About authors:

Clémence Petit-Perrot is the Children’s Radio Foundation’s Learning and Innovation Director. She oversees the development all new initiatives within the organisation. Part of her portfolio includes piloting technological solutions like WhatsApp to increase listeners engagement and measure the radio shows’ impact. Before joining CRF, she was the Southern Africa correspondent for Radio France Internationale (RFI). She also worked for the South African production company DOXA, producing social documentary films and leading a digitisation project of anti-Apartheid audiovisual archives.

Linda Daniels is a journalist by training and has worked in print, digital and broadcast media. She has reported on a range of issues, which include climate change, Intellectual Property and South African politics. Her work has appeared in local and international publications. Between 2013 and 2018, she worked at the Children’s Radio Foundation as the Radio Capacity Building Associate and managed the WhatsApp Integration project.

Please download and share the guide. We would love to hear from you – send any comments or suggestions to us at mas@mdif.org.

Guide #5: Introduction to Podcasting, by Erkki Mervaala.

About author: Erkki Mervaala is a former Program Manager and Digital Media Specialist for Media Development Investment Fund. He is also a member of the award-winning Finnish climate journalist collective Hyvän sään aikana and works as the managing editor for the climate news website of the same name. Mervaala has worked as a Central Europe foreign correspondent for several Finnish magazines and newspapers. He has also worked as a screenwriter for Yellow Film & TV, web developer and UI/UX designer. He has been a podcaster since 2008.

You can contact him via e-mail.

There’s a pattern you might be forgiven for having missed: most technological developments on the web have been driven by these industries. Think online casinos. Think credit card usage. Think video. Think VR. Users demand greater financial and data privacy — after all, who wants to admit they’re signing up for porn or gambling sites? – and better bang for their buck — a streaming video better be a lot better quality than any of the millions of free sites out there to be worth signing up for, all of which pushes these industries tothe bleeding edge of innovation. Buried in early versions of the Bitcoin software – the cryptocurrency that offers a future of transactions beyond the gaze of banks and governments — are hints of a gambling connection, after all. WebRTC is now no different.

So first off, what is WebRTC, and why should you care? WebRTC is an open source project that embeds real-time voice, texts, and video communications capabilities in web browsers. The technology enables peer-to-peer communication (P2P) among browsers. It does not require specialized software applications or browser plugins for communication. In essence, it’s the engine that powers a lot of the messaging that goes on between apps — think video, audio. The RTC bit in it, after all, stands for Real Time Communication. The Web bit is because the standard at least started life as a way to make using video and audio to communicate through a web browser as easy as using text, without any plug-ins. But it has moved beyond that, and can now sit within apps on mobile phones and elsewhere.

That may seem like quite a modest goal. But it’s only recently, with Apple’s decision to include WebRTC in its Safari browser (from version 11 and in the iOS browser in version 12), that a years-long battle to agree that WebRTC is the standard everyone can agree on is more or less won. Now, you can use a host of services to do Skype-like video and audio chatting via your browser without having to

1. a) register with any service
2. b) install any software
3. c) worry about what kind of browser you’re using.

(Of course, there are still caveats.)

This is quite a feat, if you think about it. Not because you’ve been dying to do this, exactly, but because it means that this kind of capability — real time voice and/or video communication, in real time — can be added to any web page. This means, for example, that you can now stream directly from whatever news event your reporters are covering, or direct from your newsroom, or hold a Q&A with readers, without them having to worry about plug-ins, browser versions, etc. etc.

Beyond the browser

And it doesn’t stop there. WebRTC obviously started with the web, and the browser, but that was because that was where we spent most of our time back then. Now things are mobile, they’re often app-based, and the way we communicate, and the way we consume video, has changed a lot.

WebRTC has ended up being a way for the industry to agree on a bunch of standards which have enabled all sorts of things to happen more quickly and seamlessly than they might have done had WebRTC standards groups not been working away in the background. Varun Singh, CEO of callstats.io, which measures quality of experience of live and real-time media, explained that by agreeing on this standard suite of protocols, WebRTC has quickly wormed its way into pretty much every messaging app, from Snapchat to Facebook Messenger.

