Publicism, a Dutch decentralized news medium enabling journalists to safely publish content, plans to leverage the potentials of blockchain technology in order to guarantee freedom of press, Bitcoin Magazine reported.
Dutch Journalism Fund, an organization supported by the country’s Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, has backed the initiative by €50,000. The Publicism team believes that blockchain technology could be part of a solution to reverse the concern of decline of press freedom.
“We initially went in a bit naive, and were under the impression that many of the solutions were already out there — think of Decent or Steemit. As we learned more about this blockchain technology and these kinds of projects, we found that many of them were still trying to figure out the answers themselves, and several seemed primarily focused on making money from some kind of token-scheme,” Haasnoot who is one among the media veteran behind the initiative, told Bitcoin Magazine.
By leveraging blockchain, the company will be able to offer censorship resistant and immutable broadcasting tools for journalists through a convenient dashboard. The dashboard will manage publication of stories, payments, and ownership rights, all the while preserving anonymity for both journalists and their readers.
The team launched Publicism as a part-time effort and it has yet to fill in many of the specifics, both on conceptual as well as practical levels. Publicism recently partnered with World Press Photo and Radboud University Nijmegen to explore different options.
The Publicism team is presently focusing on Hyperledger Project and the company plans to consider other blockchains, like bitcoin, possibly in combination with the Ethereum-like Rootstock sidechain. The company has scheduled a proof of concept to be finished by February, while a minimum viable product is scheduled for July.
