Becoming Citizen Journalists
Own a media corporation or be owned by one.
If writing the Great American Novel on your laptop or building a billion-dollar startup in your dorm room is possible, breaking the story of the year as a citizen without any access to traditional institutions is absolutely possible.
I believe in citizen journalists for the same reason I believe in solo developers. Satoshi showed what one person can do. So did Snowden. In 2013, Snowden needed the help of the courageous Glenn Greenwald, but the next Snowden could do the whole thing independently.
Writing is fighting. It’s not obvious, but no one is covering many tenured bureaucrats with god-level powers. A citizen journalist with expertise in a government-blocked area can reform obsolete regulations by cultivating sources, writing articles, and naming names.
Just like the open-source culture transformed closed-source software corporations into something more ethical, more open, and more commercially viable, decentralized media would strive to do the same.
We have fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders.
Is there infoduciary responsibility to our subscribers?
The founding fathers’ concern over a standing military was that it was separate from the people. It was a class with special powers and therefore temptation. A standing media is similar. The solution to both is citizen involvement. If you don’t do journalism, someone will do it to you.
The answer is NOT to found a new typical media company. After all, new media companies like Vice, Vox, and BuzzFeed all found themselves pulled into the same culturally centralized Brooklyn media circle. Different companies, same people, same social network.
This is why we need to decentralize media. Twitter was version one of decentralized media, and Substack is version two. We’re moving toward individual citizen journalists and away from media corporations. Perhaps we will see “full stack writers” who go from writing articles to producing movies themselves, like the full stack developer.
Some principles:
Every citizen is a citizen journalist.
Every company is a media company.
Media scales.
Great journalists might become millionaires, or even billionaires. Don’t option the movies; make them yourself on your computer like Notch made Minecraft, and then sell it directly. Nate Silver and Andrew Sorkin are early versions of this type of journalist. There may be room for a Y Combinator of personal media corporations.
