Journalists no longer own their audience, their data, their revenue, their distribution, or increasingly, even their own work.
Think about how insane that is.
The people creating the content don't control the business built around it.
That's a crisis that's far bigger than left versus right, censorship, or media bias: the entire economic model underpinning journalism is broken.
A reporter can risk their life covering a war in Ukraine, corruption in Africa, or political unrest in the Middle East, generate millions of views, and still have no idea how much money their work made, when they'll get paid, why one story performed better than another, or whether the platform will bury them tomorrow.
Meanwhile, the platforms know everything.
They see every click, every view, every dollar, and every trend.
The creators see almost none of it.
Coinbase is trying to solve what may be the biggest problem in journalism itself: Ownership.
Who owns the audience, the data, the monetization, and most importantly, the relationship with readers?
Because for the last decade, the answer has largely been Silicon Valley.
And that's exactly why so many journalists, newspapers, creators and independent outlets have been slowly suffocated.
His argument is that journalism doesn't have a content problem; it has a control problem.
And unless journalists take back ownership of their audiences, their data, their revenue, and their IP, the people producing the information society depends on will continue getting weaker while the platforms built on top of them get stronger.
It's one of the most important conversations I've had about the future of media.
Because if journalism can't figure out how to survive economically, then eventually there won't be any journalism left to save.
