Q+A: Jeff Koyen, Founder and CEO of Pressland

How a new platform aims to restore the public's trust in media.

Earlier this year, Jeff Koyen announced he would be rolling out Pressland, a new platform aimed at restoring public trust in the media by encouraging transparency. Part of that venture entails gathering data from public sources and inviting publications to share details about what goes into their work, storing that data using blockchain technology and displaying it as a media supply chain (for example, showing how the writing process leads to the editing and fact-checking process, and finally to publication and syndication). It also includes an editorial arm called News-to-Table that covers matters relevant to media transparency, like a reporter’s arrest after publishing leaked police documents. (Study Hall currently has an exclusive partnership with Pressland, which solicits pitches from Study Hall members.)

It can be tricky to grasp everything Pressland is up to, what they hope to achieve, and how blockchain enters into it — so we jumped on the phone with Founder and CEO Jeff Koyen to talk about the project.

Interview by Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs. This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Study Hall: Your stated goal with Pressland is to restore trust in media — can you explain Pressland’s approach to solving that crisis in a way that benefits readers and journalists alike?

Jeff Koyen: We need to have sort of a farm-to-table approach for all media production. What the consumers care about any time they buy a bottle of milk or eat a burrito at Chipotle is that it’s safe, that somebody has accounted for the path of that milk or meat from the farm to them. That’s what we want to do for journalism. Every news organization has their own data. Nobody’s out there collecting it, indexing it, and storing it. If anyone wants to know everything about any given article, all the data about that article should be readily available. You should be able to click on any article and pull up everything you need to know about it. Every single article, every single writer, every editor, relationships between writers and editors, track records. What’s the body of work? Do they have subject matter expertise? Do they have potential conflicts of interest?

Pressland wants to build that layer of data, and then that data can then be fed into places like Facebook and Google News, Twitter, and your favorite news app and can make them better. We can give Google News the ability to compare article X and article Y and say, “Ok, with article Y, I have the whole production cycle,” so when they have to choose between two articles to put in front of you first, they should choose the one with more production data available.

SH: How would Pressland go about collecting that kind of data — would you expect publications to supply that information? What if they decline? (This question was asked via email as a follow-up.)

JK: We don’t require publishers to add anything to their CMS, and they don’t have to send anything to us. We’re collecting all data from public sources, then analyzing that data to learn everything about the article’s production. Identifying an editor, for example, is just a question of having enough data sources — and knowing how to relate them. Media list plus Twitter plus LinkedIn plus human intelligence when needed, for example.

All that being said, of course we will invite publishers to send their production data directly to us. We’ll build CMS plugins and make it a very simple process. To incentivize them, we will revenue-share with publishers who do this, and they retain full control and ownership over their data.

SH: How would this data collection benefit journalists?

JK: This helps journalists because generally you want your articles to be put in front of more people and the right people, so by putting the production data on this article and saying “You can trust this person, this person,” we think we’ll get better engagement and audiences for journalists.

We’re also going to make use of that data on our own and build an IMDB for the media. It’s sort of a de facto portfolio service for writers. This will be your page of everything you’ve done — you can come in and manage it, you can arrange the articles in the way you want to. I find Google to be the worst arbiter of reputation there is because whoever is best at SEO wins at Google. We want to intercept there and say your Pressland page should come up first or second in a Google result.

We also want to build a micro-payment system — if you wanted to interact directly with your audience, we could have a little payment button that’s like a tip jar.

SH: So as a writer, I would have a considerable degree of control over my own page on Pressland?

JK: You’ll have full control. And the first people we hired are privacy people — we’re not going to doxx anybody. We’ve been talking about, how do we red line what is professionally relevant and what’s not? That’s a conversation we’re still having. Is a divorce record relevant? I doubt it, but if you’re a high profile journalist and your former spouse is and it made headlines, maybe that is newsworthy.

We’re also having conversations about, does a journalist have a right for their work to be forgotten? Can you drop off those bylines from 20 years ago or that content marketing work you did? We’re not sure yet. We’re trying to figure it out. At the very least, you’ll be able to bury it on your page.

SH: You have made very clear you’re not a fact checking service. Can you talk a little about the distinction between what you do and what a fact-checking service would do?

JK: We want to make it easier for fact-checkers to do their jobs. Facebook claimed they had no way of knowing that all that fake news was from click farms. They didn’t have the data in place, but that’s the data we’re going to be able to give them. We’ll give you that data to say, “Maybe there’s a red flag here.” We’re not going to raise those flags; we don’t presume to tell Facebook how it interacts with its audience. But we’re going to give you all the data so the algorithms can flag things a little more efficiently.

In terms of fact-checkers, we can give [them] that data right upfront with one click, so everything about the writer, boom. Do you care about conflicts? Here’s where this person has worked. Or do you care about subject matter expertise? This is the stuff this person knows about. We want to feed this data to them so their job is easier and they can make better decisions.

SH: Can you break down how blockchain enters into this and why blockchain technology was a part of this venture?

JK: Blockchain is decentralized storage — it’s a server that doesn’t sit in one place and isn’t controlled by any one institution. The key for us is that we’re not trying to say we own this data.

We do four things: We collect all the data, we analyze it, we store it, and we distribute it. In storage, it’s going onto a blockchain. And there are technical reasons, but it’s mostly a moral signal that says, “We don’t own this data.” So when publishers come onboard, when they hit publish on an article, we also want to kick a copy of that data straight into Pressland. When that happens, that data [about the publication and author] goes into the blockchain and the publishers can retain ownership and control. That’s what blockchain is good for. Because if it goes into a traditional database, it goes into my house, and I can close that door anytime I want. But putting it on blockchain, the publisher holds the keys. If I sell out to Google because I can’t resist, that data is not what I’m selling, and if The New York Times doesn’t like what the new owners are going to do with it, they take it back, because we don’t own it. We own the indexing system and the standards by which we’re making it available to Google News and Facebook.

SH: Can you talk a little about what Pressland is doing on the editorial side? What kinds of stories are you looking for?

JK: Our mandate is to cover the topics that Pressland is related to: media trust and transparency. We want to examine the pitfalls of radical transparency, how much is enough, where are the lines, all those kinds of issues. We have a really strong mandate to make sure we’re not just doing North America, and we have a mandate to really look beyond partisan bickering and then give you more of the nuts and bolts of how the media works, what are the risks, what are we facing, how does it relate to trust, all that.

We’re about to put out another call to pitches. We’re not really looking for first person — if you want to put a little bit of first person stuff in the lede, that’s fine, but that’s sort of the less interesting thing for me. We’re not looking for “How I struggled with trust at my college paper.” That’s fine, but then turn that into more reportage about stuff.

We really like to consider different populations [not represented in our staff]. One of our most popular pieces was the perils of covering the trans community — that was a really great piece and I know we got that person from Study Hall and it was fantastic. That was an issue I could never have tackled, and I was absolutely unaware of the subtleties of it.

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