69 START-UP ALLEY Civil
a key role in creating a new kind of journalistic ecosystem. In mid-September, Civil will be executing a token launch of CVL tokens (based on the Ethereum ERC20 token) for newsrooms interested in operating on the network, as well as consumers of content who wish to actively support good journalism. “We want to encourage people who care about journalism to take a more proactive stance and we want journalists to not worry about publishers taking stories down for commercial reasons,” says Mohan. For readers, if they choose to buy into the ecosystem (either via CVL tokens or their standard credit cards) there are incentives designed to encourage good journalism: they can vote for their favourite stories, challenge those that they feel are unfair, inaccurate or fake, and tip for stories they’ve enjoyed. According to Mohan, the quality of journalism will be higher because all the newsrooms will be governed by a large number of stakeholders interested in journalism – other newsrooms and engaged readers – rather than a small number of owners interested in profit. “Basically the token is a mechanism to maintain high quality on a platform,” she says.
People won’t have to use CVL tokens just to read the news but newsrooms that wish to join the network will have to pay $1,000 as well as clearly stating their mission and their credentials and signing up to the ‘Civil Constitution’ which outlines the rules for this decentralised marketplace. Newsrooms on the platform are also free to decide how they are funded. They can run on conventional revenue streams, and while advertising-based revenue models are not banned, Civil newsrooms are required to be transparent about their advertisers. The business is funded by Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin’s blockchain company ConsenSys, which contributed $5 million to Civil. Of this fund, $1 million went into setting up and hosting 14 pilot newsrooms on the site, which its adviser Old Town Media helped source, and which vary widely in terms of staffing and perspectives. The Colorado Sun , for example, comprises a fully formed newsroom of disillusioned local journalists who left the Denver Post after it was bought by a private equity firm who subsequently cut down on staff and content. Other sites are more niche, with fewer staff numbers, including Cannabis Wire (a policy site exploring the implications of the legalisation of cannabis).
While most examples, with the exception of South East Asian media organisation Splice, are US-based, Mohan adds that of the 600 newsrooms that have applied to be on the platform 40% come from outside the US. She adds that the platform is now on track to host 1,000 newsrooms by the end of the year and hopes to have 100 newsrooms up there “within the first month”. All the newsrooms focus on one or more of four currently underfunded areas: local news, international news, policy and investigative journalism. The token launch also aims to raise further capital for the venture (“a soft cap of $8 million and a hard cap of $24 million”, according to Mohan) which it wants to plough back into further projects, staffing and aiding underfunded newsrooms, particularly in the area of local news. Also planned is an R&D incubator that will explore emerging forms of journalism and reporting, archiving, syndication, curation and recommendation.
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