“The media is the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.” — Malcolm X

News outlets, broadcasters and other entities that set the talking points for a day hold immense power. When this power is consolidated in the hands of few, these can wield disproportional amounts of influence over society.

The last few years have seen a lot of consolidation in the publishing and news industry resulting in centralisation of influence. In the United States, for example, six major corporations control 90% of the media.

To counter this centralisation of power and allow for diversity and difference of opinion, we need to democratise and redistribute media influence. The advent of the blockchain gave us a technology to do so, enabling decentralised systems and a new model shaped by collective interests.

Enter Media Sifter, a news aggregator with a decentralised verification platform, owned and governed by its users.

Media Sifter from CIID IDP on Vimeo.

The Challenges in Media

Outside of its role to inform the public, the news has many other aspects to address. From its noisy nature to its increasingly biased and quite often inaccurate content, there are numerous problems waiting to be solved.

We will be analysing these in further articles but as a starting point, we will focus on what we believe are the three core challenges in the publishing industry:

1 — The Age of Noise

The advent of the internet has democratised access to information and eroded the cost of publishing and distributing content. This drastic shift has created a surge in online publications, increasingly created by amateurs or algorithms.

As a result, today’s media landscape is overwhelming and noisy, and it requires excessive amounts of time to critically consume news. Comparing for difference of opinion and appropriate fact-checking are becoming increasingly time-consuming activities.

“We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.” — John Naisbitt

We are being flooded with information related to topics of little relevance, while societally important issues such as politics, economics, the environment, and education have seen a decrease in reporting.

2 — Lack of Accountability

Trust in the media has reached historical lows and now the majority of the population believes that news is biased or inaccurate.

One of the reasons is that the media landscape has experienced increasing consolidation and few companies control a large share of the content. As the number of opinions continues to decrease, so does the critical voice that holds publishers accountable.

“It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it.” — John Pilger

High levels of inaccuracies are another consequence of lacking accountability and not only since the term “Fake News” entered the agenda during last year’s US election.

This phenomenon is not limited to politics however; even the cryptocurrency space is subject to incorrect reporting and the alleged death of Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, is only one of many bizarre examples.

3 — The Attention Economy

“The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and inform and even, one might say, elevate, has altered under commercial pressure, perhaps, into a different kind of purpose, which is to divert and distract and entertain.” — Tom Stoppard

Publishing has been sculpted into an attention economy that pays for clicks and sensationalism, rather than the quality of the investigation. As readers got increasingly used to free content, the publishers’ main revenue streams went from print subscription fees to income from digital advertising.

In a pay-per-click world, publishers have been incentivised to maximise traffic through sheer quantity of content and sensationalist headlines. As investigative journalism and serving the public interest have become difficult to monetise, user’s attention as a driver for ad revenues has become the media’s main focus.

By following the clicks-driven revenue model, publishers have become hostages of the digital ad duopoly dominated by Facebook and Google. Together they absorb the lion’s share of the value generated.

The full range of issues in the media landscape is far wider than could be described in just one article. Subscribe to our newsletter for an in-depth analysis in the following weeks.

For the time being, let’s give you a glimpse at how Media Sifter is going to help solve these issues.

Our Response: Media Sifter

“We exist to empower people to find their own truths in the world and redistribute influence through technology. Starting with the news.” — John Ferreira, Founder & Product Lead of Media Sifter

Media Sifter is a news aggregator that utilises the wisdom of the crowd to verify content through blockchain-powered user-consensus.

Focused on aggregation, crowd-sourced verification, and our proposed evidence-based economy model, Media Sifter provides people with the tools to navigate the variety of existing narratives and give them a way to analyse its factuality.

This challenges the bias on the information provided and counters the influence of institutions that use media to push their own agenda. Better information allows for better decision making. Better decision making empowers entire communities.

“He who controls the media controls the minds of the public” — Noam Chomsky

The project is non-profit, will be operating in transparency and depend on its community. We are building an open-source protocol that other applications and services will be able to build on top of.

Designed as a decentralised platform, Media Sifter will give control of the network and the content to its users and the community. By handing over control from a central entity to its users, we are creating a platform that truly reflects and acts in the interest of the community.

We invite you to join us and make it happen.

We will be gradually releasing more information about the platform, our protocol, the team and the token generation event in the weeks to come. Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter and participate through the channels below.

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(This article was originally published in Medium)