Josh Quittner is the CEO and co-founder of Decrypt Media, an independent news outlet focused on technology advancements, DeFi, and blockchain. ^[1]

Education

Quittner graduated from Grinnell College with a BS in History in 1979. He then received his Master of Science in Journalism from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 1986. ^[1]

Career

Quittner started his journalism career as a reporter for the Albuquerque Journal, where he worked until 1985. The following year, he was a correspondent for The Record, a New Jersey news and marketing provider, and a Newsday reporter until 1994. In 1996, Quittner became senior editor and staff writer for TIME Magazine and worked there for five years. He later worked at Time Inc., where he wrote for several magazines, including Business 2.0 and Fortune, and served as director of digital editorial development in 2011. ^[2]

In June 2011, Quittner became editorial director and head of international partnerships at Flipboard, a global media platform, where he worked until April 2018. During this time, he worked in editorial for ConsenSys, a private blockchain technology company, and co-founded Decrypt Media with Ilan Hazan and Ryan Bubinski. ^[2]

Interviews

DAO Journalism

In October 2021, Decrypt held a livestream and interviewed Quittner about his experiences with DAOs and launching a media DAO. At the beginning of the stream, he shared how Decrypt started: ^[3]

“I started the website with Ryan Bubinski, who has an amazing technical background. Ryan and I had been talking a bit socially about crypto in 2017. At that time, I was working as an editorial director at Flipboard, a classic Silicon Valley startup, and watching things just start to go nuts in crypto land. Since I had really begun my career as a tech journalist writing about the rise of Web 1.0 in the early 1990s at a newspaper called Newsday on Long Island and then at Wired magazine during its first couple of years, and then again covered the rise of Web 2.0 at a magazine called Business 2.0 in San Francisco, when I saw this thing called Web 3.0, I thought, man, maybe I have one more rodeo left. I talked to Ryan about it, and we got funding from ConsenSys, the incubator in Brooklyn, and we started the website."

“We always intended for the website to be a publication that not only covers the advent of the decentralized web. We wanted to become Web3, but we didn't really know what that meant at the time. What is Web3? We thought it might involve integrating different Web3 apps into the site, but the reality has been somewhat different. We started to see first DeFi and then DAOs right behind these amazing DeFi protocols. The re-emergence, the resurrection of DAOs as the kind of— I don't want to use "corporate," but as the business entity in a very decentralized way—starts to manage these things. About six months ago, we began to think about reorienting ourselves around the idea of a DAO."

He later discussed journalism being used in DAOs: ^[3]

“When I started as a newspaper reporter, you dealt with people face to face, masses of people all the time. You'd go cover something, and people would come up to you and try to get you to write about their stuff. Lately, especially in the last couple of years when we've all been driven indoors and online, we are dealing less with humanity. That's actually been a really big problem with journalism because we've become very alienated from people. That's a really bad thing, and this could help us. Yes, you're going to get hit on by people who are trying to sell you something stupid, but journalists are a naturally skeptical bunch, and there will be tools that arise to help us deal with that.”

“One of the most interesting things here is how our DAO will help us. We want to be fully staffed to build the tools we need to make this world function better. That's a long haul; it's not something we'll be able to do by snapping our fingers or in 15 minutes. Creating the tooling is going to be hard, but the community and the guilds will help point us to the things that need to be built. One of the biggest problems right now is working with freelancers—it's a real churn. We're always looking for qualified, smart people who can work at a moment's notice and pick up daily stories. What if we had the tooling that authenticated a huge number of people who could write about this stuff competently, not only for us but for all the publishers on the platform? They would come to us authenticated at levels—beginner, intermediate, more advanced—maybe pegged to a pay scale. That would take a lot of the guesswork out and come with them being invoice-ready, so we don't have to do all the billing. Taking the dumb things out of the process and putting them into the protocol via smart contracts is a really big idea that could help all publishers.”

When asked about his views of DAOs as a whole, Quittner responded: ^[3]

“That's why people think it will be the future of work, right? Already, some people are making livings by participating in different DAOs and performing different functions. That's a radically new idea. So, I can also see things like workers' insurance or insurance DAOs springing up, you know, all sorts of human resource DAOs that will help people so they can work for many different places. Now, is that utopia or dystopia? I don't know. We used to work nine to five, and you'd go home, and you'd be left alone. Then, starting with quarantine, there was this expectation that everybody was always on call, unless you lived in Europe. But Americans are like, "Oh gee, I'm now working all the time." And with DAOs being up and lit 24/7, like, you literally could work all the time. I could see a writer or editor making a living off 12 different DAOs and constantly feeding the beast. The opposite side of that, though, is you'll get to pick and choose.”

“One of the great things about this thing that we're living through is that the value accrues to the individual, to the creator; it doesn't accrue to the platform. Even when we talk about DAOs, the point of the DAO is that the value flows back to the creators, without the people doing the work.”