New Blockchain Based Association in Charts for The Associated Press

By Kapil Gauhar

News agency Associated Press (AP) has signed a collaboration for content licensing with Civil, a startup that works with blockchain. The news of partnership was announced on 28th August, Tuesday. As per reports, Associated Press is looking to explore the various ways in which blockchain can be used to provide support to ethics in journalism and monitor usage of content. As a part of this new collaborative venture, AP will be passing on its national and international news content to its partner Civil, to make sure that news agencies can directly access it using the platform. Whichever newsroom might wish to access content from the AP will need to have a direct license from the press agency.

The partnership would mean that AP will also have ownership of the CVL tokens. According to what Civil says, these tokens incentivize the sector to make sure that newsrooms remain free from biases and also factually accurate. The senior VP for Strategy and Enterprise Development working with the Associated Press remarked that the agency has begun taking interest in DLT (digital ledger technology) recently and that for over 20 years they have been trying to make forays into the digital territory.

The collaboration with Civil has opened up a whole new world of using efficient technologies to take journalism forward, smoothly and ethically. He added that they were enthusiastic about helping improve the quality of the space and exhibit their worth to the new batch of digital publishers who have come in.

The agency in question had been formed a little less than a century ago in 1846, with its headquarters in New York City. Based on the agency’s 2016 data, they are currently operating 263 news bureaus spread across 106 nations. Their partner, Civil, is a startup that works towards developing technology that will help monitor ownership rights of journalistic material and also the usage of content in the space.

Several other firms have also attempted to make use of blockchain for making journalism more objective and just. In the month of July, eyeo GmbH, which was behind developing Adblock Plus, made an announcement that it was coming out with a browser extension called Trusted News that was based in blockchain. This new extension is meant to tackle the problem of fake news. At the same time it will do the work of whitelisting reliable articles and news sources.