And it’s not just there. Dean Bubley, a consultant who has been watching WebRTC since 2009, believes “it’s still lacking in recognition in some quarters; there are many more applications that could benefit from it.” In a white paper funded and published by callstats.io, he explored how real-time communications are becoming embedded into devices and applications, into different formats, into processing (think AI) and more platforms. As users become more accustomed to accepting of voice and video technologies (would you have imagined we would have allowed listening robots called Alexa and Siri into our homes as easily as we have five or ten years ago, or been as comfortable taking selfies or video-ing ourselves?) So these technologies are likely to continue to evolve and, of course, become more commonplace in every day life

“In other words, society is now much more amenable to new use-cases for RTC,” concludes Dean. “There is familiarity with many of the UI tools, and less self-consciousness in front of cameras. This,in turn, means that the “cognitive load” on users’ brains is lower, meaning that the interactions are more natural – and more productive.”

It’s only in media, I suspect, that we’re still a little stuck with old formats: the newsreader, the correspondent talking to the camera, the interviewee stuck in a studio somewhere, or on Skype with a picture of a horse in the background. I strongly believe we have an opportunity to have a chance to break away from this.

In media

I see the opportunities here as at least initially more modest.

Firstly, internally: I have long been frustrated at how internal newsroom discussions can be starved of creative oxygen as much by poor technology decisions as by poor leadership. Reliance on dialling in to a conference call number seems both archaic and wasteful use of resources. More often than not the more creative thinkers on the call are drowned out by the noisier ones. A simple WebRTC link in the browser should solve that, using simple tools like talky.io which require no plugins.

Then there’s content. Varun of callstats.io says WebRTC offers content creators the chance to make content simply, just with a camera, which users can access from the news organisation’s website directly — bypassing YouTube or Twitter. Think webinars, game shows, he says: “it’s fairly trivial, say $50 to set something up, and have it viewed an unlimited number of times.”

So where does porn, gambling and auctioning come into it?

Well, I think the future of WebRTC for media lies in the ability to seamlessly stream events to users as if you were a professional broadcaster. It’s one thing to be able to record or stream a few jerky minutes of a demonstration, but soon enough it will be possible — even expected — that any media organisation, large or small, can, with little preparation, livecast an event with little or no lag.

Alexandre Gouaillard, CTO of a company called Millicast, says these industries are the ones pushing for this. With Adobe no longer supporting the Flash plugin, the mainstay for such industries, there’s a demand for low latency video but at scale: Millicast promises broadcast across the globe in less than 500 milliseconds. The packages range from 10 concurrent viewers (free) to 5,000 ($1,500 a month.)

This may be lower latency than required, but it’s a glimpse, I believe, of the future. I think we’ve been held back from using video in part because of its awkwardness in setting up, and the glitchiness, that makes interactions painful. Those days are coming to a close, mainly because of WebRTC.

You don’t have to be into interactive porn to imagine the possibilities of having people seamlessly integrated by a video connection, wherever they are: if your reporter can walk around with a smartphone mounted on a $150 gimbal, confident that every shot is being beamed to every user; or a Q&A with an editor accompanied by graphics and whiteboard is crystal clear to all 5,000 viewers in a monthly editorial catch-up, then perhaps in a year or two an augmented reality- or virtual reality-, or 360-degree- broadcast from a sports game or political rally — then we’ll be able to thank a porn star or a gambler for marking the way for us, once .

Tech trends are fickle things. Back in 2004, if you were starting a media business online, or thinking of expanding your offline media business, one direction seemed obvious: adopt RSS, or really simple syndication, so users can get a feed of your content easily, without signing up for newsletters. The term ‘RSS’ overtook ‘newsletter’ as a search term on Google in July of that year.

A year or so later, and your crack team of tech advisors would have told you you need to get into podcasts. Everyone has an iPod, they’d tell you, and everyone is listening to this stuff. Indeed, by early 2006 ‘podcast’ had overtaken ‘RSS’ as a search term on Google. Ditto MySpace — you would have been told to get your business on this impressive social networking site — whatever that is, you would have been forgiven for thinking back then. So you start work on that.

Then, in 2009, the Amazon Kindle e-reader swept out of nothing to make electronic publishing the wave of the future, overtaking both ‘podcast’ and ‘RSS’. And then, of course, there was Facebook. And Twitter.

You get the picture: sometimes inexorable trends aren’t what they seem. RSS, it turns out, was great for delivering information to people but was too fiddly for most folk. Google, whose RSS reader had pushed most other players out of the business, closed down in 2013, citing declining use. Meanwhile newsletters, those unsexy throwbacks, are still doing fine.

So what about podcasts? Were the advisors right? Well, yes and no.

