Blockchain Journalism

Blockchain is innovative, that much we are sure of, but the things people focus on the most are security and pseudo-anonymity. These things help make the cryptocurrency/blockchain relationship so incredibly important to our future because they provide a different way of doing business, investing, inventing and innovating, without needing the approval of some kind of government entity. The way that blockchain uses smart contracts, timestamps, transactions etc. to provide a greater sense of security and pseudo-anonymity (in some cases, only if you want to be anonymous) is revolutionary. It adds integrity and a sense of innovation, but what can it do for journalism?

Journalism is an aging profession, whether we talk about newspapers, tv broadcasts or websites. Journalism has always been susceptible to attacks by fraudsters, propagandists, libelists and slanderers, but in this day and age journalism is increasingly vulnerable because there are hundreds of thousands of "news" websites all over the web. There are satire websites like The Onion, Duffel Blog and National Report that the naive and innocent take for actual news, but this could not be further from the truth. While these satire websites admit and own the fact that they make "fake news", there are plenty of insidious websites that pass it off as legitimate news. This is dangerous, wrong and threatens the platform of integrity that people expect from news outlets. While journalism has always had errors of accuracy, for the most part people have come to trust the news that is put out by these organizations, but currently the scrutiny of Mainstream Media (MSM) is at an all-time high. Using smart contracts and unalterable blocks in the publication of news blockchain can restore some of the integrity and accountability to journalism.

There has already been an attempt to use the Ethereum blockchain to establish a more secure and reliable news network, it is called Decentralized News Network (DNN). DNN was created by two gentlemen from New Jersey, Samit Singh and Dondry Taylor. The pair said they were disgruntled after seeing the way the MSM reported and covered the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. They built DNN in order to demand greater accountability, accuracy, and integrity from the news. DNN is entirely free to all readers, built on the basis of the Ethereum blockchain, and uses digital tokens backed by Ethereum to incentivize authors and fact checkers to ensure articles/stories are accurate. Their white paper can be found here: https://goo.gl/8GoRZv.

In order to continue to see a positive trend in the relationship between journalism and cryptocurrency, we must continue to support projects like DNN and demand greater quality from the already existing MSM outlets like CNN, Fox News, MSNBC etc. Freedom of press is great but when so many people in this country become exposed to fake news by these big networks, their ignorance grows. News that is reported as true by massive news outlets through substandard research, zero accountability and sloppy methods of extraction insult the intelligence of everyone who becomes influenced by it. We need to come together as a cryptocurrency community and make sure that we exercise the collective power we wield responsibly. We can make a change that will make the world a better and more honest place, and we can start one article at a time, one block in the chain.

Refs:

1. https://dnn.media/
2. https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/dnn-ethereum-factual-news/
3. https://www.cryptoninjas.net/2017/07/11/alpha-blockchain-powered-decentralized-news-network-goes-live/
4. https://dnn.media/storage/DecentralizedNewsNetworkWhitePaperDraftv1.0.pdf