The South China Morning Post wants to use the blockchain to preserve and monetize its historical archive

For hundreds of years, newspapers have been responsible for writing the first drafts of history, capturing what happened during some of the most consequential events impacting humankind. It’s an enormous responsibility, and one that Gary Liu, the CEO of the South China Morning Post, thinks should be decentralized.

“Today, there’s specific guardians who protect, who collate, who curate all of that history,” he said during a conversation at Unfinished Live. “But with blockchain, we have an opportunity to allow the entire world to participate in this preservation.”

The South China Morning Post recently announced a new NFT initiative called Project Artifact, which will allow people to trade digital assets that encode historical events pulled from the newspaper’s archives spanning more than 115 years. The project will also include the launch of a new marketplace for selling and trading historical NFTs.

The NFTs are designed to look like trading cards, which you can purchase in packs. “You open it and it reveals one entity after another, and you can go really deep into the stories that you are rediscovering for the first time,” Liu explained. “It’s very much in line with our mission to help people better understand the world in really interesting ways.”

Watch the full conversation below, and scroll for a written transcript. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Statements by these speakers have not been fact-checked by Unfinished and represent their individual opinions.

Baratunde Thurston

Gary, you got a lot of love in this room, man. This is dope. So, brief introduction, tell us a bit more about where you are and what the South China Morning Post is?

Gary Liu

I am sitting here in Hong Kong, it’s about 4:45 in the morning, and the South China Morning Post, which is a newspaper that I work for, it’s a 118-year-old newspaper, always been based here in Hong Kong, has for a well over a century, been the newspaper of record for not only this city but for this part of the world, Southern China and a whole lot of Asia. And so, I feel very happy, very privileged to be connected virtually back to my hometown in New York to be with you guys on stage.

Baratunde Thurston

Well, we are privileged to share this virtual and IRL space with you. We’ve been talking a lot about trust, the lack thereof, the need for more of it. And news media outlets in particular around the world have been under a significant collapse, they have experienced a significant waning of trust over the past probably decades significantly. Do you see… I think I know the answer, so I’ll shift the question a bit. How do you see, without getting into description of your project just yet, we’ll cue you up for that, how do you see decentralized technology and blockchain playing any role in addressing the decline in trust in media institutions such as your own?

Gary Liu

Well, there are a few ways, and over the course of the last several years there have been many blockchain projects trying to solve this media and trust problem, and I want to be clear that our project is not about media and trust, but I’ll get to that in a second.

Baratunde Thurston

Okay.

Gary Liu

I do think that blockchain can and will add critical transparency to the actual process of reporting. And so, I think that that is going to benefit journalists, it’s going to benefit readers to understand how news is, in some ways, created, but more importantly, how it’s brought together and then shared with the world. And eventually we’re going to figure out a way to leverage distributed ledger technologies to combat misinformation, which for now it’s still quite difficult. So, I think all of these things are great things that blockchain can bring to journalism. Our project specifically, though, is about historical preservation, and blockchain absolutely changes the nature of historical preservation and frankly, the ownership of accounts of history or an historical asset, because today there’s specific guardians who protect, who collate, who curate all of that history, but with blockchain, we have an opportunity to allow the entire world to participate in this preservation.

Baratunde Thurston

So, that’s a good segue. What is the project? How does it work? And I believe you have a video you’re going to queue up, but I just want to sneak that in there to make sure that’s the case.

Gary Liu

Sure, absolutely, in a relatively short summary, Artifact, the project is called Project Artifact. Artifact is a new standard for historical NFTs. So, specifically entities that cover history, right? So, it is a unique, smart contract that uses a new metadata structure that attaches comprehensive historical context and information to a digital account of history or a historical asset. Now, the Artifact Project will also actually include the launch of a brand new marketplace that specifically is used for the sale and trade of historical NFTs. This is something that we feel like it’s always been a need, the ability to universally catalog and connect human history. And we saw it as an opportunity, as we were trying to figure out a way to preserve our own archives on the blockchain, a way for us to set a standard early on in the process of reporting history on the blockchain that everyone can actually eventually use.

Gary Liu

So, the product itself, since you queued me up for it, we have a completely non-sexy, 40-second video, it’s purely a teaser that does not have any music, but what you will see is the very first version, you guys are the first people to see it, the very first version of our archives as NFTs using this standard. And what it is, it’s effectively a rediscovery game, right? It’s a collecting card game where you buy packs of entities and you open it and it reveals one entity after another, and you can really go deep into the stories that you are rediscovering for the first time. And this video, I think, shows a time based series, and it’s something that we hope to be able to drop sometime at the end of November.

Baratunde Thurston

Okay, let’s play that non-sexy, 40-second video. There it is, I’ll narrate. These are playing cards lining up on the screen, they’re pretty newspaper covers like the kind I have yellowing in my file cabinet. And then on each card you kind of see some dates, I can’t fully read it from this distance, but you’re getting the idea, if you can see the screen, you’re getting the idea, if you can’t see the screen, it’s basically zooming and panning Ken Burns style across a Hong Kong takeover headline. And then you flip the card over and there’s a bunch of data, I suppose, about the artifact that you’ve collected. And then we got Gary’s face back. So, how’d I do? Is that all right? That was cool? Okay, good.

