> They will be partnering with the Civil Media Company, an ambitious New York start-up that aims to use griddles and pancake recipes to start 1,000 publications nationwide by the end of the year.
...actually I think the original quote said something about crypto, not pancakes, but I don't think it changes the underlying meaning. Why do you need a distributed, trustless database to run a local paper?
> The new publication will have a conventional website whose data will be written permanently into a MySQL database.
Whups, sorry, that actually was meant to say "...into the secure digital ledger known as the blockchain." Which...okay. 1) I think they mean "a blockchain", and 2) why do we...care? Is this so people will notice if the article is edited? Why not just push the content to a public git repo when it's published? Maybe sign the commits?
> People who purchase the CVL token, a form of cryptocurrency, will have a say concerning the projects hosted by Civil — meaning that they can vote on whether one of its websites violates the company’s journalism standards
So in other words, it's a lot like...a public company, that owns a newspaper, that then strips out every hint of editorial control, and then lets its shareholders directly have a say in every detail of what gets printed? So it's like...literally an attempt to create a newspaper even worse than the one they're quitting in order to form this one?
> Matthew Iles, the chief executive of Civil, said that by selling ownership stakes to the public, the company seeks to eliminate the possibility of one company or a small group of investors exerting power and influence over a journalistic organization and compromising its mission — exactly what many employees of the Denver Post accused Alden of doing.
By selling ownership, they think they're stopping one rich person from amassing a major ownership stake, as happened when their last newspaper sold ownership and allowed one rich person to amass a major ownership stake? What must it feel like to live with this level of blinding naivety?
The good news, such as it is, is that ownership of the tokens doesn't actually give anyone control over the newspaper, meaning that this is actually just meaningless hype. But, by the same logic, there's also no reason to actually buy the tokens. They have value only to the extent they allow editorial independence to be violated. So either they'll be valuable (but will undermine the journalistic ethics of the organisation), or they'll be worthless. There's no upside here.
It's early Monday morning in this part of the world, and I literally cannot figure out if this is an overly subtle troll or merely the dumbest idea I've heard in quite some time. This basically seems to be an attempt to use inappropriate technologies in order to carefully craft a "solution" that will make the problem worse. If you're worried about local newspapers being financially unviable and subject to intrusive editorial control...how does this do anything but make it worse?