The New York Times is working on a project called “News Provenance” based on blockchain technology.

published The New York Times on Friday provided some new details and findings about this highly anticipated new venture, which first appeared in a blockchain-related job offer published by The New York Times earlier.

The Times later launched a website for its “News Source” project, which it indicated will move from research to implementation and implementation at some point in 2020.

The following is an excerpt from yesterday’s post by Pooja Reddy, Director of Product Division at The New York Times:

One component of the News Source project was to research how readers make judgments about the images they see online.

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To aid in this research, we created a prototype that took advantage of blockchain technology to show the contextual information of a news image on a simulated social media feed.

We wanted to see if visual contextual information, such as the name of the photographer and the location shown in the image, could help readers better discern the credibility of news images in their social feeds.

From a technical point of view, I told “ready”:

The Times wanted to see if everything that happens to an image, from capture to publication, could be recorded in the form of image metadata and display that information on social media platforms.

The blockchain’s ability to preserve the full history of an image separately from the image file itself has made it a compelling technique for our explorations of source tracing.

For the beta version of the project, the Times said it has built a network of experimental news organizations as well as a social media platform that connects them.

Additionally, organizations share ownership of the distributed blockchain and the distributed database between them and changes can be made to the metadata of images in the database.

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She told Reddy:

When testing our prototype with users, we found that it effectively helped them make informed judgments about images in their social media feed.

However, there is more research and exploration to be done.

Added:

While blockchain technology can be a viable tool to help preserve the origin of news images, there are a number of challenges that must be addressed before it can be used on a large scale.

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According to Reddy, the assumptions focused on the prototype will face critical tests in real-world environments, including about content on the blockchain itself and how images change when they are shared on social media.

Reddy also stressed that blockchain networks must be accessible to news organizations and that for such a system to work, a variety of ports must be entered with the least impediment to entry.

Reddy wrote:

This prototype was an experiment that taught us a lot about the power of reliable contextual information in social media feeds, but there is a long way to go before something like this is fully realized.

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