My friend John Kass is a traditional journalist. He wrote a column for the Chicago Tribune for I don't know how many years until he was forced out of the newsroom. You can go to his website and find out more about that. Today, he wrote about his editor passing away. R. Bruce Dold died, and he was a great objective traditional journalist. John talks about the loss of objective journalism in today's world.

John cites this column about the new world of journalism. How good is this quote?

Three decades ago, the visionary social thinker Peter Huber published Orwell’s Revenge, a book that turned one of the twentieth century’s most haunting political parables on its head. Where George Orwell imagined a future of total information control, Huber saw the opposite: a world where digital technology shattered centralized authority. In 1984, the Ministry of Truth could rewrite history because it monopolized the tools of communication. But in the digital age, Huber argued, the networked computer would scatter those tools across society, producing an unruly democracy of voices. The Internet, he predicted, would not empower “Big Brother” but millions of “little brothers”—individuals able to report and argue and publish. What once seemed a one-way flow of information from elite institutions to a passive public was becoming a many-to-many conversation. The gatekeepers were being evicted by the code.

John writes about himself and says, "In that church at Bruce Dold’s memorial, I didn’t hear the bells tolling for journalism. I didn’t need to hear them. Thanks to the hard left, Chicago journalism is dead. Funeral bells would have been unnecessary.

But Anderson’s comment about dramatic proof of the journalist-as-entrepreneur? I think that’s me. I’m one of those journalist “entrepreneurs.” I write for a living but will never go back to corporate legacy journalism. Never."

In the comment section, I mentioned this platform. It also gave me an idea for a post here. Above, I set it up.

What broke journalism? Today, a lot of people will say different things depending on their political perspective. The thing that broke journalism was the internet.

Journalism's business model was about advertising. As a person, you went to the paper for want ads, ads for products, jobs, and a lot of useful things that you needed in your life. Good objective journalism that informed you caused you to want to pay for the information as well.

Ads went away. The journalists, instead of trying to think up a new business model, went down the road most travelled. They took the easy way. They went for clicks.

Going for clicks is just a different extension of the ad model. But, it didn't align with objective hard hitting journalism. It aligned with flashy clickbait headlines and easy to read stories that had very little actual information in them. As the competition for clicks became fiercer, the stories became more salacious and, in many cases, just untrue. They also became very biased, so they would feed the reader's confirmation bias.

Blogs were where information was decent. One of the reasons I started blogging was I was sick of going through an editor, waiting for approval, and possibly not getting published. I had a lot of great information on the guts and glue of the financial system that no one was writing about.

Blogging never actually brought you remuneration for the work. You generated your "utility" or monetary value from the things that came with blogging. As VC Brad Feld said, "Give before you get". Blogging allowed you to give, and then create something around the blog that allowed you to monetize it. In many VCs' cases, it was deal flow. In many financial advisors' cases, it was clients. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter allowed for free viral distribution if you were good. In many cases, platforms specialized. Since I was in finance, Stocktwits comes to mind. Stocktwits became buggy with a bunch of people posting information that wasn't that great, but was just designed to get you to their platform so they could monetize you.

Then blogging platforms became ubiquitous. I have a blog on Substack, which I transitioned to. It made distribution easier, and it turned subscriptions on. I never did turn on subscriptions, but for a lot of entrepreneurial writers like Matt Taibbi and others, they did.

I blog now for the habit and enjoyment of writing things down, but that will change soon. Follow this and that blog, and you will see. I am going to do something totally foreign to me, and something I never thought I would do.

I knew about Paragraph from Fred Wilson's move on chain. But I didn't do anything about it until recently. One thing I value is comments, and comments are harder to do at Paragraph because you have to participate in the ecosystem. Most people are not ready to participate in the Paragraph ecosystem for a large variety of reasons.

The economics of Paragraph are super interesting. They reward merit. They reward people who put out good content. It's a direct reward, so like Pavlov's dog, the connection between excellence and reward is direct and motivating. The other piece of this, though, is that the business model is more in line with the ability to become a many-to-many conversation.

