Have you ever noticed that corrections and updates to news articles seem to be occurring more often?

A “rush to report first” mentality often leaves fact checking and verification behind in our modern news cycle; articles change names, dates, ages, physical descriptions and more in the course of hours — especially with breaking news.

What if we could document the work of journalists on a global, shared platform where their work could be tracked and accounted for?

Blockchains

Blockchains are the technology powering digital crypto-currencies like Bitcoin or alternative data-storage mechanisms like Namecoin.

In essence, a blockchain is just like an accounting ledger that contains a list of all the previous transactions anyone has ever made. The ledger is shared amongst everyone participating, and no one can forge entries because of the way new entries are validated (a mad scramble to be the first to strike the lucky jackpot for processing the new “block” of entries in an agreed upon manner).

The most important part is that since the values and state of the new block is based on previous calculations in the old block, any attempt to go back and alter previous data is immediately noticeable: the “chain” can’t be recomputed properly.

JournalCoin

One could imagine creating a “JournalCoin” derivative of the Bitcoin blockchain merging both the currency model and data-storage (like Namecoin) using hashes.

Its key features would be:

Registering a news organization

Registering journalists

Adding/removing membership of journalists to organizations

Registering the “hash” of a news article

Chaining updates to the “article” so that approved changes can be verified by third parties

The value of JournalCoin would be in creating a distributed, decentralized, international, journalistic integrity system that can easily be audited in an automatic fashion by web-browsers.

Circumventing Censorship

If a journalist wrote an article, published it, and then a state government required it to be censored, the JournalCoin doesn’t prevent such a thing, insomuch as it documents the censorship and helps get around it.

The initial journal article will have an associated hash, while the updates will have separate hashes. The repository can be quickly searched for the original hash any online mirrors of the original article can be easily linked to.

As a decentralized repository of journalistic integrity, such a system doesn’t cure all the problems in a digital society desperate for accurate information.

What it does do is provide a solid foundation to build tools to validate the integrity of news articles.