Roundtable CEO James Heckman offers a solution for AI's destruction of journalism

Originally published on TheStreet.

James Heckman believes the professional media industry has been broken for years, and he told Mario Nawfal he has offered a solution to fix the $200 billion media industry.

Speaking after Roundtable (NASDAQ: RTB) announced its integration with Coinbase, the founder and CEO said journalism has been "ripped apart," with creators losing control of their own work.

"I believe journalism has been ripped apart. Their data is auctioned off by the social platforms, they're cut out of the economics, and now AI is aggregating their work and cutting them out too. It's called a black box for a reason: you don't know which stories are working or how much you're making. Sometimes people get paid ninety days later and don't even know what for. You don't control your data, your IP, your audience, or your advertisers." said James Heckman, Founder and CEO, Roundtable.

Roundtable is an AI-powered DeFi media platform that pays creators the instant their work earns, settled in USDC through Coinbase. On June 22, Roundtable and Coinbase leadership announced instant payments, immutable real-time reporting and a groundbreaking "Media Liquidity Pool" for the professional media industry as 200 publishers go live at Cannes Lions - backed by Coinbase and USDC.

Heckman said there is a "small percentage of the world who are truly professional journalists, and they deserve to be paid for their craft fairly, with transparent reporting, immutable contracts, their own wallet, their own money, their own IP, protected on-chain with their own keys. That doesn't exist anywhere. We're here to save traditional journalism."

Eyal Hertzog, Chief Technology Officer, Roundtable said censorship resistance is a key reason, why he chose to build the platform.

"It's absurd that one person can control the discussion of billions of people. I remember a graph of political conversation on Facebook: it fell sharply around 2020 and jumped back up in 2024. That was policy, muting political discussion. That was the core motivation behind everything I've worked on for the last six or seven years: media should be free," said Hertzog.

Heckman explains monetization for creators

To explain how it works, Heckman gave an analogy of a reporter in a war zone:

"Imagine you're a reporter in a foxhole. You don't know if you're making money, and your life is on the line. Now you open the app and the numbers are moving in real time, exactly how much you're making, by every story. It ticks like the national debt clock. You can run your business while you're being shot at. And when you need to get money to your family, you press a button and it goes straight to your Coinbase account in USDC. There are a hundred ways to censor someone, shadow-banning, cutting CPMs, removing advertisers, debanking. The Canadian truckers had their accounts shut down. Revolutionary journalists risk their lives, how do they get paid? We solved that today."