Gary Liu

You did well.

Baratunde Thurston

Okay, thank you. Here’s what I want to know, Gary, why playing cards? Why collectables? A lot of what many of us hear about NFTs is it feels like it’s on the spectrum of nonsense, dare I say, and sort of speculative valuation of non things to, on the other end, like you said, preservation of historical moments, especially those that might be at risk of being erased. And I can’t help but also acknowledge the changing, rapidly changing in different contexts for Hong Kong right now with respect to Beijing and China. So, can you share with us what the impetus is and what you’re hoping comes from this? Why NFTs?

Gary Liu

Yeah, the three primary reasons why blockchain and NFTs really matter to us right now, first, as a news organization, we believe in the immutable preservation of our archives and the history that’s containing it. And specifically for us, it’s a very important archive, it’s the first party source of so much of the 20th and 21st century of Asia.

Second, by nature, a newspaper is a centralized ledger, and we believe in that decentralized ownership of that collective experience that we’ve kind of curated over the years. And NFT, for its application will probably take technology that we found that gives the owners of important historical assets, including ourselves, an opportunity and an incentive actually to share ownership of all of our assets of our archives with other people who care about protecting history.

And the third, to answer your question, why collectible trading playing cards, it’s because actually the metaverse and NFTs provide us an almost limitless new canvas to create kind of community experiences around the rediscovery of history. And no one wants to have a boring experience when rediscovering history, and this will hopefully not be one. You are literally flipping cards around to see what has minted and what has been unveiled. And it’s very much in line with our mission to help people better understand the world in really interesting ways.

Baratunde Thurston

How are you selecting which historical moments are worth preserving in this way?

Gary Liu

Eventually our hope is that all of the historical moments that we’ve captured will be preserved in this way. I think what we are in process of is defining for every single one of those moments and every single NFT that we end up minting what the “historical significance” is, and that’s not easy. The historical significance will inevitably mean there’s going to be a scarcity level, a rarity level as we refer to them in the NFT world. And that process is… We’re spending a lot of time with historians and obviously our own archivists and our editorial leadership and journalists to define how best to understand in, today’s world, a reflection of that history, the significance of that moment.

Baratunde Thurston

Thinking about this next one, who do you expect is going to spend money on these in your marketplace? And basically, who’s going to be participating in this? Is this about collectors and raising as much money as possible? Is this about accessing and distributing these assets as far and wide as possible?

Gary Liu

It’s honestly all of the above of what you’re saying. I think they’re going to be collectors who buy these things because they’re nostalgic, because they’re connected to a certain place, a time, a person, event. I think there’ll be collectors who are ideological, right? Who believe in the [inaudible 00:09:00] or believe in the mission of historical preservation. They’re going to be gamers and curious people who just love the serendipity of discovery and whatever collection challenges we might come up with. And others will be speculators, people who are in this space right now who think that these things are going to be worth something, and I would agree with them, I think that these artifacts, because they’re verifiably scarce and they’re truly valuable, are going to be worth something.

Baratunde Thurston

More of a philosophical question about kind of the nature of what you’re up to, these are non-fungible, immutable, but also capturing admittedly the first draft of history. And if we know anything about history is that our definition of it changes over time. So, how do you feel about preserving a very early version of a thing that we, five years from now, 50 years, 500 years from now will have a very different view of?

Gary Liu

That’s a great question. This is why a metadata standard is actually necessary for historical NFT. First thing is that, contemporaneously, as we mint these historical NFTs, the metadata is quite comprehensive, the metadata will include the historical context and effectively right now our reading of the significance of that moment X number of years later. And then even though that thing is immutable, eventually what we’ll have an opportunity to do at the community is build the additional kind of context years down the road around these NFTs so that we’ll always be able to update and show people how our view of history changes with time.

Baratunde Thurston

Is there anything else you think we should know about this project or the role of historical preservation as a newspaper operator or anybody else interested in preserving history?

Gary Liu

Yeah, and it really is about the anyone else, anybody out there that is interested in preserving history. We are working right now with historians, archivists, art curators, museums around the world, think tanks, universities to define what the standard ought to be, because we want it to be comprehensive, we want it to be universally applicable. This is not a South China Morning Post thing. Once we initiate it we are going to hand it off to a foundation that is going to own and govern this for the long-term. So, my hope is that there’ll be many institutions out there who decide that they want to use this as a way to preserve the history and the archives that they today guard on the blockchain, and then we’ll have many partners around the world working with us on this.

Baratunde Thurston

Gary, thank you for getting up so early for us, and if you’re already up at this time, I’m sorry, but I’m glad we caught you here, I really appreciate you sharing this project, and I just like the idea it’s not just a South China Morning Post thing, you’re going to create a standard that others can also build around and extend on. So, good luck to you preserving things that definitely need to be preserved, thank you.