Recently, several new entrants claim Blockchain will enable them to solve media problems, particularly that of fake news and/or payment for “quality journalism”.

• Decentralised News Network 
• Civil
• Snip
• Mediasifter
• Trive
• Hubii
• Steemit

NewsBlocks has five major differences to these projects:

1. News-is-data approach
   NewsBlocks is a fundamental rethinking of  how news is stored and processed. Processing news into its component data allows much more robust analysis of the news event and the sources that contribute to it. Competitors who continue working with traditional news articles as their base data layer are immediately compromised in their approach. It is also much harder to make apps using traditional news articles.
2. Store of news value
   NewsBlocks, as a store of news value, are the foundation of a global news marketplace that – for the first time – assigns a value to every piece of news. Applications that display NewsBlocks’ data to their readers pay usage fees in the NewsBlocks cryptocurrency, while fees generated from the retrieval of NewsBlocks are paid to contributors who added and verified the NewsBlock’s data.
3. Application Platform
   NewsBlocks is an application platform that can be used to create applications, such as of fact-checking systems. In fact, we foresee multiple fact-checking systems that can be built on NewsBlocks data, with each application using different analysis method to create their own ‘trust scores’ that consumers can decide are best for them.
4. Payment for “quality journalism”
   Some blockchain platforms are attempting to use blockchain as a way to pay for original “quality journalism”. While this is a noble goal, it neglects two truths 1) quality journalism is a small market and 2) distribution, not content quality, is king.
5. Distribution
   No other blockchain news platforms has a solid distribution strategy outside of the crypto world i.e. they expect that their content can be supported solely by coin holders. Additionally, their content is unable to be shared on partner sites.
6. Team
   In some cases the founding team have no experience of media.