A new approach to crowd journalism using a blockchain-based infrastructure

The significant evolution of smartphones has given ordinary people the power to create good-quality content which can then be spread, by the press, over multiple platforms. Citizens are almost always the first ones to arrive at a breaking news location and can provide the initial images of the scene. However, existing crowdsourced tools and platforms are predominantly centralized and are usually fed with unreliable and untrustworthy information.This work introduces a Crowd Journalism ecosystem whose core is a video marketplace web tool based on an organization-level decentralized system that can store, visualize, rate, and execute transactions of live-made videos. Smart contracts ensure that all the transactions are transparent and secure.This approach to Crowd Journalism exploits the inherent features of a blockchain such as offering trustful, anonymized, and immutable transactions, which has the potential to revolutionize the way news content is shared and commercially exploited.