Blockchain news is all the rage, but it’s also a moment of reckoning for journalists and media companies. Its shiny new thing veneer masks a powerful and complex technology that freezes time by securely signposting edits to a shared database. At its core, it’s a technology that’s both potentially monetizable and deeply disruptive to traditional business models.
While the most well-known blockchains are tied to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, they can be used for much more. Blockchains are essentially shared, tamper-proof databases of digital records that can store many types of data in addition to money. The core data stored in each block includes a version number, the Merkle root, a timestamp, and a header hash (the output hash of the previous block). A special cryptographic algorithm scrambles these numbers together to create a unique fingerprint that links one block to the next, making them difficult to change once written.
News organizations can use targeted solutions that leverage blockchain to improve the efficiency and integrity of their editorial and sales workflows. Examples include using blockchain to secure and validate timestamps for publication dates, or ad tracking systems that can prevent advertisers from paying for inflated ad impressions. Blockchain-based solutions for these problems can help journalists maintain a level of transparency that is hard to replicate in centralized and proprietary systems.
More sophisticated newsrooms are adopting hybrid solutions that introduce cryptocurrency into the equation, transforming their journalistic business models to some extent. For example, Civil is a blockchain platform that offers a CMS for its participating journalism organizations to build and host their websites, but it also uses the blockchain to support journalists through micropayments that are recorded as blocks in the blockchain. The value of these tokens is determined by a network of stakeholders, and participants can use their stake in the system to propose or challenge the organization’s rules.