点击查看本文中文版 (Read in Chinese)

It’s hard to cover news that doesn’t have a big audience. Ad revenue funds journalism based on the number of people who will see it, not the value it provides to its readers and the public. This problem hits hardest in niche communities, where there’s a huge mismatch between the value the community would gain from in-depth coverage and the number of viewers who would read it.

The Ethereum community has several publications that do good work covering the news, but since the community is still small, we’re missing out on valuable coverage that isn’t necessarily profitable to fund. The shortfall is most visible when it comes to DevCon, our most newsworthy event of the year. The lack of substantive coverage is clear if you compare the coverage of conferences like Apple’s WWDC, Google I/O, and Microsoft’s Build. The reason for this is quite clear: that coverage draws enough ad revenue to the sites creating it to make it worthwhile.

However, if this kind of coverage is valuable to our community to spread the word both within the community and to the rest of the world, then it’s our responsibility to make that coverage happen.

It’s problems like this that drove us to create Benefactory, a decentralized app that lets communities come together to fund grant proposals that contribute to their mission. Everyone’s history of contributions to the community’s mission is written to the blockchain, where anyone can see it, making it easy for social rewards to flow to those who deserve them. Think of it as community curated crowdfunding. Individuals who contribute funds to grants get the respect and gratitude they deserve. Companies who contribute garner the attention of prospective employees and partners. Publications earn loyalty from their communities, who can send them traffic from their social media platforms. Benefactory displays contributors prominently within the app and, since those contributions are on the blockchain, allows them to be displayed across the web.

With Common Press, publications and the communities they serve can fund more in-depth coverage than they could apart. We can commission coverage for everyone’s benefit, which can then be published anywhere. We can fund quality translations to bridge the language gap that divides our community. Ethereum only launched a year ago, but its developer conference could have the kind of coverage that decades-old behemoths get by using our own technology to coordinate economic activity — one of the new kinds of coordination we’ve always expected Ethereum to unlock. And when DevCon 2 is behind us, the mission of Common Press still lies ahead: keep covering issues that aren’t being covered, especially this decentralization renaissance that’s still invisible to so many.

This article first appeared here on August 23, 2016 and was written by Niran Babalola, founder of Benefactory.