As a kid, I wanted to be a journalist.
Twenty years later, I'm a writer in crypto.
Had I become a journalist, I'd probably have the moral high ground and less arduous discussions with the family about the uselessness of my industry.
But I'd probably also be struggling to get by, and if I weren't working for a publication like the New York Times, I'd have been laid off recently, along with 100 thousand other journalists.
The lay-offs in traditional media are symptomatic of a deeper crisis. A crisis of trust and a lack of viable business models as advertising moves to other platforms.
We're observing a death of the middle where only media empires and individuals with large followings thrive — while medium-sized publications fade.
Could Web3 offer some antidotes to the issues journalists and the media face? Let's find out.
And what better way to start than with everything currently going wrong?
"Do journalism or make money!"
Before the rise of the internet, most major cities had two newspapers: a morning publication and an evening publication. The first for white-collar workers and the second for blue-collar workers as they came home from work.
In the 90s, alternatives arose with cable and the radio.
Then, the internet completely changed the delivery economics. With newspapers, it wasn't clear which part of the paper was most valuable. However, with the internet, one could easily figure out which articles scored high with audiences and which didn't.
Distribution became a question of who ranked highest in search engines and could attract the biggest crowd to the site.
Content became king. Who had the best, most attractive content would score high.
And it wasn't just established media anymore. Now, with the ease of access to posting, anyone could become a citizen journalist.
Marx and Orwell would rejoice. Means of production and information are free.
But by giving away everything for free, the media also dug their own grave. It turned out that just doing journalism wasn't a money driver.
There is a gap between what users want to pay and the costs associated with investigative journalism necessary to hold governments and businesses accountable.
Pandora's box
Nothing in life is free. Media companies couldn’t finance journalism as print revenues dropped, and content online was mainly shared for free.
It seemed like a no-brainer to transition from contextual advertising, which partly maintained their print businesses, to the online world.
Unknowingly, they opened the floodgates to what Zeynep Tufecki, in a 2017 Ted Talk, called "a dystopia just to make people click on ads."
The problem with advertising is that it sets the wrong incentives. The truth matters little if the incentive is to generate as much traffic as possible. The goal shifts to creating as many clicks as possible, often using click-bait headlines and low-quality content.
Slowly but surely, the separation between business operations and editorial decisions blurred. Even though the 20th-century journalism code of ethics prohibited financial considerations from influencing news coverage, it's hard to maintain that this is still upheld these days.
Targeted ads don't care about educating or informing. All a platform needed to do was keep users engaged. And if that's with cat videos or yet another paparazzi photo of Schwarzenegger on the beach, it doesn’t matter.
Serious media compete with memes in the feed of social media companies that capture the largest share of ad revenue.
Popularity replaces editorial judgment.
“Affirmation journalism,” which simply offers people content that is in line with their worldview, further contributes to deepening information silos.
The outcome is a weakening public sphere and a destabilizing of the democratic systems of checks and balances.
Trust Crisis
As a result of the shift to optimizing for traffic, the media has also lost trust. Only 34% of Americans have a “great deal” of confidence in media, with 38% stating they have none at all.
The disappearance of local journalism is worrisome as it’s one of the key ingredients for a functioning democracy. And, even though we might all like to live under the illusion that all the global news and celebrity gossip is really relevant to us, it isn’t.
What your local council is doing with your tax money if your trains are running, and why the farmers are striking yet again — probably is.
Local journalism, though, is not a for-profit center. And this is another issue. Some local newspapers were lucky and got bought by billionaires.
Shame that…
Billionaire owners can’t fix it
The Time magazine, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times were all bought by billionaires — now bleeding money.
While they, like Elon, probably thought they’d do the public a favor, the Bezoses of the world are now realizing that running a media business is hard and not as fun as soothing your midlife crisis with shooting rockets to space.
They should have watched some Succession to prepare. The show about a family-run traditional legacy media vividly illustrates the struggle to remain viable in a world where distribution and creation have changed.
In an attempt to prop up their business, the Roy family conglomerate buys the trending digital media site “Vaulter,” a content farm kept running by generous VC investment — or, put differently, a satire of digital media blogs where truth isn’t a currency dealt in. Instead, articles discuss whether Swift is secretly Marxist.
“Is that, like, a business model: conflict porn and hipster honey?”
Roman Roy
Ultimately, the purchase doesn't save the empire either.
What could? Maybe the New York Times illustrates a business model that can work in a world of misaligned incentives.
Monetizing media
Clearly, relying on advertising alone to keep the media business running isn’t in the best interest of either companies or individuals.
What’s the alternative?
Simple. Getting people to pay for content.
The New York Times recently crossed 10 million paid subscribers, making paid subscriptions a major revenue driver. To achieve that, they created an internal team called Beta dedicated to turning the New Yorker into a trusted place where people can go to solve problems like What to eat for dinner or where to live.
This has turned the NYT into a lifestyle brand, trusted for cooking recipes as well as critical coverage of politics.
