Vivian Schiller has never owned cryptocurrency. The 57-year-old is about as far from a “bitcoin bro” as you can imagine. Having spent most of her career as a senior executive at media organisations including CNN, the New York Times and NBC News, she is, in her own words, a “dyed-in-the-wool cynical journalist”. So when she joined Civil, a blockchain-based platform that is selling its own currency to fund the future of journalism, I took notice.

In a blog post explaining her decision, Schiller asked: “What if we had a time machine that could take us back 25 years, when news organisations were just starting to experiment with the World Wide Web??.?.?.?Knowing what could go wrong, how might we have thought about governance, integrity of information, identity and legitimacy?”

Civil aims to increase trust in journalism, and help media groups achieve financial sustainability. Schiller tells me that she wants Civil to be a community that is an “antidote” to platforms such as Twitter (where she was head of news in 2013-14) and Facebook, which, she says, have prioritised shareholder value over the value of the journalism produced by news organisations shared on their platforms.