How Web3 Can Revitalize (Revolutionize) Journalism - Eric Mack

all right hey everybody so yeah my name is uh eric mack and i've been a journalist for about a quarter century which is a super crazy thing to hear come out of your own mouth um and uh come out of uh broadcast originally and for about the first half of my career did a lot of uh public radio stuff uh npr and just generally talking at people like i'm doing now and also going into rooms like this of uh people that are primarily smarter than me and then trying to distill what they're all working on for a larger audience um another project i did along the way was i helped crowdsource a science fiction novel and this was back five or six years ago before there was much web three or dows and really wish i had had the tools we have today back then because doing this in a facebook group and on a google doc was a bit of a nightmare so but what i'm really interested in after going down the dow rabbit hole over the last not even a year is that i began to realize that uh in addition to helping to crowdsource science fiction uh it stands to be able to fix a lot of the problems with journalism that i think you'll probably recognize uh from this list we all know what clickbait is and some of the flawed incentive structures involved in journalism news deserts i don't know if anyone's familiar with that term but at the moment you could drive from where i live in taos new mexico and if you were to drive due east towards the oklahoma panhandle you would drive for hours go through several small communities none of those communities have a local news source right now they used to within the last 20 years and about a half a dozen of them have closed so a lot of problems with journalism but uh i also do think that there is a lot of potential and so just a disclaimer that the rest of this presentation presumes that this potential is actually real we could debate problems in journalism for a long time um and that's because uh earnestly i've seen the power of journalism i've seen it realized you know during my own career and what's even more eye-opening is when you leave and you go to a place uh other places around the world where this potential really isn't there and it's very different so um i'm very interested in how web3 can achieve these things and maybe go even further that said this is not a road map instead i look at this as building up four pillars of what web3 journalism could be so these are basically the four best ideas i feel like i've come across uh not necessarily my ideas but putting kind of a journalism and news spin on them so number one something we're all familiar with and all struggling with if you're in a dow particularly is onboarding web 3 and traditional journalism i feel like really need to get to know each other i've been hanging out in dallas for several months now and keep looking around for other journalists and there are not many are showing up and i mean i think this is this is a real problem because uh most people outside of this conference don't necessarily get what's going on uh and in particular a lot of journalists don't get it and i think that's a real problem and it's bad for everyone and something that i think we can help fix there are some places starting up where you can begin to find web3 literate journalists and media folks one is one i'm involved with called journal dao which is really just a discussion group right now of a couple dozen journalists and media people uh bankless dow i think is a an onboarding system for a lot of people into web three uh and then also another one i'm involved with is called dow planet and that's a group a social dial that's actually putting on denver down the road later this week um so that's a simple one pillar number two i think is the more important thing that we can get into and that's to move media from an extractive to an expansive uh ecosystem and so what do i mean by that well first let's go into how web 2 journalism works this is all going to be pretty familiar to you i think um let's start with social content on web 2 platforms your social content does have value sometimes not all of it but the thing is all of it is completely harvested all of that value by web 2 platforms that we post to and by reporters like me who meet who make a living off of it so here's here's an example i mean i'm not talking about elon musk elon musk wants his stuff on on twitter it's what he uses instead of a marketing department but here's something else this is uh some footage of comet leonard from december this was captured by an amateur astronomer using uh some pretty expensive equipment and this is the kind of thing i cover i cover a lot of space and astronomy and i was writing about comet leonard and i grabbed this tweet and it went into the story and now i mean i happen to know that uh dr janetta was you know pretty excited to have that that up in my story uh but the thing is uh she didn't get paid for it twitter did and i did and something just feels a little bit off about that so to break it down a little further let's talk about how value flows in the different mediums that we're familiar with so web one the value flows from publisher to the reader in terms of immediate access to information this has been this way for 30 years now and then value flows back from the reader to the publisher in terms of subscription revenue and eyeballs to sell to advertisers now which had what changed with web 2 uh is that you've still got the value flowing from publisher to reader in terms of that access to information but now uh the reader is getting an extra platform an audience and that that hit of dopamine that we're probably all familiar with from you know getting a like or a retweet or whatever acknowledgement of your humanity and then the other way uh web 2 value flows back from the reader to the publisher in terms of not just the eyeballs but also all sorts of personal data that the platforms can sell to advertisers so here's where we are in web 3 the opportunity is that the value can flow from the publisher to the reader in terms of