Real Journalism = Cardano Insights

[IMPACT]

This project proposes to add an experienced Reporter to our team to write in-depth, investigative journalistic content about Cardano. Focus areas would be: big developments in the network, interesting projects, and important questions.

First, some quick highlights of what we are already doing:

• The Library at LidoNation.com already includes 40+ articles covering many topics and news headlines related to Cardano, written by our current team.
• Our "Catalyst Proposals" page is a public resource for searching and researching ALL past Catalyst Proposals. You can search proposals by keyword, by Fund #, by funded status, and more. We believe this tool is one of the best out there for both proposers and voters to research Catalyst proposals and projects.
• We Host and Co-host 8 Cardano "Twitter Spaces" each week (live audio chat shows), most of these shows reach 100+ participants each day! In this community, @LidoNation has been dubbed "The Catalyst guy" because we are always encouraging people to participate, explaining how it works, and sharing out links to the latest happenings and resources.
• We have 5 funded projects so far, which have funded translating our articles into Spanish and Swahili, founding a Cardano Lab in Kenya, and more.

With this project, we propose to capitalize on our experience and success so far by adding an experienced journalist to the team.

1. We will grow our team with a journalist to expand our resource Library to include 12 professionally researched and written Cardano articles.
2. These will be posted at LidoNation.com, cross-posted to multiple social channels, and possibly linked/hosted by other community content sites.
3. This proposal would fund journalism efforts at a rate of 2 articles/month through the end of 2022.

Future/Scaling

Beyond this year, our aim is to build our Stake Pool operations to a level that can sustain ongoing paid journalistic content in the coming years. We hope that the community will value high quality Cardano News content and will "vote" with their staked ADA to support it in an ongoing fashion.

About Lido Nation

At Lido Nation, our mission is Cardano education, outreach, and global community building: Because the Future is for Everyone!

• Our site invite community involvement by providing an interface to submit new content, comment and respond to existing content, record audio versions of articles, and propose new article ideas.
• We are building new tools to teach blockchain content and promote humanitarian values, by using "real" Cardano blockchain tokens and transactions to allow community members to direct our charitable giving!
• We have 40 articles published, covering a range of Cardano topics. We skip the hype and focus on the real good stuff that is happenning in Cardano, with the aim of publishing content that is understandable to newcomers, and educational for everybody.
• Because we value reaching as many people as possible with content they can understand, we are translating our content into multiple languages - we were funded for Swahili translation in Fund 6, and for Spanish translation in Fund 7. Those translations are currently rolling out on the site and getting great feedback! We also provide audio recordings of all of our content (in all supported languages!) for those who may prefer to learn that way.

Motivation

We see that the next frontier of growth for Cardano won't be confined to Developer forums and GitHub repositories. Instead, it will be among our friends and neighbors, as they start to see and understand the applications of blockchain technology for their own lives and futures. We hope they will see Cardano as the most exciting project out there, and we want to provide a trusted resource to help them learn, get involved, and contribute.

Our Values

We believe that Cardano is a powerful platform paving the way for a future that works for everyone. To help connect that future with "everyone", information and resources must be available to all kinds of people, and written by all kinds of people. So we put a high value on accessibility and cross-cultural collaboration:

• Explain groundbreaking technology in simple terms
• Provide a User-Friendly interface and thoughtful resources
• Meet ADA standards for differently-abled users, including Audio versions of all content
• Provide our content in other languages (so far, Spanish and Swahili)
• Facilitate original content creation from across cultures, via collaboration with our Lab in Kenya, and via content contribution channels on our site.

Raise the bar for Cardano content and journalism by allocating resources to hire professional resources, as one important and valuable type of contribution.

How big is the market?

• More than 2.5 Million ADA holders are the first market of consumers who are likely to be interested and to seek information via Google Search, Twitter, etc.
• We are also aware of the larger world population of crypto-investors, and indeed the larger-still pool of the "Crypto-curious".

We believe that dedicated Cardano Journalism - and indeed, good blockchain journalism of any kind - is a need that is as-yet very underserved, and that the community will put a high value on expert, dedicated journalism. Providing content that is professional, in-depth, and on-point would be a huge differentiator for Cardano.

The aim of the Miscellaneous Campaign is to Fund "great ideas that focus on problems that are not covered by any other Challenge."

No other challenge is pointed at this particular issue in this Funding Round.

We think that we have identified a problem in the ecosystem - and that we can provide a high-quality solution in a short amount of time, and at a very affordable cost to the community.

What is the problem?

I could describe so many times that I have looked or heard journalism pieces about crypto where I get to the end of the story and think "That's it??"

Even coming from supposedly high-quality news sources, like name-brand newspapers or public radio, the depth and understanding in blockchain reporting is terribly lacking, and often misses the point completely.

We in the Cardano community know that this technology is here to change the future, and we want that future to include everybody! A critical building block in creating that future is Communication. Good quality journalism is respected and effective in spreading news and information. We want to be part of the communication solution, ensuring that there is good quality, informative content about Cardano that skips the hype, squashes the scams, and promotes global understanding.

