How Larry Ryckman and Civil Media are saving local news
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He may have quit… his job at The Denver Post where he was senior editor, but Larry Ryckman didn’t leave journalism. His former company, owned by a hedge fund, faced numerous budget cuts and layoffs. Such financial and personnel decisions created an environment where corporate owners and journalists could not coexist; a scenario that happens all too often.
Time for a change… and Ryckman founded The Colorado Sun. The company has a 10-person staff and is owned by journalists rather than a corporate overlord. Most of the funding came from Kickstarter and Civil Media, a blockchain company that supports a decentralized model for journalism. And Civil Media is where this gets even more interesting…
Debuting cryptocurrency… is what Civil Media plans to do. Odd, right? However, token owners will oversee newsrooms that are part of Civil and can challenge any content that fails to coincide with a journalistic code of ethics. CEO Vivian Schiller will ultimately decide if changes are imposed. This plan is supposed to create a world of independent, ethical journalism without all the spam, trolls, and misinformation. Can you smell that? That is the smell of innovation at work!
