The excitement of the cryptocurrency space has predictably sparked a flood of media interest in the industry.
Blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and other decentralized and distributed technologies promise to solve, among other things, the problems related to the increasing centralization of the current Internet economy, but the speed of the clickbait economy reduces much of the so-called mainstream coverage to superficial updates on prices.
In addition to what is the equivalent to political horse-race reporting, shoddy investment advice and ignorant cynicism is peppered throughout these stories.
While educated caution should obviously be exercised with any investment decision, this kind of coverage misses the larger breakthrough of these technologies and their larger political and cultural implications. Very little attention is given to what these various technologies actually do.
Instead, the layperson is left with headlines speculating over unknown timelines of if and when a cryptocurrency bubble will pop or how criminals use these technologies to thwart the law.
Thankfully, a number of industry-focused publications have emerged in recent years to fill in this gap. However, due to the lucrative investment model of the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) that has accompanied the cryptocurrency boom, much of the content filling the pages of these publications consists of company press releases.
When first studying this space, my first instinct as a journalist was to study and report on as many of these breakthroughs as I possibly could.
Instead, I decided to aggregate these stories in as much of a no-frills manner as possible in order to deal with the sheer volume of stories being produced innovative activity.
And so I created The Coin Dispatch to focus on this third wave of the Internet.
The Drudge Report's layout became the obvious choice for the form this new project would take for two reasons: first, practicality, and second, symbolically.
Practically, whether you agree with Matt Drudge's worldview, his site is a media tour de force that expertly leverages the power and reach of the global Internet. By sifting through and posting the most interesting stories in the news, he is able to regularly present to his readers a coherent snapshot of the world, supported by the diverse reporting of newsrooms from all around the globe.
Choosing Drudge's minimalistic model to cover the nascent cryptocurrency industry allows me to do something similar.
Symbolically, the Drudge look is a callback to the early days of the public Internet. Much of the feeling right now in the cryptocurrency community is that we are at a similar phase of development and adoption for these new technologies. By choosing an aesthetic for The Coin Dispatch that represents those early days, it serves as a reminder that we are still just in the beginning stages of these technologies.
If you see any stories that you think I should be linking to, please send them to the contact email linked to at the bottom of the site.
Thank you for reading,
Josh
Image Credit: Washington Times (Fair Use)
Josh Peterson is a writer living in Denver, CO. He is a 2016-2017 Robert Novak Journalism Program Fellow for The Fund for American Studies, studying the impact of artificial intelligence on democracy. He is also an advisor to PassageX, a blockchain startup tackling the secondary event ticket market, and the founder and publisher of The Coin Dispatch, a news and opinion site covering cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and artificial intelligence.