True, interest in podcasting (as a search term on Google, as reliable an indicator as any) peaked in early 2006. Interest continued to decline until the launch in late 2014 of Serial, whose first season explored a murder in Baltimore in 1999, singlehandedly pushed the podcasting niche into the mainstream. In short, podcasts are that rare breed among tech trends: they’re getting a second wind.

So what is driving this, and are podcasts worth doing?

Well, it’s true that Serial jumpstarted a fresh wave of interest. The appeal of podcasts is that they time-shift — users play them when they want, in the order they want, where they want. This may seem obvious, but Serial added a key ingredient: the serialized approach, where the story was being shaped as it went. This invited audience participation, suspense and a feeling that it was unclear where it was going.

All these elements helped differentiate podcasts from other forms of entertainment. At the same time, those coming in late could easily download old episodes: ‘Bingeable listens’ is even a category on iTunes, still the epicentre of podcasting.

The data all point to a growing market. Most figures are U.S.-centric so let’s look at another market: Australia. Recent surveys there suggest that nearly 9 million people will be listening to podcasts by 2022 — a third of the projected population.

Big players are taking note. Apple is improving its metrics, and applying some standards to podcasts it accepts for its iTunes platform and podcasting app. After leaving the field alone for years, Google is jumping in with its own Android app. Amazon has tried to add to its Audible audiobook service with some original programming, although it’s not clear how well that’s going.

Investors are interested: Luminary Media secured $40 million in venture capital funding for its subscription-based service. And of course Spotify has added NPR’s backcatalogue to its subscription service. Companies like Audible and Spotify are already in a sweet spot because they have already convinced users to subscribe. Most podcasts are free, and it’s hard to change users’ minds, as we’ve found to our cost in online journalism.

But of course, as we’ve learned from the past: trends can be reversed, even when they’re enjoying a second life. So will podcasts wither too?

Here’s how I see it for media players. Don’t do podcasts as an afterthought; it’s your brand and if you mess it up listeners might not come back. But do see how much you can do without having to create content afresh. If you’re in the spoken word business already, then package up 10 of your best programs and see, after a year, which ones are gaining a following.

And despite the talk of growing investment and advertising interest, don’t do it for the money. The industry is still too young and unstructured, the hits too unpredictable. The Interactive Advertising Bureau has released two sets of proposals to regulate advertising metrics across the industry, and uptake has grown. But some podcasters are nervous because their reported download numbers would inevitably take a knock, at least in the short term.

Then there’s the problem of the elephants on the grass. Apple dominates the space because no podcast can afford to not be on its platform. Google is now serious about podcasts, which could be good news for podcasters in Android-heavy markets. But the app is still pretty raw, and of course will only work on Android devices, leaving those cross-platform podcast players like Overcast more appealing to many.

These big players all seek to control the choke-points in the system. They can, like Apple’s AppStore, create markets, but they can also trample them.

And there are lots of pieces missing, another sign of a wild west. The technology of inserting ads, for example is still not quite there. The Washington Post last month (eds: July) felt it necessary to develop its own internal technology, Rhapsocord, for inserting ads into podcasts. This reminds me of the early days of the web, when everything was so new we didn’t even think of calling it an ‘ecosystem.’ Only a handful of companies survived that.

It is possible to cover costs, and attract advertisers, and should soon be possible to weave podcasts into broader subscriptions. But right now it’s probably better to think of honing your podcasting skills and ideas than of viewing it as a revenue stream in its own right.

We are currently in a phase of seeing in blockchain, the ledger technology that underpins cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, the solution to problems in nearly every industry. There is something alluring about a technology that is so easy to set up, does not require a leader or central controller, and which can store anything permanently. But would it work for media?

First off, it’s worth talking about what blockchain is – and isn’t. Blockchain is the name we have given the underlying database system created by Satoshi Nakamoto, the so-far unidentified maker of bitcoin. Nakamoto needed to solve a couple of problems if he (or she) was to create a digital currency that was unhackable. He first needed to get around the problem of copying: when it’s easy to copy something digital, a digital currency needs to not only be impossible to duplicate, but also everyone needs to be able to see that it cannot be duplicated. The other problem he wanted to get around is to make sure the process of recording and validating transactions was not dominated by one person, either relying on some central authority, or that someone could take over the system and manipulate transactions.

