21st Century Media is an entity that bears fiduciary responsibility for our attention and that is directly supported by readers. At success, its scale will be akin to existing media empires, but it will truly be a reader-fed, reader-supported, reader-consumed resource.
However the media is delivered – whether as TV-like video streams or a web-page-oriented site – it will be organised by issues, not by event. Each issue will have a history and will be updated as events occur, setting those events in context – context and perspective being what today’s news lacks.
It will not be neutral, and it will also not be ‘both-sides‘. Both sides implies that there are only two interpretations of an issue, internally homogenous, framed either as for or against, an adversarial view of everything that has catalysed the polarised world we live in. Reality is messy. It is a continuum of positions with pros and cons, and 21st Century Media will highlight and present that.
It need not start with producing original writing. Great content is already being written. Text, video, even audio via podcasts. But search engines and other discovery and editorial mechanisms are not incentivised to surface this. 21st Century Media will aggregate and present the best writing and conversations from across the Internet.
The algorithms for surfacing the ‘right’ content are dependent on first defining what this content is, and for that we need humans to train them, like the human curators in Neal Stephenson’s science-tech-fiction book Fall. 21st Century Media needs to get a head-start over the sort of polluted internet Stephenson imagines
“[A] Few people were rich enough to literally employ a person whose sole job was to filter incoming and outgoing information.”_
“Direct, unfiltered exposure to said flumes—the torrent of porn, propaganda, and death threats, 99.9 percent of which were algorithmically generated and never actually seen by human eyes—was relegated to a combination of AIs and Third World eyeball farms, which was to say huge warehouses in hot places where people sat on benches or milled around gazing at stuff that the AIs had been unable to classify. They were the informational equivalent of the wretches who clambered around mountainous garbage dumps in Delhi or Manila looking for rags. Anything that made it past them—any rag that they pulled out of the garbage pile—began working its way up the editorial hierarchy and, in rare cases, actually got looked at by the kinds of editors—or more likely their junior associates — who worked for people like Sophia. Consequently, Sophia almost never had to look at outright garbage.”
Human editor aggregation and filtering will be augmented with reader submissions. Readers – more a community – will be rewarded for these submissions. The rewards resemble Bitcoin’s Proof of Work, except that the work is not computing power but their judgement. Specifically they will be a share of profits from micropayments for that content.
Perverse incentives to submit clickbait content do not exist because everything goes through a filter: first human, then eventually human + algo. The 1% rule of the Internet makes this very likely to be financially viable: “…in a collaborative website such as a wiki, 90% of the participants of a community only consume content, 9% of the participants change or update content, and 1% of the participants add content.” – there are nearly two orders of magnitude more people paying than being paid. In fact, this will be done at a scale that approaches Wikipedia more than any news organization.
21st Century Media will nail trust by placing reader recommendations, publishing, edits and subscription payments on a public blockchain. The smart contract and its integration with whatever CMS is used will be publicly auditable. While recommendations and payments will be pseudonymous, publishing and edits will be identifiable. This will be critically important when the team and the reader base scales.
All this brings us, finally, to supporting and sustaining 21st Century Media (part 5).