Thanks for the Bitcoin! How Does It Work?
The West End Phoenix, a four-year-old community newspaper in Toronto, bills itself as “slow print for fast times”—a reaction against global forces that have been decimating local journalism, if not an analog way of life altogether. The Phoenix, which publishes periodically, is a broadsheet, defiantly large and ill-suited to manipulating on the subway. Its design is heavy on art photography, and feature articles range from “Pet of the Month” to examinations of the demonizing of Black communities by traditional crime reporting. The founding publisher, Dave Bidini, is an author and a musician, best known for fronting the Rheostatics, who used to tour with the Tragically Hip. Owing in part to Bidini’s celebrity, in 2019 the Phoenix office received a personal visit from Justin Trudeau (“It’s got a real heft to it,” the Prime Minister said of the paper), and Margaret Atwood has contributed book reviews. Nonetheless, paid circulation hovers below three thousand, and the recent anonymous donation of a bitcoin to the paper’s coffers presented a welcome opportunity for expansion—assuming, that is, that management could figure out how to receive it.
“I bemoaned to Richard that we were having trouble getting our bitcoin activated,” Bidini said the other day, referring to Richard Berman, an occasional Phoenix contributor who’d previously covered Silicon Valley for the San Francisco Chronicle. “He said, ‘You should talk to my friend Anthony.’ I was, like, ‘O.K., cool! Anthony’s going to come over?’ Once I did a bit of research, I realized I wasn’t just getting, like, a tech guy. I was getting one of the foundational crypto people to help us.”
Anthony Di Iorio, one of the co-founders of Ethereum, is a Toronto native, and, as it happens, is in the midst of a transition toward philanthropic endeavors that extend to combatting misinformation and other problems engendered by faulty business models. “We need media that is trustworthy,” he said. “Ninety-nine per cent of the stuff I’m reading? Grain of salt.” He dispatched some associates to help set the Phoenix up with a so-called cold wallet and later joined Bidini and his top editors for a Google Hangouts session to “whiteboard” strategies for growth, using a model that he calls his “perfect formula.”
They made at first for an awkward party, the cryptocurrency guru and the ink-stained journalists. Di Iorio sat in a futuristic white swivel chair with a couple of talismans hanging from chains around his neck, one of them given to him by the organizers of Burning Man and the other by a Costa Rican shaman. (“It stands for protection,” he said.) Between bites of salad, he spoke of scalability, disruption, utilization, stakeholders, and the importance of “empowering people to be in control of their digital lives.” Bidini, who likes to joke about his unfamiliarity with smartphone features, sat on a couch with his wife, Janet Morassutti (the managing editor and a co-founder of the paper), and their snoozing rescue dog, Sandy. He interrupted Di Iorio at one point to ask, “Can you just define what a stakeholder is?” He reverted to a music analogy to articulate his concerns about selling out. “I always use R.E.M. as an example. How do they go from ‘Murmur’ to ‘Losing My Religion,’ and they continue to be R.E.M.? They navigated it so beautifully.”
The Phoenix staff may have been short on data, but they were long on hunches—about, for instance, the efficacy of hot-pink lawn signs (“I Read the West End Phoenix”) in disseminating the word, compared with ads they were placing on the boards of local ice rinks, say, and with social media, where engagement was measurable but potentially in conflict with their ethos. Melanie Morassutti (the executive editor, Janet’s sister, and the third co-founder) said, “Do we hire somebody to produce more local online news? Well, that’s not really the heart of this operation.” She added, “I feel like I trust the lawn sign.”
Talk moved to bumper stickers and window decals. Di Iorio stressed the importance, in his formula, of broadening your message and giving people—future stakeholders—reason to associate your product with improvements in their lives. Janet had a eureka moment. “In Toronto, pedestrian safety’s a big issue, so slowing down is something we want people to do, and our whole thing about print journalism is about slowing down,” she said.
Di Iorio knit his hands behind his head and smiled. “I love the idea of ‘Slow Down,’ ” he said. “It’s also mindfulness and being present—all those things are also very popular right now. A lot of times, things go up in a cycle and then come back down again. I see the space that you’re in maybe having a comeback. People might say, ‘Print media, who needs more of that?’ But, with the world changing and things happening, maybe that’s what communities need.” ♦
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November 08, 2021 at 06:04PM
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Thanks for the Bitcoin! How Does It Work? - The New Yorker
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