These problems were neatly solved by the blockchain. Embedded in software, copies of the ledger of transactions would be stored on multiple computers — basically anyone who wanted to join in. All subsequent transactions would be added to the ledger in sequential order, connecting each block cryptographically, so any attempt at tampering with the record would be discarded. The task of recording those transactions would be done by miners — people who had a copy of the blockchain on their computer, and used their computer’s resources to run through permutations until they found a particular sequence of digits. The first to do so would have the right to add a block to the chain, and earn bitcoin. This created an incentive for people to participate in storing copies of the blockchain, and to record the transactions.

So what has all this got to do with journalism? Well, the blockchain has lots of parts to it that appeal. Together they offer what some believe would be a different way of connecting the components of the media economy — those who produce content, those who consume it, those who publish it and those who currently finance it through advertising.

To understand this, it’s better to take each part of blockchain’s appeal one by one.

Micro-transactions

Micropayments — basically defined as pay per article — have long been the holy grail of digital media, as an adjunct to rather than a replacement for subscription and advertising. The idea is compelling because it means that people who care enough about a single piece of content could pay for it; no need for a subscription, no need to whip out a credit card, no need to think too hard about whether the content is worth it.

The reality is that micropayments will only work when the transaction costs are reduced to near zero. This hasn’t happened because we’re still using credit cards, or a variation thereof (PayPal, Apple Pay), where costs remain high. The alternative is to store value elsewhere — in a wallet, say — which is then transferred in the form of micropayments. But it is still one or two many steps for most users. Wallets are only appealing to users when there are obvious benefits or no alternative. Think ride sharing, or bike sharing. If I can only unlock a bike by uploading credit to their account, then I’ll do it, but I won’t be happy, because that money is all locked with them. And in a recent case, the money might disappear entirely if the company closes down suddenly. Expect wallets to get a bad rap from here on in.

So how could blockchain help? The first, and perhaps only, proven use case of blockchain is Bitcoin. The Bitcoin blockchain network has been running for nearly 10 years, and has an uptime of 99.992364787%. (Really.) So it’s a proven payments system. Unfortunately, it’s also hugely expensive: to move bitcoin from one address to another (in other words, to make a transaction) is still costly — often more than the value of the transaction itself. This is because the miners — the people running the computers that are adding blocks to the blockchain — need an incentive beyond earning bitcoin from the correct ‘guessing’ of the mathematical puzzle. So those making a transaction add a ‘tip’ to the transaction request to bump it up the queue. All this is hugely inefficient and often means transactions can take hours to be recorded. This is fine if you are moving large amounts, or if you just see bitcoin as a valuable commodity, but this is not what Bitcoin and blockchain were designed for. The idea is that it would make it possible for people to transact simply, securely, and without anyone creaming anything off the top (or blocking the transaction.)

Now we’re getting closer. If cryptocurrencies can overcome some of their limitations — high transaction costs associated with adding blocks to the chain, poor usability and security issues — then they definitely offer a way forward. You’d still have to convert from fiat into a currency or token, but that might be feasible if the transaction costs can be lower than real-world transactions. This will probably happen first on Bitcoin Cash, which is what is called a ‘hard fork’ from the original Bitcoin (now called Bitcoin Core.) Bitcoin Cash adherents talk about reclaiming Bitcoin from the Core people by focusing on increasing the transaction volume; Bitcoin Cash supports about 100 transactions per second. Compare that to Bitcoin Core’s 7.

One example of a media company exploiting this is Yours.org. The site, according to its founder Ryan Charles, is a platform designed to reward content creators. After trying several other cryptocurrencies unsuccessfully, they turned to Bitcoin Cash allowing users to charge for content if they wished, using Bitcoin cash. One user, Rivers and Mountains, charges about $5 for the full article after a short précis. His articles (about Bitcoin Cash, mostly) earn him up to $900 each. (Yours charges 10 cents to post content and takes 5% of purchases.)

As the founder of Yours, Ryan Charles, puts it: “With Bitcoin Cash we have actual low fees and the payments are actually irreversible. This is kind of amazing. This didn’t used to exist. This is actually the fantasy of micropayments that people have talked about since the 1990s. We actually have it for real starting last August.”

Tokenisation

Yours.org is somewhat unusual in that no extra tokens are involved. You buy Bitcoin Cash and you use that to pay for content. And that may end up being the most popular way of doing things. But most other platforms in this space use their own tokens — basically a version of bitcoin on its own blockchain, like a separate currency. Remember, a blockchain is like any database, it can pretty much store whatever you want on it. Bitcoin, a digital currency, was the original use case which inspired (and required) blockchain. But anything could be stored there, usually in token form.

