Journalism

Journalists like to think of ourselves as writing the first draft of history. In the internet age, this is true, but in a sense we wish it wasn’t. Like many other first drafts, our work ultimately gets thrown away, burned or otherwise deleted. 1/x

Global Product PR Specialist at Consensys, Long-time journalist, JournoDAO Co-Founder

Example- 24 years ago I anonymously documented the bursting of the 90s dot-com bubble, which paralleled my own coming of age story of sorts. Then... 9/11, an economic crash, me retreating to Bush Alaska for four years. The series I wrote disappeared along with the rest of the once groundbreaking site that published it.

Often outlets go defunct and dark, or they’re bought out by a larger corporation and retired, or at odds with the latest rebranding or growth strategy. Most recently, an outlet told me over 700 of my articles written over a span of twelve years were being pulled offline for reasons of “SEO alignment.”

Enter Seed Protocol, designed to make any content’s online footprint permanent while preserving ownership. If Web3 were a default publishing layer, content meant to be permanent – like journalism – really would be, alongside a record of revisions, corrections and annotations – a more complete historical record.

Seed Protocol helps preserves not only portfolios for journalists like me; it could preserve our sanity and help us all make better sense of the world.
@journodao is building Seed Protocol as a public good. To support the effort, please donate to our Gitcoin campaign.

Seed Protocol helps preserves not only portfolios for journalists like me; it could preserve our sanity and help us all make better sense of the world.
@journodao is building Seed Protocol as a public good. To support the effort, please donate to our Gitcoin campaign. https://explorer.gitcoin.co/#/round/42161/26/57

Donating as little as a few dollars worth of token can go a long way thanks to the wonders of quadratic funding. And, of course, your support will be recorded for all of posterity.

More digestible version of this thread here -

More digestible version of this thread here - https://journodao.xyz/blog/journalism-and-the-history-it-documents-are-disappearing-we-have-a-plan-to-change-that/

The experience is common: Pour hours into reporting and a digital footprint that disappears. There was the AOL site I created videos for, another where I documented a crazy road trip with celebrities;  stories for NPR; interviews for the first MTV.com; a failed reboot of BYTE magazine, and more. All of it has vanished.