tools for journalists and their communities.
I would be honored to have friends from our network subscribe and share the ImmutableType Newsletter.
Subscribe here-- https://immutabletype.substack.com/
ImmutableType Mission and Values
The problem we're solving is the unsustainable business model of yesterday's media companies, which relies on an attention economy that sells access to its audience as a products of advertisers.
The attention economy is a business model which clearly creates perverse incentives for the media operators and negatively impacts the ability for journalists to represent the true interests of the people. Instead of Walter Cronkite, we get clickbait, content, and breaking news passed off as journalism.
The below is a graphic from our "About" page outlining our Mission and Values.
In short, we want to have extreme confidence in the credibility of the information we read and view, therefore, we want to help journalists cross from the old world into the new (emerging) world.
Why Blockchain and Public Ledgers?
We really don't know who, or what, is behind the information published in the media today, nor its motives in recommending stories to us online. That general uncertainty leads to our loss of trust in the entire system.
Transparency and provenance, therefore, are key to returning trust to our informational institutions. Our new crypto era is the first opportunity we have had to publicly refer to the origin of information and identify the editorial participants involved in curating the narrative.
We believe creating a decentralized, sustainable, public ledger system with proper incentives will provide the necessary technical components to work toward solving for loss of public trust by creating a trustless system available to all communities.
Furthermore, we believe blockchain and crypto technology will reduce barriers to entry and increase the opportunity for more voices to be represented.
Few communities today are able to support the costly infrastructure of local daily newspapers, radio, or broadcast, which leaves their interests out of the public discourse.
We are able to re-open the doors for those communities by reducing operating costs for journalists and increasing access to self-funding activities. Editorial priorities will, again, be decentralized away from national decision makers and put back in the hands local community members. There will not be a national gatekeeper for local news, no central authority, nor a distant penny pincher to decide what will be included within all the news that's fit to print. The people will decide, thank you.
But, They Say Crypto is Bad(!)
Of course 'they' do.
We are in a very, very, disruptive time in history, and those to be disrupted are the ones benefitting from value aggregation within the current order. New technologies occasionally disrupt legacy systems, which is where we find ourselves today with the adoption of blockchain and associated cultural technologies, such as crypto.
Banks, media, government, global finance, and corporate structures are all examples of system design which benefit from continued aggregation and growth. These systems are coordination solutions that are necessary in the presence of coordination problems. We need them to be successful for the public good when coordination solutions are not available.
Crypto, as a generalized term, is a coordination solution, and it includes tokens, currencies, smart contracts, governance and consensus mechanisms, public ledgers, the act of tokenizing, as well as speculation and mining.
This is very important to keep in mind when evaluating what is in the public's interest. The incentive for established systems is to throw the baby out with the bathwater and be rid of the threat crypto, but that is a solution from the Middle Ages. No intellectually honest person is throwing out coordination solutions to save inefficient systems. Many will recognize this conflict from the book, The Innovators Dilemma, and it's playing out on a global scale.
"Crypto is bad" is simply an objection shouted by those unwilling to share value with the people who create it. Don't be led. Do your own research, as we like to say. Building better information sources threatens the ones who benefit from leaving the current system untouched.
How Does ImmutableType Work?
The shortest description of what a journalist will be able to do on ImmutableType: A journalist will be able to sell their articles as a digital good with a provably finite supply.
As a general description, a journalist will be able to write an article, publish it online for public reading, establish total edition quantity to sell, set article purchase price, set date and time collection is available to purchase, receive funds to a Web3 wallet from on-chain sales, receive secondary royalties from secondary sales when available, receive tips, and sell subscriptions.
The shortest description of what a community member will be able to do on ImmutableType: A member will be able to buy and sell digital goods with provable provenance of a provably finite supply.
A community member will be able to collect articles from their favorite journalists, display their collection online and on-chain, share their public profile of their collected works, fund their favorite journalists through DAOs, subscribe to the ImmutableType.com website, tip journalists and the platform.
We are able to do the following currently:
Our 2023 roadmap also includes:
More updates are available through our Substack newsletter: https://immutabletype.substack.com/
Help Grow ImmutableType
We're building this project to have a positive impact on society, and it's a bottoms-up grassroot effort to get the word out. We appreciate all efforts to promote and grow our network.
Thank you for reading and sharing. I'm looking forward to working with everyone to advance our tools for journalists.
Damon Peters
Founder, ImmutableType