Steem NewsRoom Experiment

We, humans, are an incredible breed. We managed to create so many complex things and yet, in the end, we screwed them up.

Personally, I consider we did this also to journalism and this problem becomes easier to see in developing countries, like mine, Romania. Here, journalism, in its traditional forms, has become, for some years now, a social trumpet that splits society into two political hemispheres. Of course, there are exceptions and there are experiments that are starting to be implemented in the economy of journalism here and there. Still, there is a lot of work before bringing the whole industry on a right path. Some consider it will never happen while some are hopeful and decide to involve themselves in projects that take this later direction.

For some time now I've been combing my brain in order to find theoretical concepts that can be implemented on the blockchain of Steem, using its micropayments system and give birth to real life applications. To try to change broken things and/or procedures in society. Yes, I'm looking to experiment on Steem, but not in the "Dr Frankestein" way. As my formation is "journalism" I decided to start a real-life project, developed through Steem, in order to try and organise the first "Decentralised Romanian Editorship".

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What is it about?

It is about 3 young journalism students, with the will to write, to check, to search, to question and to trust nobody. The idea is to help, facilitate (thanks @lishu for this notion) and encourage these 3 young future journalists to develop their own Steem based newsroom. A different kind of approach, with no boss, no editorial policy and no political influence. They will need to focus on news-blogging, split info and jobs between themselves so that they will cover stories and jobs; in the end, we can have a core of people that will spread real info and the real, whole big picture about Bucharest and Romania, to the whole world. They will serve as an example and arrowhead to future news professionals in Romania who will want to come and join the content revolution. They can be "Steem Ambasadors" in their own way.

The directions that they can approach are not finite in the above paragraph so these 3 people will most probably develop this new form of "newspaper" into writing genres we haven't seen until now.

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How will this work?

I can't do it by myself. But I think we can do it together in the @steemromania community. So @lishu, me and @alexdory teamed up and agreed that this is one of the healthy directions @steemromania should concentrate on. We wait for more people to come and join this project from inside our community. There are multiple things and multiple levels of issues we will need to solve in order for this to start functioning so we can use all the help we can get.

Because I'm not that old (sic!) and my former professors from Journalism University are still alive and kicking, I will start there with the search for these 3 young, open and talented guy/gals. This will be a Bucharest based experiment as there is a big pool here for recruiting and also a big pool of themes on which they can concentrate in the early stages of the project, in order to increase the reputation of their accounts.

After finding the correct people we will help them open their Steemit accounts and start blogging. The idea is to have full support from the community, from @steemromania and its trail, through votes, through advice and help to promote their content. During these early stages, the community has to watch over these people in order to check if their path is correct and if they are moving towards real journalism and not start treating their accounts as Facebook accounts and go into raping the rewards. I am sure that bullshit can happen along the way but all mind shifting require time and multiple attempts to work.

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What will they write about?

The idea behind this is that in time, we will be able to shift journalism minds and investors towards blockchain mass-media. This means total decentralisation because each journalist, reporter, cameraman or photographer will be a freelancer. They will be able to monetise their jobs directly, to the end user either by approaching news-blogging as Achilles, head first, by themselves or by organising under collective accounts that split the rewards. The possibilities will be endless and apart from changing the whole paradigm of what "news-reporting" is and how is made, it will make room for other businesses to grow along with them.

In our own experiment, we will follow first the success of the 3 bloggers in reporting to the Steemit network, interesting situations from Bucharest. This is after they manage to create an audience while growing their accounts reputation. After all, not everybody is interested in what they might write so growing an audience will be important. This is where all the @steemromania community will have to march in and help, through voting, resteeming and overall, contributing to their initial need for exposure.

This 3 students will have to be active journalists and participate to public events from all spheres of interest: cultural, educational, political, governmental, entertainment, tourism and maybe other topics that I can not think about at this moment in time. The interesting thing here, from the journalist point of view, is that Steemit is about blogging so each "wall" can be treated as a separate "publishing". I'm sure that in time interfaces like busy.org will be even more friendly in regards to reading and arranging the info collected from the blockchain so the appearance of the blogs will start to be customisable more. This only opens room towards developing new writing genres as approaching subjects while staying connected to your audience will become complex in ways we can only imagine and new perspectives from which to attack will be possible.

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What's in it for them?

Oh, that devil behind the ear, whispering 24/7: "the rewards, the rewards..."
Of course all the above will mean nothing if there is no money involved. After all, we could all gather on some other blogging platform and start playing mass-media moguls with Monopoly money. The catch is to give these kids a pay, though at first it can't be fixed and after all, it shouldn't be. They should be free to earn as much as they can on the platform, by "selling" news, editorials, entertainment articles etc. But we've done some calculations and if the plan will go accordingly, this 3 people will be able to earn an amount between 150-180 USD/month in the first 3 months, with the real perspective of going higher.

The calculation goes like in the infographic below:

Everything in the infographic is just theoretical of course, there are a lot of "ifs" and I based my calculations on the current situation of the market, where STEEM is something around 3$ and SBD around 2.20$. I think there's a good chance that the currencies will increase and we all know that STEEM is one of the few cryptos that really have applicability, doesn't pose any threat to national electricity industry and is ready for an incredible transformation when SMT's will be implemented. So the future looks pretty bright from my perspective.

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These being said let us proceed to the real project. We will start having updates about the project, the directions we will attack (in detail) and present every stage as it unfolds directly from @steemromania but each of us in this project will have his contribution. After all, this is teamwork so make sure to follow @steemromania, @lishu and @alexdory in order to be fully informed about how this project develops and to be able to see the results as they will come.

Steem on my brothers :)