Hey Frens,
This is the Geyser team, coming at you with a spicy idea: a grant for proper journalism.
Issue: Journalism is broken. Independent journalism is emerging with the work of The Rage, Whitney Webb and so forth. They deal with issues like privacy, political corruption, economics, ESG, medicine and many other issues that are not discussed by mainstream media.
The problem is that not many people know about their work and there are very few grant programs that support their work.
Proposed Solution: Geyser would like to host a Grant supporting independent journalists using 'community voting mechanism'. See here for how Community Voting Grants work.
However, we need more companies to partner up and sponsor this initiative with us. Ideas of more sponsors:
  • Stacker news: SN has become a great repository of independent/indie journalism. I think they'd fit in great as sponsors for this type of grant. cc: @k00b
  • Bitesize media: A new independent media house that wants to focus on the signal Bitcoin brings to our world. They expressed interest already.
  • Bitcoin Magazine: might be interested as well in this effort.
Would love the community's feedback on this idea and propose additional thoughts!
I'd say if you could somehow position some platform as a serious competitor to Stripe, a lot of problems might be solved. The framework of stacker.news, but for long form journalism perhaps. I don't think journalism can be properly done under one's own name easily now without dealing with a host of other unpleasant issues.
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121 sats \ 1 reply \ @Wumbo 6 Sep
I can see it working two ways:
  1. Sponsorship / grant to a journalist (the way you are proposing)
  2. I would also like to see a list of different potential topics that an individual journalist would like to research. Then Stackers could vote/donate to that particular topic. This might help a journalist break a tie on which story next to dive into.
A site could enable both options.
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Great feedback! I like idea 2, for individual journalists to make polls on areas they are most interested in.
Idea 1 seems to be most related to solving the problem suggested above. Geyser Grants community voting is tried and tested, check out the ones we did for Bitcoin film fest, where community votes for their favorite projects with sats: https://geyser.fund/grants/6
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