Often in crypto projects, I find that. They are free market and merit-based. As a former floor trader who traded his own money against the Big Banks and Big Ag companies, I empathize with it. The problem with crypto was the fraud, the rug pulls, and the fact that so many people raised so much money on stupid stuff. The rampant speculation also hurt it in the kind of mainstream newsworld we have today.

It's looking to me like crypto is starting, just starting to turn a corner. Banks absorbing crypto rails for stablecoins is one sign. There are others.

It will be interesting to see if Paragraph can turn a corner.

Two final thoughts for you to think about.

When I was a delegate at the first-ever i7/G7 meeting in Torino, Italy, we were discussing and formulating policy statements on topics like "The Future of Work", "AI" and other cutting edge technology the G7 countries were grappling with understanding. This was in 2017. We worked in our groups and formed policy statements, which were blended into a much larger statement.

Unbeknownst to us, the leaders of the session had previously run reams and reams of data through what then was a primitive AI engine to generate a policy statement. When the statements were read side by side, they were almost exactly alike.

That shows you how hard it is to generate unique and meaningful content in an era with AI.

I believe that the ability to trade with other humans in order to improve our own lives is deeply embedded in the human spirit. Adam Smith was right about specialization. I know a lot of people in the world are embracing socialism or some version of socialism now. Socialism is a horrible idea and is contrary to how humans are coded.

Because of that, I think in the end the free market will win out, and the socialists will go away. My guess is crypto is going to have a lot to say about it, and enable it. But, a lot has to happen in the crypto world for it to get to that point of influence.

I used to blog about stuff, and three days later, I'd see it in the Wall Street Journal or on CNBC. It bugged me because there was no way to prove they didn't read my stuff and then plagiarize it for their own use. But, I knew for sure I was having an influence on the direction of the conversation.

Paragraph changes that, doesn't it?

What do you think?

My friend John Kass is a traditional journalist. He wrote a column for the Chicago Tribune for I don't know how many years until he was forced out of the newsroom. You can go to his website and find out more about that. Today, he wrote about his editor passing away. R. Bruce Dold died, and he was a great objective traditional journalist. John talks about the loss of objective journalism in today's world.

John cites this column about the new world of journalism. How good is this quote?

Three decades ago, the visionary social thinker Peter Huber published Orwell’s Revenge, a book that turned one of the twentieth century’s most haunting political parables on its head. Where George Orwell imagined a future of total information control, Huber saw the opposite: a world where digital technology shattered centralized authority. In 1984, the Ministry of Truth could rewrite history because it monopolized the tools of communication. But in the digital age, Huber argued, the networked computer would scatter those tools across society, producing an unruly democracy of voices. The Internet, he predicted, would not empower “Big Brother” but millions of “little brothers”—individuals able to report and argue and publish. What once seemed a one-way flow of information from elite institutions to a passive public was becoming a many-to-many conversation. The gatekeepers were being evicted by the code.

John writes about himself and says, "In that church at Bruce Dold’s memorial, I didn’t hear the bells tolling for journalism. I didn’t need to hear them. Thanks to the hard left, Chicago journalism is dead. Funeral bells would have been unnecessary.

But Anderson’s comment about dramatic proof of the journalist-as-entrepreneur? I think that’s me. I’m one of those journalist “entrepreneurs.” I write for a living but will never go back to corporate legacy journalism. Never."

In the comment section, I mentioned this platform. It also gave me an idea for a post here. Above, I set it up.

What broke journalism? Today, a lot of people will say different things depending on their political perspective. The thing that broke journalism was the internet.

Journalism's business model was about advertising. As a person, you went to the paper for want ads, ads for products, jobs, and a lot of useful things that you needed in your life. Good objective journalism that informed you caused you to want to pay for the information as well.

