Newsroom collapses this decade have been explained through different lenses — culture wars, business model failure, the death of attention, the rise of AI. While these are real forces, they share an architectural cause that the industry rarely names: the web was never built with a payment, ownership, or consent layer for the content moving across it. Journalism — which is in many ways the deepest content tradition the web inherited — has been running on borrowed infrastructure for thirty years, and the loans are coming due all at once.

This lightning talk is a working journalist's field report. I spent the formative part of my career as an editor at WIRED, and the last decade across the industry — reporting, founding small publications, organizing journalist collectives, and most recently building an ownership protocol for the information economy. I've also spent a lot of time listening to what reporters, editors, and freelancers actually struggle with. What I've learned, and what I want to put in front of this room, is that the decentralized web community is in a near-perfect position to help — and that the bridge between "decentralized infrastructure" and "what journalists need" has barely been built.

After Camp, I plan to publish the inventory of journalist needs as a working document — incorporating what came out of the Q&A and any related Unconference sessions — and to share it with the Internet Archive and the Department of Decentralization, and any DWeb Camp attendees who want to keep working on these problems. The goal is for this talk to seed an ongoing cross-community conversation!