The Associated Press signs deal with blockchain startup Civil, licensing its content to Civil newsrooms and collaborating on blockchain tech for news
Lucia Moses / Digiday :
Context & Ripple Effects
Civil arrived at this deal with momentum: the ConsenSys-backed startup had raised $5M to fund journalism on a blockchain platform, with Popula as its first publication and plans for dozens of CVL-token-supported news sites. Weeks after the AP agreement, it landed its first major-media validation when Forbes began experimenting with publishing stories to the blockchain.
The AP deal has two halves that matter differently: licensing wire content to Civil's newsrooms gives the young network editorial legitimacy, while the collaboration on blockchain tech for news puts the AP inside the tooling itself rather than just supplying it.
First-order effects
- Civil's newsrooms gain licensed access to Associated Press content, upgrading the editorial quality of a network whose publications were seeded startups like Popula and The Colorado Sun.
- The AP moves from observer to participant in news-specific blockchain development, with its standards work shaping whatever Civil builds next.
Second-order effects
- Forbes' decision weeks later to become the first major media company publishing to Civil's blockchain shows the AP deal functioning as a credibility signal other publishers could follow.
- Rival wire services and syndicators now face a question about whether their own archives should be licensed into token-funded networks, pressuring traditional content-licensing pricing.
Third-order effects
- Civil ultimately shut down after losing ConsenSys as a backer and finding no substitute financing, showing that marquee licensing deals did not fix the underlying economics of the CVL-token funding model.
- The AP's own path bent toward utility over funding: by 2021 it was working with Chainlink on authenticating elections and sports data, and it later launched an Xooa-built photojournalism NFT marketplace — blockchain as provenance infrastructure rather than a journalism business model.
The trend: News organizations are separating blockchain's durable use case — content authentication and provenance — from the failed token-based funding experiments of platforms like Civil.