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This morning, Sludge published the full text of one of our most read detective reports – "Charles Koch is a right-wing funder, Pro-Trump Media" – at the Ethereum blockchain.
Today, therefore, marks the first time that Sludge has published a complete text of the article on the blockchain of Ethereum, to be archived forever. Last month's Alex Kotch report on Koch's foundations on conservative media will be accessible forever wherever the internet exists, for continued public responsibility.
Here is the transaction on EtherScan that archived our article on Koch, and here is one of the first artifacts of the complete text of the article on the InterPlanetary file system (of course the article remains on the open internet, as before). We are pleased to follow in the footsteps of our publication of Popula brothers, who published the first full article on Ethereum on Monday.
Filing the full text of the Ethereum blockchain article or IPFS is the strongest current technology guarantee that Sludge journalists guarantee for the accuracy of our articles when they are published. Our independent editorial staff is based on the model of voluntary participation. By incorporating our work into a decentralized repository on the Ethereum platform, we aim to show that we are truly accountable to our readers, who can now always access the full text of our backup pieces.
This strong degree of permanence makes sense for the area of Sludge's money cover in politics – unfortunately, journalists have seen in the past how powerful interests they can acquire their businesses, dissolve them and disappear the archives of stories from the world. public internet. Even if in the future the Sludge article database was somehow corrupted or compromised (or disappeared or deleted), the articles we will run on Ethereum or IPFS will, well, be completely damned to censorship.
Obviously, the articles can be updated and corrections released in real time on the Internet, and later versions of the articles must be copied to Ethereum. However, it will not be possible to go back and add any editorial nuance to modify our articles: the integrity of the article text as originally published on the Ethereum blockchain or IPFS can subsequently be verified with an open source algorithm.
In fact, the decentralized publication "unlocks" many interesting features for licensing, remixing, curation and discovery of content on the distributed web, and the Civil network will develop and test those with the wider Ethereum community. For an example of how distributed content can live all over the web, instead of reading a "blockchain explaniner" post only on a publishing platform like Medium, the content of the authors could be licensed to appear in widgets or pop-up helpers. up on external sites, with compensation terms embedded in the smart syndication contract and automatically met on Ethereum.
Furthermore, as we have hands on many financial data from Sludge campaigns, we are planning ways to make money information in politics more open to value added, by publishing it on Ethereum and IPFS, staying tuned, or getting in touch to discuss ways we can crowdsourcing analysis or data visualizations of campaign contributions and lobbying influence.
I've worked on open source web development since 2005, and it's important to me that Civil's technology is largely open source (on GitHub), and that the Civil Publisher design has been made friendly to writers workflows in the menu WordPress (and other inbound publishing tools). The first draw of today's Sludge in Ethereum comes on the day that Civil has released more information on its product roadmap for the launch of its platform, so more independent journalists will soon be able to use these innovative tools for true self-publishing.
Much more on how Sludge will use this open technology for decentralization to support our mission of investigative journalism – read a long personal essay of October, on the benefits of having the new affiliation option of a WordPress user ID with an encrypted address and insured to subscribe to our free newsletter for updates to the Sludge project:
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