At the core of Civil’s blueprint for a marketplace for ethical journalism is the concept of a newsroom. These groups of collectivized writers (or singular writer!) can launch digital publications on the Civil framework that are supported by readers and curated and fact-checked by the community, all of which is capacitated by the CVL Token. Although the CVL Token is used to launch newsrooms, directly support journalists, and challenge publications for veracity and validity, the Civil platform is built in such a way that blockchain newbies and crypto agnostics alike will have no issues accessing and engaging with the newsrooms.

It’s a fine balance wrought by Civil’s remarkable team of journalists, technologists, and media industry upstarts intent on reviving an industry that is more important now than ever. We spoke with Civil Co-Founder and Head of Marketing Matt Coolidge to get some insight into the platform as the CVL Token sale progresses the Civil vision into reality

The tradition of journalism is under duress from so many different angles that it’s hard to know where to begin…

When you look at the state of the industry today and the accepted models that are powering it, there are two major problems. Looking at the ownership structures and/or having to cater to Google and Facebook’s ad duopoly, it’s really hard to generate reliable, sustainable income as a digital news outlet. Someone said on Twitter the other day, and it was meant as criticism: ‘Civil’s approach to journalism is that there’s a building on fire in the middle of the city. Instead of saving the building, we want build a whole new city.’ We think that’s exactly right!

All of the band-aid solutions that we’ve seen over the past ten years in the digital economy that are focused on “saving journalism’ really don’t go far enough. Pivoting to video isn’t going to reverse the fortunes of hundreds of thousands of journalists worldwide. I think it is a much more systemic, deep-seeded issue, where we need to look at the ownership structures and distribution models, neither of which empower journalists as they should. Addressing those fundamental issues is going to be a critical step in reimagining a healthier, more sustainable journalism economy, and that’s precisely what we’re trying to do. .

Can you lay out how this ends up happening to even the most respected publications?

Most newspapers today are controlled by one of three parties, none of whom are journalists: media holding companies, hedge funds or private equity firms. None of these organizations have models that incentivize funding the production and distribution of journalism at the expense of other business conerns. In most cases, that’s the maximization of profit margins, fiduciary responsibilities. Whether or not a newsroom is profitable is immaterial.

Simply put, we think that’s pretty screwed up. Take, for example, The Denver Post. It was once venerated as one of the greatest daily papers in the US, and, in recent years, served the community as the only major daily in the region. Even as their newsroom was gutted — they went from 300 to 60 full time journalists in under four years — they were turning a profit. But it wasn’t big enough. They were owned by this company called Digital First Media, which is in turn owned by a hedge fund called Alden Capital, which is notorious for swooping in and buying newspapers as ‘distressed assets’ and profiting from gutting their rotting carcasses, as opposed to trying to fund more and better journalism, which could actually improve the product at hand. This is a pattern that manifests all over the world, and the standards of journalism are falling away as a result.