As a journalist, I’m becoming increasingly uneasy about the ability of authority to co-opt or crush the free and independent Press. I already run a news site on the web, and am interested in figuring out how SAFE Network could be a place to build a publishing app that allows for permission-levels, content contribution, content collaboration, and multimedia delivery with the eventual potential for live audio/video feed. Basically, a WordPress type of system, but with some added features, such as versioning. I searched, but didn’t find quite this idea being discussed. I have a low level of tech-spertise, but have been in journalism for nearly 20 years. Pretty intuitive when it comes to UX also.
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I think @happybeing might be a good address when it comes to topics like SAFEpress.
I am not sure what comes shipped with solid plume (which I think @happybeing managed to make running through safe) with permissions and cooperation, live audio/video feeds I guess that needs some time to be developed (maybe someone is already working on it - you never know for sure)
Probably there will be limitations in the early days of the network - but I am positive that what you would like to have is in great demand and therefore I hope it will be released fairly soon (safeCMS could be/have been a good candidate too before Shane suddenly vanished 
if he appears again or someone else is forking and continuing his efforts this could be a good starting point too for what you plan on doing)
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Solid Plume is a simple blog - details will be revealed in my talk on Monday afternoon at the DevCon
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A simple blog is all that’s required to start. I’m looking forward to finding out more.
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Also check out SAFE-CMS. The devs have been MIA lately but the code that was produced is a great foundation. Safe-CMS - Censorship is a thing of the past - #165 by Shane
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No conflicts of interest, no sponsorship or ads.
Open collaboration
The chans
Sorted contributions i.e. up votes with trust trees or merkle trees(?)
I think we are in a post journalism age. Most journalists seem not only corrupt but stupid and fame or popularity driven. They try to sell themselves as brands, when their personalities are beyond irrelevant. What is needed is an intelligent sorting mechanism like deep un corrupted (non sponsored) open honest AI infused search with the feed back loop of the crowd.
I think we are in the post journalism age. I for instance can’t think of any intelligent honest conservative commenters. I can think of some liberals but almost all seem to have hook in them that shows they have a price. I like the Bill Moyers and Amy Goodman. But this is rare. Trust the Chans more than any journalism.
I would like to see ABC,NBC,CBS, Fox, WJS and BBC, NY Times, LA Tines, Washington Post, (better lately,) Bloomberg News, AP, destroyed (peacefully but abruptly) as these are lower than garbage and a true menace to the world- pure scum in the truest sense. Also a bunch of little trash rags like Business Insider and Ars Technica.
Real News Network and RT are much higher quality and very strangely so has AlJazera been on many issues. Pacifica used to be better but is increasingly sponsored. Sponsorship is censorship and it makes money as law bribery based politics possible its the enabler of lobbying and money based pre filtering and vetoing of candidates. A society had to be insane to allow a sponsored media and interlocking boards. Very clear if a subscription is in place ads should never ever be allowed. Attention enclosure should be illegal.
The news needs to die. And we don’t need eye witness experts.
You can probably get that through the decorum platform with some additions
As of now I wouldn’t trust any AI I didn’t train myself (and even then I would say it is more than questionable if it really did learn what I intended it to learn…)
I very much disagree - I very very often cannot know if that ‘facts’ are just manipulated/fabricated information and the source of the information tells me something about the credibility… Did you watch some recent movies? There is an impressive amount of super impressive animation work done nobody recognizes… How am I supposed to recognize something made up just in a picture/a 1 minute clip…
I think credible reporters are a very important part of society - and they need to be independent from gvts and paid for by the people…
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Hey, @Warren–
I’ve read your posts on the subject elsewhere, and share your frustration with what mainstream media (MSM) news has become. I don’t share your prescription for it, however. An accurate picture of reality is never formed by the collection of data points that just happen to be harvested because someone arbitrarily entered them into a “sorting mechanism.” Journalists, half-decent ones, anyway, combine both their humanity and their understanding of human nature to look for stories that should be getting attention, but aren’t. They use their experience and instinct to gauge when the official narrative is deceptive or incomplete. They make connections that aren’t always linear or logical to bring more context and depth to stories in a way that illustrate why the reader/listener/viewer should care. A journalist builds a network of connections based on trust that represents of pool of sources either who will provide confidential tips at some times, while at other times can be valuable resources for the reporter to go to for understanding or anonymous, often dangerous information.
Lastly, a journalist is more that just a fact gatherer. She is a storyteller who uses all the tools of her art and science to make information resonate with the audience. Humans prove time and time again that we make our decisions primarily based on emotion, not logic. The journalist tells her stories in ways that can break through the noise and clutter of an ever-increasing hailstorm of data. The reader has actually to care about a subject for the facts to mean anything at all.
I may be a bit biased, here—I am a journalist after all. But I am also a journalist who sees a chance to improve, rather than extinguish a critical light of liberty.
I agree that the sponsored journalism model works even less now in the digital age than it did in 20th Century. Trouble is, people don’t want to pay for the news. I run a podcast-based news network. In one year, listeners downloaded approximately 18,000 hours of audio. I asked listeners to pitch in $1 per month. I had four contributors in three years, despite repeated explanation that I could not continue providing the service they were enjoying without their subscription. Could I have put it behind a payway? Sure. But then I’m accused of being a greedy pig who wants to hold the news for ransom.
