A great year ahead

2017 has been a great year for steemit. We have a lower Alexa rating than ever before (this is good). As of writing, we have a global rating of 1708, and we are sitting at 690 in the united states alone. This is amazing, and i am sure that 2018 will be an even better year. We are giving people the ability to speak of their passions, spread their ideas, and get paid to do it.

Rewarding passion

We are creating a platform where we can support each other's dreams, and i find that wonderful. But i see a use for steemit that has not yet been utilized yet, at least not to its fullest, Journalism.
In the age of the internet, one of the most common ways of creating revenue is through ads. This might work fine on youtube (It does not work fine, look at adpocalypse, which is why DTube is the future), but it creates an issue for the more established news media.
When the thing that counts is not the quality of your content, but rather the catchiness of your title, good journalism has a hard time surviving. When the success of an article is measured in amount of clicks, stories about the war in Syria loses out to videos of kittens, and thus we all lose out.

We can make a difference!

But this is where we, my fellow steemians, can make a difference (let’s take a moment to pat ourselves on the back). Steemit was created to reward good content. Sure, we see issues with autovoting, bots, and people raping the reward pool, and we will need to sort these issues out, but i still see amazing opportunities ahead.

Steemit (steemy?) journalism

What if we were to allow journalists to share their stories and articles here? I realize that there is an issue with trust. With a classic newspaper, you have trust in the name of the paper, which can hold a lot of integrity. On a decentralised platform, this is an issue. We would need to find a way to make sure that the journalist isn’t simply writing nonsense. But this would be our responsibility as steemians. We would have to live up to the task to reward the high quality content, and weed out the low quality. We have a bunch of great curators on steemit, and if we work together, we can make it happen. Together we can bring back proper journalism, and set a better example of how to properly reward creators. The media is essential to society (Despite what a certain president might think), and critical journalism is a vital part of this. We need people reporting in on what is happening in the world, and we need people asking the tough questions. This can not be supported by ad revenue. So maybe 2018 will not just be a great year for steemit, maybe it will be a great year for journalism as well?
Thanks for reading