Steemit, for example, is a social media platform that rewards users with its own token — Steem — which can be converted into dollars on an exchange. And, like Yours, not only are content creators rewarded but anyone clicking on like buttons, adding or voting on comments. All this, the argument goes, helps to oil the ecosystem and promote better content. (Steemit is doing very well, although you might think of it as more of a social platform than a media one. Steem’s market capitalisation — if you add all the tokens together and sell them at the present price — is more than $400 million at the time of writing. It has about half a million accounts.)

Having tokens opens up new ways to move value around the system. Brave, for example, is essentially a browser like Safari, Firefox or Chrome, that among other features builds into it a way for users to reward publishers. It works like this: download Brave, buy some Brave Attention Tokens with a cryptocurrency like bitcoin, and then decide how much you’re going to pay your favourite websites each month. So long as you use the Brave browser to visit those websites, this will be calculated and distributed automatically.

This is probably too many steps for most people, but it’s a start. Brave, like a lot of blockchain-based startups, raised money through something called an Initial Coin Offering, or ICO. An ICO is a bit like an IPO, in that those who are enthusiastic about the business buy into it by buying the tokens. Owners of those tokens can then use them in some way tied to the service. But as I explain below, this is not quite as simple, or legal, as it sounds.

In theory though, the idea is simple enough: those holding tokens can reward other people on the same platform — Brave, for example — for activity that benefits them. The token is a currency, but with benefits. The obvious one is paying for articles but they could also be used, for example, to reward contributors to an article (crowd-sourcing): So the author could ask for data for an article, and disperse tokens matching the size of each contribution.

The potential of tokens is that could unleash all sorts of new micro-transactions, effectively monetising content and content-related activity that so far has not been monetised. For example, existing content — think all the stories lying in archives, photos, videos, lying in archives that can’t be readily monetised because it would be too administratively cumbersome. Each item could be indexed to the blockchain and each user charged via a smart contract (more on them below.) Tokens promise a way to increase the overall value of content and access to content created by other readers. So, for example, you could charge users to comment on certain stories, effectively filtering out (some of the) time-wasters and trolls, and thereby increasing the value of the content produced by commenters by raising the bar. Similarly, you could charge for access to that content, creating a sort of club of readers. These costs would be small, but might act as enough of a barrier to flippant and time-wasting content.

Fighting censorship

Another appeal of blockchain technology is its distributed, decentralised nature. The blockchain — the ledger of transactions, but also potentially the database of the content itself — is not held anywhere centrally, so no one person or institution, in theory, can close it down or change that content. (Nor, in theory, can they monitor it because, while the transactions themselves may be visible to all, who or what exactly was transacted may not be. The Bitcoin blockchain, for example, can be explored in detail, but all you can see are amounts of bitcoin, bitcoin addresses (where the bitcoin travelled from and to) and the date and time of the transaction. Deeper study might reveal patterns, especially when an address is linked to an individual. But it’s detective work, and still more art than science.)

The blockchain — the ledger backbone — can therefore not be easily destroyed, disrupted, hacked or altered. That means it is more likely to survive some government’s, or individual’s, attempt to stop information from finding its way out. But it also means that the information stored on it has credibility: it’s much more likely not to have been tampered with, and because it has timestamps and other data attached, can be relied upon as an accurate record of what happened.

So several outfits are exploring opportunities the blockchain offers to reduce the potential for censorship. Publiq, for example, offer their distributed storage infrastructure to store all content — think of a peer to peer network like Napster, where users who host the content would be rewarded with Publiq’s tokens. A hash — a short unique code — of each piece of content on Publiq’s P2P network would be stored in Publiq’s blockchain, so any corruption of the data, intentional or otherwise, would be noticed straight away. So no-one can alter or remove the existing content — think censors or fake news hackers — but the content can be amended. So authors could for example add notes or corrections to the original content. Publiq’s Gagik Yeghiazarian tells me this has already happened, when one content provider was able to add amended transcripts to a story that some readers rightly claimed was incorrect. The correction was added to the original content, leaving it annotated but intact. With even mainstream news organisations over-writing or ‘fixing’ content without properly flagging it to readers, this feature is welcome.

Funding

The obvious way to reward journalism — the creators of content — via the blockchain is to remove the obstacles preventing people from paying for content that has been created — the micropayments model described above. That’s great for people who can create content on spec — in the hope that someone is going to reward them for it, either through tips or through a paywall.