contribution to the creation of valuable content and from the reader to the publisher in terms of contributions to the creation of valuable content seems a little different so to sum that up another way in the old model eyeballs and attention are converted to fiat via advertising to fund the creation of content to attract more eyeballs and attention and generate profits been going on for generations but in the new model engagement drives the creation of content and that drives more engagement generating value for the public good that same circle from the last slide in the process and this engagement and creation can be moderated measured and facilitated through tokens and smart contracts this is i mean we're seeing this stuff among creative communities and this is really just kind of taking what's been working for artists over the last couple years and seeing if we can make it work for journalism as well so put another way media tokens can create a community for journalists and their audience and web3 tools can build a new economy for citizen journalism so instead of grinding on axi infinity to earn a couple of tokens you could be going out and contributing to what's going on documenting what's going on in your local community and helping spread the word of that and keeping civic engagement where it should be oops so the point is that with web3 we can be expansive rather than extractive web 3 is the potential of citizen journalism recognized and civic life revitalized as i was saying okay so third of four pillars um i would love to see information put on shane to truly unlock its power and i think some folks here might be familiar with this one kind of a basic experiment the associated press put has worked with putting facts on chain using chain link they put election results on there and that was used to settle prediction markets back in 2020 a couple of other experiments that are underway or have been tried that i've kind of been drawing inspiration from a poet you may remember was an attempt to put um among the many things it could do like journalists and writers could put their actual portfolio on the blockchain ocean protocol of course is doing some really cool stuff uh with tokenizing data and access to it and i'm pretty sure there's some folks from the decentralized science movement here who are a little bit further along in building these kind of things that i'm talking about talking about in terms of making actual facts and data available on blockchain so a couple other applications of having this stuff on chain for journalists uh it makes it potentially uh much easier to facilitate interacting with anonymous sources um and also i don't know if before covid we were freaking out a lot more about deep fakes i don't think that the potential for problems there has gone away uh but i mean i would love to see can we like take an actual original video of an interview put that on ipfs or something token data with a multi-sig and then we and then you have the authenticate you can authenticate the original version i feel like this is a bounty that somebody should be looking at another another possible use for journalists of putting this stuff on chain when you write a story on a web 2 platform that thing is likely to get changed updated corrected several times a little a little insight behind the curtain uh a lot of my stories maybe maybe one or two person one or two people will edit them uh the the headline will get edited about eight to nine to a dozen times um so if we if we could have an immutable record of everything that happens to a story every update every correction i think it'll go a long way in regaining the trust of uh of the public in terms of uh for journalists and also increasing that transparency that i think uh is essential oops wrong way now we're going the other direction okay another thing so in that discussion group journal dao that i mentioned we were starting to talk about the potential of blockchain for journalism and immediately everyone went here you know not long after constitution dow why not we can join jeff bezos and buy some struggling local newspapers or maybe restart the ones that have shut down like on that drive to oklahoma i mentioned earlier so but why would we go ahead and do this well i mean i think you know some dows want to use democratic means to buy cool stuff and preserve it constitution whatever but it would also be cool to use it would also be cool to buy these struggling local institutions that help actually preserve democracy i could see this as an experiment with being able to break away from the advertising business model finally if we if journalists web three native journalists were to uh actually own a local outlet uh and also an opportunity to pay journalists what they're worth and give them the means to actually do by do right by their communities in terms of having the resources to do the reporting that a local community actually deserves um and so if you were to put these four pillars together and this is kind of the like very long view of where i think this could all be going if we can dial in onboarding a model that focuses on expansion over extraction of value getting some facts on chain and then maybe going shopping for a few outlets um with all those things working together this leads us inevitably i think to dowse as the new wire service um and there's some some of the larger dowels like when you're out if you operate in in bankless at all it's just this kind of large sprawling thing with people from all over the world and i you know one day i was like if all these people were actually journalists it's a wire service right there and i think we have a better we have a better grasp on what's going on in our world um but this process could be a straight line or not there's a reason it's pillars and not a road map i think these things can be built up in sequence or in parallel and i'm really curious to see who steps up to do it first this this is the community that i'm a part of and this is me and if there's any time left for questions it looks like i got about five or six minutes