Ads went away. The journalists, instead of trying to think up a new business model, went down the road most travelled. They took the easy way. They went for clicks.

Going for clicks is just a different extension of the ad model. But, it didn't align with objective hard hitting journalism. It aligned with flashy clickbait headlines and easy to read stories that had very little actual information in them. As the competition for clicks became fiercer, the stories became more salacious and, in many cases, just untrue. They also became very biased, so they would feed the reader's confirmation bias.

Blogs were where information was decent. One of the reasons I started blogging was I was sick of going through an editor, waiting for approval, and possibly not getting published. I had a lot of great information on the guts and glue of the financial system that no one was writing about.

Blogging never actually brought you remuneration for the work. You generated your "utility" or monetary value from the things that came with blogging. As VC Brad Feld said, "Give before you get". Blogging allowed you to give, and then create something around the blog that allowed you to monetize it. In many VCs' cases, it was deal flow. In many financial advisors' cases, it was clients. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter allowed for free viral distribution if you were good. In many cases, platforms specialized. Since I was in finance, Stocktwits comes to mind. Stocktwits became buggy with a bunch of people posting information that wasn't that great, but was just designed to get you to their platform so they could monetize you.

Then blogging platforms became ubiquitous. I have a blog on Substack, which I transitioned to. It made distribution easier, and it turned subscriptions on. I never did turn on subscriptions, but for a lot of entrepreneurial writers like Matt Taibbi and others, they did.

I blog now for the habit and enjoyment of writing things down, but that will change soon. Follow this and that blog, and you will see. I am going to do something totally foreign to me, and something I never thought I would do.

I knew about Paragraph from Fred Wilson's move on chain. But I didn't do anything about it until recently. One thing I value is comments, and comments are harder to do at Paragraph because you have to participate in the ecosystem. Most people are not ready to participate in the Paragraph ecosystem for a large variety of reasons.

The economics of Paragraph are super interesting. They reward merit. They reward people who put out good content. It's a direct reward, so like Pavlov's dog, the connection between excellence and reward is direct and motivating. The other piece of this, though, is that the business model is more in line with the ability to become a many-to-many conversation.

Often in crypto projects, I find that. They are free market and merit-based. As a former floor trader who traded his own money against the Big Banks and Big Ag companies, I empathize with it. The problem with crypto was the fraud, the rug pulls, and the fact that so many people raised so much money on stupid stuff. The rampant speculation also hurt it in the kind of mainstream newsworld we have today.

It's looking to me like crypto is starting, just starting to turn a corner. Banks absorbing crypto rails for stablecoins is one sign. There are others.

It will be interesting to see if Paragraph can turn a corner.

Two final thoughts for you to think about.

When I was a delegate at the first-ever i7/G7 meeting in Torino, Italy, we were discussing and formulating policy statements on topics like "The Future of Work", "AI" and other cutting edge technology the G7 countries were grappling with understanding. This was in 2017. We worked in our groups and formed policy statements, which were blended into a much larger statement.

Unbeknownst to us, the leaders of the session had previously run reams and reams of data through what then was a primitive AI engine to generate a policy statement. When the statements were read side by side, they were almost exactly alike.

That shows you how hard it is to generate unique and meaningful content in an era with AI.

I believe that the ability to trade with other humans in order to improve our own lives is deeply embedded in the human spirit. Adam Smith was right about specialization. I know a lot of people in the world are embracing socialism or some version of socialism now. Socialism is a horrible idea and is contrary to how humans are coded.

Because of that, I think in the end the free market will win out, and the socialists will go away. My guess is crypto is going to have a lot to say about it, and enable it. But, a lot has to happen in the crypto world for it to get to that point of influence.

I used to blog about stuff, and three days later, I'd see it in the Wall Street Journal or on CNBC. It bugged me because there was no way to prove they didn't read my stuff and then plagiarize it for their own use. But, I knew for sure I was having an influence on the direction of the conversation.

Paragraph changes that, doesn't it?

What do you think?