Then there’s the funding of proactive journalism: the crowdsourced model, where enough people believe the story or content will be worth consuming that they’re ready to pay for it in advance. Similarly, the blockchain can help, not only with micropayments but with an immutable record of who paid what for what, and what that entitles them to.

But what about bigger content that require deeper funding — an investigative podcast series, say, or a documentary? Companies like Qravity are looking to break down the various tasks of a project, which are then farmed out to team members. Instead of being paid for their contribution they’re given tokens, which give them a stake in the ownership of the project proportionate to the number of tokens they hold. They’re therefore transparently tied to the project and can share in its success.

Content licensing

And then there’s monetising that content once it has been created. Or finding a way to monetise one’s archive. Take AllRites, a media company based in Singapore which handles licensing of content on behalf of major TV and video players in the region. They’re creating a platform that would move this marketplace onto the blockchain, in theory simplifying the licensing of that content, while also opening up B2C licensing — where you or I could buy streaming rights to movies, tv shows or documentaries by the hour, say — as well as a content funding platform. Initially, content would be represented on the blockchain via a unique identifier, but ultimately, their CEO Riaz Mehta hopes, technology will allow the content in its entirety to be stored on a blockchain, simplifying the process.

So why? What’s the point of this? There are several advantages, Mehta says. First off, an ICO allows them to raise money that venture capitalists would never provide because they wouldn’t see the longer term, and they’re only just starting to get blockchain. “For them,” Rias told me, this is the frontier land and they’re very cautious about what they put into it.”

But more significantly, they believe that not only will it make for a more efficient marketplace, but that content locked up in the long tail of providers could be more readily found and monetised. By registering the content on AllRites’ blockchain even niche providers or content creators themselves would be able to prove their rights, advertise their wares and sell to a much larger market.

There are other efforts in this area. Po.et is a shared ledger recording ownership and metadata for digital assets. Qravity is both a studio and a distributor of content created by decentralised teams. Both aim to build platforms that level the playing field for content makers. In other words, disintermediating the middle parts that conspire against smaller producers of content.

Smart contracts

A key part of the appeal of blockchain is the idea that embedded into it could be more than just tokens of value. You could store the content itself, theoretically, or you could store applications — code that actually does something. These are, or could be, smart contracts — a piece of code that, in its simplest form, kicks off an action, or sequence of actions, based on some input. So, on a certain date, ownership of a token could change hands. So imagine I have loaned a video to you, the record of which is stored on the blockchain. When that loan expires, ownership (and control) of that video returns to me. Part of the smart contract could delete it from your device, say, or require you to extend the loan, releasing tokens to me in payment. These smart contracts would effectively unleash a lot of the potential for what is otherwise just another database. Qravity, for example, plans to use smart contracts to determine how many tokens to distribute to each member of a team based on their contribution, in the example described above.

Warnings

ICOs

There are concerns however. Quite a few of these blockchain companies are launching, or have launched, initial coin offerings, or ICOs, to raise funds. These have proved very lucrative for some startups, but their appeal is beginning to fade. Regulator anxiety is forcing every ICO to move away from calling their tokens securities, for one thing — so while they are still raising money from the sale of tokens, those tokens do not represent a stake in the underlying company. Instead the tokens will be used to buy services or products. And there’s the issue of incentive: if companies do raise money through ICOs, how can they be held to account over how that money is used?

The first problem with ICOs and the subsequent blizzard of tokens is: why? Why can’t people just buy those services with their own currency? The argument is usually two-fold: the tokens allow money to be transferred without constraints of borders/currencies, and secondly, that it allows more value to be transferred than was available previously. Brave moves tokens (value) between the three main pillars of media — the users, the publishers and advertisers. So users, for example, can earn money directly from advertisers by giving their consent to view ads. Similarly, they can reward content producers on a proportional basis depending on how much of their content they viewed during a month.

But I think the bigger worry is that these systems are too complicated for the end user. I tied myself in knots trying to chart the various transactions that would take place within Brave’s ecosystem. And that was one of the simpler ones. These complicated arrangements may work in B2B, but the diagrams that accompany nearly all these models highlight the same problem: For the solution to work it must be invisible or intuitive to the end user. He or she must not have to juggle multiple tokens, or perform elaborate calculations in her head, or have to require lots of separate apps, accounts or wallets. And they don’t want to see lots of real money locked up in tokens. I can’t help coming away from reading some of these white papers (the conventional way these days to explain how these blockchains and tokens might work) and feeling there might well be a simpler way of doing things.

