This Is What Happened When They Tried To Fix Journalism Using Blockchain

Joe Weisenthal (0:11)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Unfortunately, my colleague Tracy Alloway is out again this week, so it's just going to be me. And I'm going to be talking again kind of about the broader crypto world, but I think a really interesting, different story this time. So listeners might remember that in 2017, during the last cryptocurrency boom, when Bitcoin was taking off, there were all these follow on coin offerings. And beyond just that, beyond just other coins, there were all these ideas about how different industries could be transformed via blockchain technology in some way, or tokens, or their own cryptocurrencies. And there were stories about putting banana trade on the blockchain with a currency, and dentistry having its own currency, and all kinds of weird things that never really took off. Tomatoes, there was a famous story about putting the tomato trade on the blockchain. Anyway, none of that has really taken off.

And at the time when a lot of this was going on, I thought a lot of these endeavors were kind of cynical, just attempting to cash in on the hot market for coins in general without much purpose. But some of the projects actually did seem sincere. And today we're going to be talking about one such project that did sincerely try to solve an interesting problem. And that problem was journalism.

And so the question was, could this technology, could a currency somehow help build a sustainable journalism business model in some way that existing subscriptions or existing models weren't capturing well or weren't doing a good job of. So I'm very excited about our guest. I'm going to be speaking with Maria Bustillos. She's the founding editor of Popula. She has a new endeavor called the Brickhouse Co-op. But several years ago, she was a co-founder of a project called Civil, which attempted to create a new journalism business model and in part using its own cryptocurrency.

We're gonna be talking about what she learned from that project and the sort of potential and limits of the technology. Should be very interesting discussion for both people interested in finance and markets and how markets create incentives, but also journalism and journalism business models. So without further ado, I wanna bring in Maria. Thank you very much for joining us.

Maria Bustillos (2:53)

Thank you for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here, Joe.

Joe Weisenthal (2:56)

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to getting your story, but it's always, I've been following you in your career on Twitter from afar for a long time. We've never talked before, but it's always seemed interesting and you seem to have an inclination to experiment and try new things and be open-minded about new ideas in a way that strikes me as kind of rare for this industry, to be honest. But I'm just sort of curious your background first, how you got into journalism and how you got interested then in the sort of world of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.

Maria Bustillos (3:32)

Well, I am kind of a serial entrepreneur really. I started my first business when I was in my early 20s as a designer of like overpriced tachikas for the home.

And then I sold that and opened a kind of like a proto Etsy in 1998 Like I was always really interested in the internet computers. I met my husband on Prodigy.

So I kind of came at journalism from an interest in the internet and a long time interest in sort of research and writing and entrepreneurial stuff. And my husband's a Wall Street guy. So there was a lot of business in our house, business talk. And that's kind of how I approached it to start with. But I mean, I love sort of literature and blogs and I wound up going to see that terrible movie Avatar with my husband and I just hated it so much. And I just came home and banged out this like absolute screed about how awful it was and sent it to my favorite blog, the Cory Cica and he printed it. And that became my job like 11 years ago almost.

Joe Weisenthal (4:46)

That's awesome. I love stories like that. I feel like so many of the most interesting people in media came at it from some angle where they didn't originally intend to be in journalism, but then all these new tools opened up and they realized they could write and they're like, oh, this is pretty cool.

And that's a pretty great story.

Maria Bustillos (5:04)

I love it. I like, this is my favorite job by far and there's a lot of work to do in it. So I've been really fortunate to be the forefront of some really interesting projects.