Mainstream media has failed us and we’re fucking pissed off. Something that should be a beacon of fearless truth, reason and integrity, is replaced with an entity that regularly lies, suppresses information, panders to power, and generally feeds the gawping masses with a never-ending stream of vapid celebrity bullshit. The primary goal seems to be diverting the viewers eyes away from anything vaguely important, like someone jangling a set of keys to get a zoo animals attention. The good news is that we can change this though, all without policy reforms or empty promises.

Decentralized peer to peer technologies hold the promise of ushering in a new era of journalism, one that could help us all as citizens to understand what’s really happening in the world, allowing us to make informed decisions.

Of course I’m not an expert on any of this so, as always, take whatever I have to say with a hefty shovel of salt.

CHANGING THE BUSINESS MODEL

The business model of most news organizations is advertising driven and I’d posit that this, by it’s very nature, is antithetical to the goal of ‘honest’ journalism, whatever that means.

Aside from filling videos, websites, apps, newspapers and magazines with annoying, garish and badly designed ads, there’s a deeper ethical impact of accepting money from advertisers. Would the advertisers be happy with you talking negatively about their products? Even if the concerns were legitimate? How about talking positively about their competitors? What about reporting on businesses and products owned by mutual parent companies?

Large news organizations have many advertisers meaning lots of potential no-go zones. There’s also the looming spectre of angering the powers-that-be enough for them to exert their influence on your advertisers to pull out of contracts, leaving organizations in existential crisis.

This is where cryptocurrency and micropayments come in. You could potentially get rid of advertisers, and rely on direct payment for content. The difference here is that with a currency such as Bitcoin, you have the chance to do it with no centralized payment gatekeepers like Banks, Paypal, Visa/Mastercard etc who can stop your funding if they’re leaned upon, like what happened with Wikileaks - so you can keep receiving payment, no matter who your reporting pisses off.

The second point concerns micropayments and how users could easily and cheaply pay in real time as they consume content - which is something only now enabled with decentralized digital money. Users could pay per month, per day, per article, per minute or even per second. There are companies like Streamium [http://streamium.io] working on bringing real time micropayments to the masses.

Imagine if you only had to pay a few pennies to view an article from a trusted source. From the users perspective, they have paid next to nothing, but for the journalists, they can get paid instantly and directly proportional to their exposure. Now multiply that over a site with hundreds or thousands of articles/videos and large daily traffic and there is potential for an alternative business model that is completely financially independent to outside influence.

CITIZEN JOURNALISM

By it’s very nature 'citizen journalism’, that is journalism written, filmed and shared independently of news organizations is decentralized, meaning anyone with access to social media, a blog, or a smartphone with a camera can capture what is happening and push it out to the wider world. The challenge here is not having stories get lost in the oceans of ever-changing data, and although not perfect, you find with aggregation sites like Reddit that important information usually gets bumped up into the social consciousness without the need of centralized curators.

I think with the continual shrinking of technology + the increase in battery tech, we’re going to see more personal recording devices, whether that’s tiny cameras, microphones or drones, which will all lead to an explosion of citizen journalism and primary source evidence. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the thought of being recorded 24/7, but that is more likely than not going to be our future. Perhaps the only solace we can take from it is that as citizens, we too will be able to use this tech to hold others accountable and cover unfolding events in real time.

Add in distributed, timestamped blockchain technology into the mix and you also have a way to prove the date and time of publishing without the need of any central arbiter.

CENSORSHIP RESISTANCE AND PRIVACY

Probably the most important aspect to all of this is freedom of speech, and when I say that I mean it in the most absolute way. The ability for us to say whatever is on our minds, without fear of retribution or censorship, is immeasurably important to any modern society.

One way that censors can shut down information is by blocking domain names, but there are an increasing number of ways to get around this. For example Namecoin’s [http://namecoin.info] .bit DNS is the first information based blockchain system (after Bitcoin) which allows anyone, anywhere to set up a domain that cannot be seized by authorities such as ICANN. Since it is fully distributed, there is no governing body who says what is and isn’t allowed.

There are of course TOR hidden services [http://torproject.org], which are probably for the more technical journalists. As well as that there are also ambitious rethinkings of the internet itself, aiming to take away the standard client and server model, replacing it with systems that are completely distributed, meaning there are no central servers to censor and take down. Projects like Maidsafe [http://maidsafe.net] and BitTorrent’s Project Maelstrom [http://blog.bittorrent.com] are both in the works and aiming to take on this challenge.

If oppressive regimes think they have a problem with twitter and bloggers now, what will happen when there are a raft of easy-to-use decentralized systems out there that are technically impossible to censor?

These technologies will not only help protect sources with sensitive information, allowing many more whistleblowers to shed light on corruption and injustice, it also protects users personal privacy from surveillance, so overzealous authorities won’t be able to see what news information its citizens are consuming, which as you can guess is going to drastically change things.

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BY CHRIS ROBINSON