We cover new technologies and digital start-ups from all over the world here on TechFruit with a particular eye on the media and the interplay between new technologies and the traditional media businesses that were built around scarcity and the expense of distribution. We’ve watched the music business be up-ended by the internet since the birth of Napster, and through our sister site The Blue Walrus we have been involved in trying to forge new paths in digital distribution.
In the last couple of years, however, we have seen something all the more humbling than the digital revolutions of businesses and that is the social revolutions. We have seen the Arab Spring spark huge political upheaval across the Arab world, where people once divided and ruled have found common partners and similarities with their brothers and sisters of nation. We have seen dictators topple because the people could finally organise themselves and they had found common causes to believe in. We have seen the Occupy Movement follow that example and demonstrate the power of the populace across the Western world where the few had caused problems for the many with greed and negligence. But we have also seen the dark side of instant digital communication with the London Riots – where rioters organised using those same digital methods only to show frustration with little political ends in mind.
We are at a juncture where the power and wealth held by the few is more bare than ever, and the many are beginning to use these digital tools to level the playing field. The formation of unions ushered in workers’ rights, but the internet is ushering in personal rights and personal responsibilities. There is no-where to hide in the digital playground, and the web is the great leveller.
On the subject of news – the majority of it is still through the lens of the major media conglomerates and institutions. The news is filtered. The BBC falls foul of being forced to be too impartial and offer two sides of a story even if there is only one side – the MMR jab risks, and global warming being two high-profile cases. And then you have “news” organisations such as Fox News where the news is not only filtered, but skewed and twisted into utterly biased commentary.
It is here we come to The Descrier. What if you stripped away the lens and offered direct access to the comments of those on the ground – the activists, the scientists, the bloggers directly involved? Why not get the story directly from the source, rather than filtered by your news institution of choice? The web has given a mouthpiece to all of these people directly, but most people simply don’t know where to look to hear it. The Descrier constantly scours the web to find the sources of the stories you are hearing about in the news, and many you aren’t hearing about at all, and curates and aggregates those stories into a centralised digital newspaper. Each story on The Descrier can be considered the opening chapter to more on-the-ground reporting and information on the subject – but it also comes with an index of where on the wider web to find the rest. There are no pay walls excluding people from reading the news, and there are no SEO linking policies that prevents authors from linking out to the wider web to find our more on the subject.
The Descrier is a different type of newspaper for our digital world. One where there is no agenda, no pandering, just first-person reporting and analysis directly from involved parties.