Beaconreader.com aims to allow independent journalists, makers, writers and content producers, the ability to crowd-source their funding needs in an attempt to give them a window of creative and journalistic independence.

I cannot effectively communicate how strongly this resonates with me.

I strongly believe that recent, amazing developments in content delivery on the internet and other social, global and political factors have led to a general decay in the quality of written journalism. As a voracious reader and someone who would like to view myself as a globally concerned, pro-human intellectual, this decline causes me great pain. I derive much of my learning about people and life from reading classic literature, modern print, modern internet, fiction and pretty much anything I can get my hands on.

Unfortunately, the combination of the need to create for-pay traffic and media organizations that bobbled the move to a digital only life, a lot of my interest in reading journalistic stuff has waned. I find a lot of online writing to lack data driven depth, to lack the ability to effectively present competing points of view and the inability to write at a concise, sophisticated level. There also exist conflicts of interest between the content producers and the pseudo-owners of said content or the owners of required distribution channels.

For students of the classic text by Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma, one subtle, unstated idea that he alludes to is that one of the most powerful patterns to watch in business is the aggregation and dis-aggregation of supply chains over time and the nature of how companies focus their competencies in relation to this pattern. This pattern is what has allowed companies like Google, Intel, Microsoft, Twitter and Tesla (just to name a very key few) to own very important parts of the markets they play in.

In the case of BeaconReader.com, we would be looking at a dis-aggregation of the supply-chain related to information where the distance from producer to consumer gets compressed significantly while numerous layers of financial and quality drain get eliminated. Also, this move has the potential to raise the salaries of journalistic content producers, which in my opinion are too low and do not reflect the inherent value that I have received from this community throughout the course of my life.

Again, I cannot stress how powerful this could be and how much I would like to see the creation of very strong, independent, journalism, writing and thought leadership on the internet.

Two things I would really like to see happen in this process;

1. Journalists need to adopt a git-style workflow so that changes and updates to content over time, have a ‘diff’.

a ‘git diff’ is a very useful way to look at the state of computer code before and after change, something of great power as related to journalism. for any person reading this article who want’s to learn how to use git workflow, ping me john@rubyonrailstutor.com and I will teach you, for free.

1. When a random author makes a prediction and people read it without concern to whether or not it will happen, or whether or not that author has a good track record of making predictions, if people act on these predictions blindly, chaos can ensue. Finding a way to minimize the quantity of predictions made in writing and backing up the historical context, and the future follow-through of the prediction is something that seems like software might do a good job in solving and in a supply-chain environment as envisioned by Beaconreader.com, the authors in my opinion, should have a very strong interest in maintaining maximum levels of transparency, quality and data centric integrity.

Beyond the above, I am a prior U.S. Navy Officer with tours in the Persian Gulf/Afghanistan, a prior student of Mandarin at the Dalian University of Foreign Languages(PRC), an MBA from the Thunderbird School of Global Management, a hacker from the second cohort of Dev Bootcamp and recently a full stack web engineer, educator and mentor who is trying to change the nature of how people around the globe acquire relevant maker skills.

I spend a lot of time reading http://cir.ca/, http://medium.com/ and https://news.ycombinator.com/. Please reach out to me at john@rubyonrailstutor.com or @railstutor if you’d like to chat, tell me I’m totally wrong or buy me a cup of coffee.

DISCLAIMER: I do not possess the skills or time required to fully document my point of view, nor do I possess great copy-writing skills, so please, go easy on me and have a great Monday :)