News Giant, Associated Press Partners with Blockchain Startup Civil for Journalism

One of the world’s largest and oldest news agencies, Associated Press partners with blockchain startup Civil to develop technology that will enable the flow of newsroom content to be tracked, and licensing rights enforced.

According to an official announcement, Associated Press (AP) will deliver its national and international news content to the Civil blockchain platform, which will afford AP the immutability of blockchain technology when licensing it’s content directly to any newsroom wishing to access it.

AP’s senior vice president for strategy and enterprise development, Jim Kennedy, stated:

“AP has been pushing into new digital territory for more than two decades, and Civil is opening up another new space with interesting technology to explore, and a commitment to good journalism”

Civil, which is based on the Ethereum blockchain, has raised $5 million from the ConsenSys venture studio.  Still in development, once it’s live, it plans to make the licensing tool available to all the newsrooms in its ecosystem, of which it currently has 14.

The aim is to reinstate trust and credibility in journalism and eradicate “fake news”, Civil endeavours to turn the ad-based revenue model on it’s head, creating a new economy, providing journalists with ownership, and accountability of their content.

The Civil ecosystem uses CVL tokens, as well as an incentive for all parties, it enables a democratic approach, keeping newsrooms in check and journalism accurate.  Matthew Iles, the founder and CEO of Civil said it is:

“going to create far better signals for consumers to really know if a news organisation is trusting and credible, despite whatever powerful people might be saying.”

This deal marks a significant step for the blockchain startup, which is set to launch it’s initial coin offering (ICO) of CVL tokens on the 18th of September.  AP, which operates 263 news bureaus in 106 countries, will receive CVL tokens as part of its deal.

Civil have been seeing exceptional support, it also landed a major contract with Singapore based media company, Splice, to invest $1 million for 100 media projects in Asia, and according to CEO Iles, in the preceding weeks to its ICO, it expects to announce more partnerships.

There are a number of companies developing technology to address the quality control of news content.  As per a previous BCTech Report, Adblock Plus have partnered with MetaCert, the largest anti-fraud and URL registry, for its TrustedNews platform, identifying fake news using blockchain technology.