Finding and hiring the right talent could be a risk.

We would also hope to retain the same Journalist contributor through at least 2022, and there is a risk that we could experience turnover mid-project.

We are however confident that we can find good talent - searching on one hiring platform turns up many quality candidates who already have experience writing about blockchain!

We would also consider candidates with more general tech experience who are eager to learn.

We are expert teachers and guides for Cardano information, and we will spend the time that is needed to onboard new talent.

To mitigate turnover risk, we are budgeting for a competitive pay rate for freelance journalism. While not at the highest-end of the spectrum, the pay we will be able to offer is attractive enough to retain good talent.

[FEASIBILITY]

Roadmap

• 1 Month: Hire a professional blockchain journalist
• 3 Months: First articles have been published and cross-promoted on social channels
• 6 Months: 12 new articles published before the end of 2022

Definition of Success

By the end of 2022, publish 12 original, professional-quality Cardano News & Insight headlines.

Our project completion report would include an overview of the topics that were covered, and well as stats on reach, pageviews, and comments for these articles.

Detailed Plan

• Regarding Hiring: We have a wide network within the catalys community, twitter, and discord servers. We will be tapping into the cardano network find the right candidate. We also have a professional account at Upwork.com, which we can use to research, contact, interview and find talent there as well. We will also provide guided onboarding resources to whoever we hire. We already have a library of 40+ articles of newcomer-friendly content about Cardano, and are equipped to provide the new hire with the other resources they would need to quickly dive into and understand the Cardano ecosystem.
• Regarding posting and Cross-Posting: Our website LidoNation.com already has an organized Library of Content, so we already have a platform and backend system to create and host new content. We also have built-in, ready-to-use tools for posting to multiple social platforms. We are in conversations with a few other Cardano Content creators (YouTube, websited) talking about cross-linking and promoting each others' content, which would help grow the audience for all of us.
• Regarding pacing: We are targeting 2 articles per month, totaling 12 articles in 2022.

$6400 - Add a journalist to the lido team to research and write 12 original articles about Cardano - the technology, the people, the latest news. This budget accounts for the fact that even a journalist with some tech experience may have to do a significant amount of background research to gear up! We are also budgeting such that some articles may require in-depth, longitudinal investment of time, interviews, and research.

$1600- Edit, publish, tag, and run SEO optimization for these articles at LidoNation.com, administrative costs

$FREE - Share published content through our distribution channels, including popular twitter spaces, micro-podcasts, and newsletters.

We are Cardano enthusiasts. With are a growing collective of dreamers who believe in providing insightful education about Cardano in plain English, Swahili, and Spanish. Most online blockchain content is written by and for developers and finance geeks. We break down complicated technical ideas for everyday people, and provide relevant news in quick bites, and build tools that everyone can use.

Our website is a resource for anyone who wants to learn what Cardano is, why they should care, and how they can participate. We want to make these resources accessible to as many people as possible.

Darlington is an engineer by day and at all times a dancer, humanitarian, idealist and entrepreneur. Darlington has deep knowledge about blockchain technology and broad experience in the Cardano ecosystem.

Stephanie is a teacher and technologist with a passion for helping non-profits navigate and capitalize on technology. She applies her communication skills at Lido Nation by writing and editing articles, and helping to organize ideas in a way that people can understand.

Dirk is an experienced designer and developer with a lot of love for tech, knowledge and art. He helps machines talk to humans and cleans up the mess the information age produces.

Our team at the newly-founded Friends of Ngong Road Blockchain Lab in Nairobi Kenya helps with research, translation, and content creation.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/phuffyking

https://www.linkedin.com/in/profd2004

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmkraft

https://www.linkedin.com/company/lido-nation

[AUDITABILITY]

• Regarding Hiring: Interview and hire a professional journalist within 1 month of funding
• Regarding posting and Cross-Posting: First Article is released within 8 weeks of funding. (July 2022)
• Regarding pacing: Further articles are posted at a rate of 2/month, through 2022 (totaling 12)

• Regarding Hiring: Freelance Journalist is hired
• Regarding posting and Cross-Posting: We post 12 new professional Cardano News articles in 2022
• Regarding pacing: Articles are published at a rate of ~2/month

New Project to extend work we are already doing in the space.

Past Unfunded Proposals

https://www.lidonation.com/proposals/simple-fund-management-dao-sdk - F7

https://www.lidonation.com/proposals/opensource-php-sdk-for-coti-ada-pay - F7

https://www.lidonation.com/proposals/spanish-news-insights-onboarding - F6

## Past Funded Proposals

https://www.lidonation.com/proposals/treasury-catalyst-proposal-api - F6

https://www.lidonation.com/proposals/newcomer-resources-en-espanol - F7

https://www.lidonation.com/proposals/translation-for-proposal-api-data - F7

https://www.lidonation.com/proposals/cardano-blockchain-lab-in-kenya - F7