Tag: journalism

The International News Media Association (INMA) hosted a webinar this past week (Oct 17, 2018) titled, “Blockchain: Enabling Next Generation Media Services.”

The webinar was presented by Stefan Farestam, Co-Founder, Carechain, Sweden.

INMA editor, Shelley Seale, provided an article about the webinar.

Farestam notes, “What the internet enabled was for information to be shared with other parties. But what blockchain enables is distribution of transactions among multiple parties without a central intermediary.”

Blockchain has the potential to disrupt all parts of the media value chain through:

• Disaggregation
• Digital Rights Management
• Royalty Tracking.

Blockchain-enabled identity solutions could benefit the following:

• Battle fake news
• Re-establish trust in the authenticity of comment fields
• Create entirely new business areas for media actors

There are several reasons to keep data on a blockchain, Farestam shared:

• Timestamped: provable timing for all content.
• No super-user: no priveleged access mode.
• User in control: user controls all access.
• Immutable: content cannot be changed.
• Distributed: no single point of failure.
• Smart contracts: programmable functionality.

Daniel Sieberg speaks about blockchain, cryptocurrency, trust and more specifically, what blockchain is good for when it comes to journalism.

In this talk he highlights three points:

• Governance: Putting value, such as a vote, or a token, in the hands of individuals, as opposed to centralized entities.
  
• Storage: Once a story is published on blockchain, it’s permanently available and distributed on many computers in the world.  Trying to change or hide that story would be like trying to recall all of the issues of a newspaper after it has been distributed.  In other words, it’s  immutable and transparent.
  
• Licensing: Blockchain is like fingerprinted digital assets. It helps content creators get paid for their own work into the future since the source of the creator is indisputably known.