Can the NFT Save the Digital Magazine?

Magazine: “a periodic, not a daily publication, printed at regular intervals”.

Culture and information do not pass only from institutions such as schools and universities, but alongside these we also find information from newspapers, books and even magazines, think of classic or specialist magazines that deal with science at multiple levels.

The magazines have a consolidated structure and we can find in each the contributions of the various authors, who obviously sign themselves, and present arguments and themes regarding a specific case or sector, and consequently have fashion, science, technology magazines, blockchain and NFT and so on, and usually the same are either paper or digital hosted on a web page.

The Past

One of the first journals that came out in this light was in France with the "Journal des sçavans" in 1665 and, again in the same year, in England "Philosophical transactions" was published which contained the contributions and research done by the members of the Royal Society of London, and in 1668 in Italy there was the "Giornale de 'Letterati" which is the oldest Italian magazine.

Over time, magazines multiplied and there were magazines dedicated to the religious world, those aimed at the commercial bourgeoisie and which also reported information on other countries, very useful tools for understanding and doing business with other cultures.

Obviously we are talking about magazines with a strong written content and without images, made for an alphabetic and cultured content, certainly not for an ignorant public, which however left all the others behind.

But it was not until the mid-1800s to have the first magazines with illustrations including the "Illustrated London News" in England, reaching over 5 million copies, while in Italy there were "L'Illustrazione Italiana", "La Tribuna illustrata” or “La Domenica del Corriere”.

In the twentieth century, magazines with a strong political character emerged, especially regarding the First World War even if most of them were closed, especially in Italy during Fascism, only to find a small boom after the end of the Second World War, where there was a boom in sales, well tripled compared to previous years and which would soon find other competitors such as radio and especially television.

In fact, with the advent of television that started in Italy in 1954, we see a steady decline to reach the peak in the 70s as the largest entries of magazines and newspapers, coming from advertising, thinned in favor of televisions with an increase 100 times the investments made in the new media, bringing with it the transformation of the sector and focusing on something easier to sell like the tabloids, and in Italy we have “Panorama” and “Espresso”.

We have approached the end of the century and with the advent of the internet, new competitors enter the market such as online magazines, which provide the same content as the magazines of the time but in this case in a completely free format, blasting the bank, as a second financial decline began for traditional magazines as no one spent any more on them. Many historical newspapers were forced to close forever.

The Present

Thus we arrive at the 21st century and with a globally widespread internet and the evolution of online magazines, here there are other media and communication tools, namely social networks, which in the last decade have stolen large slices of the market from digital publishing and today we can retrieve news directly from the pages and profiles of journalists, politicians and people who fall into our favorite tastes or sectors, think of the journalist "Scanzi" in Italy or even "Elon Musk" who, with just comments on a social media, succeeds to generate articles for newspapers around the world.

Here too we see that, however, we do not have an interesting system as the classic method of advertising or sponsorship is the king, and what is even more serious is the fact of being on centralized platforms, which entails being subject to closure, censorship and other forms that limit freedom and among other things, to not even being able to do anything to solve the problem.

In fact, if one day the major social networks close your page and your channels, at that point you disappear from the internet and no one will be able to read and see your content, whether it depends on a very specific will or whether it depends on a platform problem, recently the famous Pompliano YouTube channel was removed and then rehabilitated, which shows the fragility of the centralized system we rely on, every day.

Fortunately, with the advent of the internet the world has changed and made it more globalized, with the advent of the blockchain and crypto, the concept of power and decentralization has been unhinged, putting in the hands of all the tools for be independent from a centralized economic and social system, as not only does this tool allow you to transfer value from one person to another without intermediaries, but it also allows you to save information within the same without it being modified or censored by someone in any way. And it is thus that with the evolution of the blockchain sector as well, we see that others in addition to Bitcoin have been born and that have allowed the use of smart contracts and therefore the possibility of doing things that were previously unthinkable with this tool.

We are not just talking about decentralized finance (DeFi) or about creating tokens for our projects and selling them as financing tools, but we are also talking about digital and non-fungible assets, the NFTs, which allow us to expand other sectors such as art in the first place but also other forms of culture and information.

Let's not forget that within an NFT you can contain information, any type of information that is text, images, video, audio and more, and thanks to this versatility we can decline it in almost every area of ​​our life, such as for example digital paintings, unique and non-falsifiable tickets and so on.

The NFTs

And in no time at all, traditional magazines have seized the opportunity to be able to digitize themselves in this sector, such as the "Time" magazine which has created a collection of NFTs in collaboration with "Cool Cats" and has also made some of his famous covers in NFT, totaling over 1.5 million euros.

But let's not just talk about traditional newspaper covers, because real magazines are also coming with the NFT, in this case aimed precisely at NFTs, which takes the name of "The NFT Magazine" and which will be published from next month on the famous OpenSea platform, an NFT marketplace, among other things the project is not limited to providing a simple magazine with super technological content as the NFTs are, as all those who will take the magazine, will also participate in the DAO of the project itself, and bring them in the first person to decide on the articles or topics to be treated for the next issue of the magazine.

In this way we see that a traditional media, such as a magazine, becomes completely digital, decentralized and in control of the users, so as to make it impossible to censor in any way.

And we are only at the beginning of this sector and technology and other things are emerging, such as the possibility of connecting physical goods to digital goods such as NFTs as in this case, and which will emerge in other sectors and that we still cannot imagine.