A group of journalists, free-speech activists and academics from around the world has launched a blockchain-powered news platform called Civil, which is aimed at safeguarding journalism's code of ethics while reigniting the connection between readers and journalists and shifting away from the ad-driven business model.
Maria Ressa, CEO of the online news publication Rappler and one of the proponents of the initiative, said that Civil is overseen by a Civil Council, which is an assembly of 15 experts who would safeguard Civil’s code of ethics and behavior to be called the “Civil Constitution” which will be "the rule of the road for all activity."
“Unlike most websites today, there is no single server containing the articles. Instead, the articles are distributed across and constantly verified by the network. The network, as in any blockchain system, is made up of user computers, each contributing processing power to maintain the network,” Rappler said in its report.
Other members of the Civil Council are Tow Center for Digital Journalism founding director Emily Bell, Gizmodo Media group former CEO Raju Narisetti, Rutgers Institute for Information Policy & Law co-director and co-founder Ellen Goodman, and a Canadian journalist who was the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation for seven years.
Civil will run on the Ethereum blockchain platform, the report added.
The group claims that its journalism platform changes the way news is delivered and kept as Civil uses blockchain’s distributed ledger, where the articles are recorded, including all the changes, stored immutably.
Matt Coolidge, a co-founder of the group, said that because the articles are in blockchain, they cannot be removed “at the whim of a billionaire or limited group of actors overseeing a centralized server on which the entirety of a publication’s data lives.”
“No single party is in control,” he said.
He said that it is the decentralization power of the blockchain that takes control away from a central authority. He explained although the technology is nascent, it could provide long-term benefits to an industry prone to abuses by some actors.
Coolidge echoed Ressa’s statement that the platform would change the industry’s traditional business model by taking out publishers, advertisers and all third-parties. “We believe that the ad-driven business model is slowly killing good journalism – which is itself a critical foundation for free, democratic societies," he stressed.
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