Blockchain is often mentioned in the same breath as the invention of the internet. That could be true. I would say that for it to be successful it must be closer in analogy to the invention of the World Wide Web — when Sir Tim Berners-Lee came up with a simple layer of links embedded in a familiar text-and-graphic interface which unlocked the potential of the plain vanilla and impenetrable internet. Until the blockchain is able to offer that, talk of its disruptive power in media is premature.

Of course, I might be wrong. Efforts like Civil hope to build a whole ecosystem — a platform encompassing many of the features I’ve described — and are already building a portfolio of news organisations. They describe it as a Netflix strategy — instead of waiting for someone else to aim big, they’re doing it themselves. And Yours Inc’s Charles points to his company’s buy button, seamlessly woven into any webpage, that would allow anyone with Bitcoin Cash to pay a user for his content, in the same way we click on the Facebook like button now. So there is traction, of sorts.

Platforms and standards

Most of the startups I spoke to are keen to point out that they’re not pursuing blockchain technology blindly, and ignoring other technologies — like artificial intelligence, for example. Inkrypt’s co-founder and CEO Muhammad Ali Chaudhary, for example, says: “It is important to realize that blockchain ledgering is just one piece, albeit a very necessary one, of the technical solution being provided by Inkrypt. We are implementing blockchain technology in a particular way for a specific use case and at the end of the day we are a media tech company, as opposed to a ‘blockchain’ company.”

For sure, there will come a time when these companies decide it’s better not to even use the word blockchain to describe what they’re doing. And I think we’ll see some quietly disappear when they realise that journalism is for most people both a passion and a job, and that it might be hard to build a critical mass of journalists and content creators willing to be guinea pigs for untried and untested business models.

What I think needs to happen in the longer term is that independent media, organisations, or funders should work on building standards and platforms that allow all these tokenised initiatives to cooperate. We are some way from a world where people will be comfortable with handling lots of different tokens, and it feels like a reverse if we push users in that direction. Better would be to encourage interchangeability — say an exchanges where you can easily buy and transfer your tokens. Or, where one token rules all. In that sense, companies like Yours.org may have a head start — building APIs, or application programming interfaces, software that allows services to talk to each other — for other content makers to plug into the Yours.org platform.

Ultimately though, I am optimistic that out of all these spaghetti-like flowcharts might emerge a model for media to find a better way of rewarding great content, keeping advertisers happy, and tapping into loyal audiences. I just don’t think we’re quite there yet.

Guide #3 – Best Practices for Data Journalism, by Kuek Ser Kuang Keng.

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About author: Kuang Keng Kuek Ser is an award-winning digital journalist. He produces and consults on data-driven reporting and interactive journalism projects. Keng is also the founder of DataN, a training program that lowers the barrier for newsrooms and journalists with limited resources to integrate data journalism into daily reporting. He has more than 10 years of experience in digital journalism. He was awarded a Fulbright scholarship in 2013 to further his studies at New York University’s Studio 20. In 2015, Keng was selected as a Google Journalism Fellow and a Tow-Knight Fellow.
You can contact him via e-mail or follow @kuangkeng on Twitter.

Case Studies to Guide #2: Paywall Implementation at Gazeta Wyborzca and Malaysiakini, by Marius Dragomir, Dumitrita Holdis and Ian M. Cook.

Please download and share the guide. We would love to hear from you – send any comments or suggestions to us at mas@mdif.org.

Authors: Marius Dragomir, Dumitrita Holdis and Ian M. Cook – Center for Media, Data and Society (CMDS) at Central European University (CEU) School of Public Policy (SPP).

Guide #2 – Launching a paywall: What you and your team need to know, by Tomáš Bella.

Please download and share the guide. We would love to hear from you – send any comments or suggestions to us at mas@mdif.org.

The guides are not designed to replace existing resources; on the contrary, they summarize current trends and approaches to critical issues in an easily understandable way and provide links to other resources – always with a strong emphasis on practical use and real-life examples. Over time, we will add a case study to each of the guides to highlight a particular approach undertaken by MDIF’s portfolio companies.

Guide #1: Practical Guide to Product Management in Digital Media, by Derrick Fountain.

This guide provides practical strategies and tactics for implementing the product management function in a media organization.

Please download and share the guide. We would love to hear from you – send any comments or suggestions to us at mas@mdif.org.

