SCMP to mint 118-year-old media assets into NFTs

Hong Kong-based news organization South China Morning Post (SCMP) has launched ‘Artifact,’ a litepaper on blockchain technology as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), for owning and trading news reports of historical moments.

The media company said its project will begin with a few selected blockchains and later will have the ability to issue authenticated ‘Artifacts’ at launch by a group of trusted partners globally recognized for owning authentic historical assets.

SCMP, which was bought by Alibaba in 2016, will start with a collection of NFTs of archived historical events, in the forms of text, pictures, cartoons, and graphics, reported by its journalists for over 118-year, representing journalistic “first drafts of history.”

“Blockchain offers immense potential to immutably preserve journalism that witnesses and explains history. The ‘Artifact’ project is an opportunity to discover, collect, showcase, trade, and reanimate meaningful moments and objects from our collective human experience, and we are excited to introduce this standard to the world,” said SCMP CEO, Gary Liu.

In addition to the NFT project, the news house also partnered with The Sandbox, a blockchain-based game-making platform, to build educational video games where users can interact with various ‘Artifacts’.

“It’s a partnership to create interactive educational experiences in the metaverse using the Post’s 118 years of journalism,” Liu said. “So our hope is that over time, we will create metaverse environments for people to experience historical Hong Kong, historical China and to learn about the beauty and the complexity of this part of the world.”

Though NFTs representing historical events have achieved popularity, these are often from the entertainment world, such as sport or music for collectible purposes.

“The Post believes that factual accounts of history and authentic historical assets should be immutable and that ownership of these digitized and tokenized assets, which are part of our collective human experience, should be decentralized,” the announcement said.

In June, CNN launched “Vault by CNN” to tokenize its history of news coverage. It published a video clip of CNN founder Ted Turner announcing the cable network’s launch in 1980 and a clip of CNN’s reporting from Baghdad in 1991 when the US began bombing Iraq.

Both the clips are published as NFTs with 500 limited units and are on sale for $25 each.

Picture Credit: Coindesk