If confusion is the commodity, certainty is the premium product

Ten years ago, I argued in a Nieman Lab prediction that we needed to demonstrate our care for our readers and journalism by implementing a much-needed layer of security to web content. The mission was to get to HTTPS everywhere, and to defend the digital pipeline that journalism’s audience depended on from tampering. We succeeded at just the right moment.

HTTPS became so ubiquitous that browsers have flipped the script and UI: They scream at you in the now rare instances when you step off the HTTPS-protected path and visit a site without SSL.

Today, the problem is what’s coming through the pipe and into our information ecosystem.

Consider Aesop’s “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”

In 2025-26, the Boy is an algorithm. He is flooding the village with toxic information — infinite slop and plausible deepfakes. And us? We are the villagers. We haven’t stopped listening because the content is bad; we’ve stopped listening because the challenge of figuring out what is real has become too hard.

This is the “Liar’s Dividend.” When everything could be fake, the value of all content seemingly drops to zero.

However, here lies the opportunity.

If confusion is the commodity of the AI age, then certainty and trust are the premium products. There is a hard business case for this, and the industry has already taken note. Major news agencies are equipping staff with C2PA-enabled cameras from Leica, Sony, and Nikon (see Starling Lab, Canon, Reuters; Nikon and AFP; Sony and AP). The EBU and BBC are researching how to implement the same provenance technology for broadcast.

They all understand that in a world of infinite synthetic supply, proven reality is the only scarce asset left. And it is worth paying for.

So journalism must pivot slightly. We can’t just be storytellers; we must be a part of the chain of custody for truth.

In 2015, we fought for the green padlock. In 2026, we design visible, cryptographic markers that prove a piece of media is authentic. We work hand in hand with readers to understand how they perceive and utilize these data points and visual cues. We seek to design and build authenticity markers into information sources at their origin, supporting our readers through the task of sorting truth from fiction.

In 2026, we will road-test these provenance and authenticity manifests in news articles, on YouTube videos, and possibly even in press and government releases. The aim is to develop an “electronic press pass” for journalists that cryptographically seals their words and images against tampering: “It was me. I saw this, then, and there. And here’s the proof.”

Our own case studies and collaborations confirm this: When we layer context and cryptographic proof onto media assets, we don’t just protect the reader. We protect the value of the work.