No, there is a solution to the news problem, and I think it may be here, where I can build a trickle-fund mechanism that would pay to keep real journalism alive, but in a way that no one has to shell out money for unless they are using the service, but who MUST put in their fair share if they do consume the content.
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Ok I like that. How do we replicate Gregg Palast, Amy Goodman, John Nichols and Bill Moyers. Very very rare.
I’ld like to pay after the fact. Only what I want. Only if I want and only as a basis for keeping more content coming and on an adjustable micro increment that is a simply as a single click. And I also want a way of knowing the group or entity I an contributing to is a conflict of interest free entity and for this reason I like open collaboratives. Also like to keep may anonymity and not be subject to any tracking and where tracking is only ever opt in.
Update, I forgot Seymour Hersh.
@mongrel That’s pretty bad, I can’t imagine what that does to your enthusiasm. Have you heard of Patreon.com?
They allow content creators to ask for monthly dues, in exchange for contributors content or Premium content. Might be worth looking into.
@Warren That must make shopping at the grocery store pretty impossible,
“I would like to take these groceries home, but only pay for them if I like them and only if I feel/want to!”
You need to lighten up Francis.
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@SalvorinFex The few supporters did contribute through my Patreon page. I like the idea of crowdfunding, but the campaigns live or die by the numbers—scale is the big indicator of success. My current online newsthing covers local news in a low-population density part of Western Massachusetts. We only have about 35,000 people between 18–44 (my demographic) living in an area that’s 2,450 km2. I’d need almost 10% of them to give me a dollar per month just to make a liveable wage. Which they should, since they’re downloading my programs, but they don’t.
I face exactly the same struggle that legacy (dead tree) journalism faces, people are disengaging from local news. They’d rather Netflix and chill, or watch videos of kittens, or whatever. The answer is probably to create an entertainment channel on my platform that people WILL pay for, and use that to pay for journalism.
@Warren I think people ARE trying to replicate the work of the journalists you mention, and others like those at the Intercept, and, to a lesser extent The Young Turks. That critical approach is what inspired me to start my thing. One of the challenges at the local scale, especially in small towns, is that you run into people at the supermarket you ticked off with that article about X, Y, or Z. Or you get blacklisted. Which is what happened to me. I did a story about police violence. I did a story about racism. Both of them extremely tame. Now I have a number of people and organizations who won’t talk to me. If I were the local newspaper that’s been around for 200 years, I could get away with that a bit. But the villagers have pitchforks and torches for a reason–they don’t like upstarts making waves.
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VERY Cool. Thanks so much, @Nigel.
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I get your point but this is where the potential to leverage scale comes in. IP is a problem in that it’s getting in its own way. I don’t care about the property aspect as much as priming the pump, so I’d rather pay for future works with payments meant to keep them coming. I also want all of the risk on the supplier with regard to the fit for the end user. Again these are info products not tangibles and the distribution mechanism is a commons- as are markets when they work. I also don’t want any possible point of enclosure so this after the fact mechanism keeps it about as honest as it can get. I do understand the drawbacks of this type of approach for a good or service that is more local, but under this type of approach its quite plausible that artists for instance would do much better than they have under labels and the quality of the music getting to people would improve. Also for fair use principles when it comes to information.
@Warren I’ve considered much of what you say, and still find application for it; however,
is a bit of a sticky wicket. The word “fit” can be interpreted many ways. Does it mean that the content provides information that allows for meaningful, impactful interaction in their local civic life? Or does it mean that the content gives the user warm and fuzzy feelings? Most people would agree that news about local zoning laws or residential tax rates on detached structures or school custodial expenses make for pretty boring content, but someone has to report on these topics, or else all manner of municipal mischief can occur. I very cursory
search on local journalism decline will reveal that the United States has lost about 40 percent of it’s local news coverage since 1995 (In the U.K. and Europe, programs have recently been launched to protect and nurture local journalism but the U.S. doesn’t have a culture of supporting the underdog, except in movies).
That’s the thing about responsible journalism—it keeps on reporting on the things that preserve democracy, transparency, and accountability even when nobody would pay for it. Until the public apathy starves the outlet to complete anemia and it dies a really gut-wrenching death.
Viewership of videos of cute kittens and puppies has gone up about 3,657% on the other hand.
Journalism is really a lot like a streetlight. It has to stay on at night in the interest of public safety, regardless of whether two cars drive under it or twenty. How much of it’s upkeep and electricity costs fall on your shoulders? Pretty hard to say. Pretty hard to say you wouldn’t have had a fatal accident on that corner with or without the streetlight, since the reason it was installed four decades ago was to stop the string of fatal accidents.
I shudder to think of how quickly the world would plunge into a network of fascist empires if people only paid retroactively for stories that they were personally interested in and met their standards of quality.
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That’s an argument for education. But I think only the end user is in a position to decide. We want to raise the volume on the signal and lower the volume on the noise. What we have is captured lie based media.
I think with a functioning system petrol bailouts like 911 and 311 would be impossible and that is where we need to be.
Hmmm…Just found out about CIVIL. Looks like they are doing something very similar to what I was thinking about creating on the MaidSafe network…https://joincivil.com/
=D doesn’t mean you cannot do it nonetheless
But of course might make a lot of sense to build on common goals and work with them if it really fits what you need 
(do they really store the articles themselves on the ethereum blockchain?! Isn’t that expensive? Oo)