About author: Derrick Fountain is a global product leader with deep experience of launching digital products in the US, the Middle East, Africa and Turkey. He is currently Head of Digital Products at TRT World in Istanbul. Prior to that, he was Principal Product Management Specialist at Al Jazeera Media Network, where he launched more than 50 web and mobile products. His professional career in media started in 2008 with US-based LAKANA, where he managed a network of 36 mobile web portals.

Yet to navigate a complex digital environment in which more than two billion participants are constantly producing information, journalists — who are supposed to be at the forefront of news — are forced to learn their trade almost from scratch.

How can they compete with the crowd? It is a daunting challenge, particularly for many mid-career journalists. In fact, it starts with a simple but fundamental change in mentality; writing a story doesn’t end when it is published, but continues well after users finish reading it – if indeed they do.

The next step is to learn how to develop and use products that will help you report, verify and explain stories. You need flexible teams with varied specialties capable of adapting or creating tools to rapidly analyze data needed for investigations, capture what users are talking about and engage with them so they can contribute with their own expertise. You should connect with peers and other professionals to cover realities that go beyond borders and topics that require expert knowledge. Finally, you have the challenge to steer audiences and communities away from click-bait traps set by trolls, bots and con-artists.

Fortunately for journalists, there is a growing number of media and journalism schools and research centers investigating new trends, helping to understand digital disruption and its impact. With their newsletters, websites and interactive online training, among other resources, they can inform you about inspiring innovations, share academic research, spot threats, provoke critical thinking, highlight valuable journalistic endeavors, and report on moves in the industry that will affect how stories reach people. Their work equips editors and journalists to deal with the digital waves that have busted business and editorial models. It provides an important source of information for potential investors, philanthropists and inventors in the field.

Well-known English-language organizations sharing knowledge in this field include the Nieman Lab, sponsored by the Nieman Foundation, at Harvard University. So far, it has focused on US-centered innovation, but it is now starting to publish in languages other than English and increasing its coverage of innovative media projects in other parts of the world. The University of Texas’ Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas connects journalists in North and South America, helping them understand and take advantage of digital change. The Center produces weekly stories on new enterprises in Latin America, such as for example, “Daily Corruption”, a researcher’s project to build a regional corruption database sourced from newspaper coverage. It also offers free online courses on new tools and best practices, such as “Product management for journalists”.

Another well-established global English-language knowledge-sharer is the US-based Poynter Institute. It is a tech-savvy journalism education and innovation center, which also provides a news platform covering trends in media. It offers practical courses, for example, How to write sharper social headlines. The British, Brighton-based Journalism.co.uk, a for-profit online publisher, covers, also in English, innovation in the media industry, offers training, lists jobs, features press releases and organizes the News Rewired conference series. This piece on Dutch start-up The Playwall, which gives readers the option to pay for content by giving their opinions or extra information about a story, is a good example of the kind of stories they carry. Digiday, a platform with branches in both the US and the UK, aims to foster change in the media and marketing sectors. They feature reflections on the industry such as this podcast by Washington Post’s Chief Risk Officer, Jed Hartman, which invites publishers to stop whining about the Facebook-Google duopoly and start figuring out their own unique contribution to the information marketplace.

Specialized outlets are covering media trends and innovation in other parts of the world too. These usually publish their stories in different languages. For example, the ICFJ’s International Journalists Network (IJNet), highlights a variety of projects undertaken by their fellows in several countries. They recently shared a great piece on 8 key trends in local journalism in Arabic, Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese. Similarly, the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN), an international association of nonprofit investigative journalism organizations, has created regional feeds to share content across multiple platforms in Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish, as well as from across Africa. The European Journalism Observatory (EJO), a network of independent non-profit media research institutes, is publishing stories based on their research findings, such as this one on the surge of ad blockers in Poland, in up to 14 language.

Among the regional knowledge-sharers up and coming are The Splice Newsroom, a media specializing in the Asian market, and Jamlab, a platform from Wits University’s Journalism Department in South Africa, reporting on innovation across the African continent. Both start-ups publish original content in their area of expertise. For example, a recent Splice piece was: Asia’s top journalists and editors share their best advice for aspiring young reporters, while in Jamlab’s section “Innovator Q&A”, FrontPage Africa founder Rodney Sieh speaks of how this platform revolutionized digital media in Liberia.

With such a rich array of options, you can chose to subscribe to whatever source is most relevant for you, depending on your geography, language or interest. Just following a few could inspire you with new ideas and make your next trip to the digital galaxy that much more fun.

This story originally appeared in https://medium.com/@OSFJournalism of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and is reprinted with permission. You can subscribe to the newsletter here.