On top of that, the NYT has a strong advertising business driven by companies' desire to be seen on trusted platforms and on sites where people linger.
A quality audience allows the publication to charge higher prices for advertising while also being picky about who to display.
For journalists employed by the NYT, great news for their job security.
However, for every NYT, there are 10 media businesses that have not managed to transition successfully. Especially medium-sized companies that don’t have the budget necessary to buy a viral game (wordle) or start a cooking newsletter with 600k subscribers.
Could Web3 be a way to sustain this middle ground?
Chris Dixon calls Web3 the ownership layer that has been missing from the web. It’s the ownership aspect that’ll enable authors to monetize and build direct relationships with their audiences. So the theory goes.
“Creative People should be paid for their work”
We can probably all agree that creatives should get paid. Yet, at the same time, Web3 has made royalties, the thing that was supposed to allow creators to reap benefits from the value appreciation of their works, optional.
The race to the bottom isn’t one I want to engage in as a writer. So what’s left?
Fortunately, Web3 offers revenue streams for media beyond royalties. For one, it allows the building of a direct audience and the process of micro-payments for access to articles and reports. Similar to what experts are doing on Substack, but with the added power of tokens and gated group chats.
Video games don’t monetize through sales of their games but through the in-game items. Media adopting that playbook could mean selling exclusive memberships and access to their writer's expertise.
NFT Now, a publication covering all things NFTs, created its NFT Now pass, allowing holders to participate in governance and receive airdrops and discounts for events.
Going for membership instead of direct sales of the content allows media to attract with their content and draw people in — while the audience gets to “try before they buy.”
The lines between subscription and membership become blurry in Web3. After all, a membership can function similarly to a subscription.
Take Hypersub by Fabric, a service that leverages an extended NFT standard, allowing people like you and me to subscribe for a set duration to a creator or media publication of our choice.
I’ve been part of Chris Co-Created’s Hypersub for a month and have received a variety of airdrops of art and even contributed to creating art with my input. Something that Web3 is uniquely positioned to enable.
Co-Creation
The current media landscape is a single-player game, individualistic, and a win-loss scenario. Everyone is competing for attention. When someone else garners more of it than we do, we’re jealous and start feeling anxious about our prospects.
What if this could be turned around? The landscape becoming multi-player.
With Web3 native tools, tokens can be structured in a way that empowers creatives to work together and create pieces that are more than the sum of their parts.
By releasing work with a group of peers, you feel less anxious about your work because you know you’re not alone. Other people having your back, making each other’s work better, and promoting each other’s drops is a massive improvement to the anxiety and dread of releasing work on your own.
Yancey Strickler, Metalabel Co-Founder
Take Metalabel, their spin on the traditional music label, has artists co-create and drop releases. Each one then receives a portion of every sale automatically to their wallet. Another portion of every sale goes toward the Metalabel treasury and is used to fund future works. A sustainable model, if you ask me.
Even PayPal Mafia overlord Peter Thiel thinks that “Competition is for losers.”
While mentioned in the context of starting a company, it applies to creators and media just as well. Instead of competing in a zero-sum game, why not collaborate with a community and start with a niche instead?
And here is another thought. Since crypto networks have staking rewards, why can’t we have communities locking their funds and dedicating some of the rewards to crowdfund citizen journalism?
Access protocol is pursuing a similar approach, where users lock up funds’ in a writers’ liquidity pool. I think if we could expand it to include tokens people generally stake anyway, we’d be all the better off.
Back to media and people like me.
I didn’t become a journalist. But as a writer in crypto, I strongly believe journalists benefit from the technology.
After all, on-chain publishing platforms offer something that no off-chain solution does: proof that you wrote something and the exact timestamp in block height.
In times where the generation of the written word is available at a click, and people shamelessly copy-paste others’ works, there is nothing like owning it.
“It starts with us owning our work and allowing others to pay us to collect our work.”
When publishing on-chain, readers can collect articles to support the artist. On platforms like Zora, there are even built-in rewards for being the first minter.
Another thing that Web3 does better than Web2.
Rewarding collectors for being early to discover a great writer.
Will Web3 lead to what Deloitte calls a Creators’ Haven — An ecosystem where thousands, if not millions, of creators thrive?
While my preferred scenario, it’s a strong maybe from me.
Yet, if I learned one thing during all this research, it’s this: “Media empires are built when distribution changes.” (The Riff Podcast)
And once everyone masters distribution, all that matters is this: who owns the best content?
P.S. I wrote this as a submission for Solana Scribes. I chose not to shill any one chain as the preferred solution.
Needless to say, it will require highly scalable, affordable tech, and I’ve seen Solana being great at offering NFTs at scale — a potentially perfect fit for media NFTs.
In the end, though, what matters isn’t tribalism but how we as a whole can leverage the tech we have to benefit people.
Lastly, if you haven’t watched Succession, go do it.
