Media Lift: How Duckling is training the journalists of tomorrow

How can young journalists learn their craft beyond university and traineeships? A young start-up has developed an exciting idea for this: Duckling. A social media platform that focuses on qualitative reporting.

Media literacy and the use of social media are two topics that are often discussed in close proximity to each other. However, the possibility that a social media platform could help to better shape the media landscape of the future is rarely mentioned. The Duckling team wants to change that - with a social media platform that enables young people to become reporters themselves. And at the same time learn to tell stories with compassion and journalistic values.

Duckling is one of five business ideas that we are supporting in the fourth batch of our Media Lift incubator. Media Lift is our incubator for promoting innovative business ideas at the intersection of content and tech.

In line with Duckling's mission to create a more positive media landscape with young journalists, the startup's team met during a fellowship for constructive journalism at Aarhus University: "Our task during the fellowship was to find ways to make journalism better," says Bjarke Calvin, co-founder of Duckling. "During the fellowship, we talked about many approaches, and the idea behind Duckling emerged organically during our discussions."

A social media platform with a new objective

And the idea behind the platform is surprisingly simple - with some major differences. While platforms such as Instagram have already understood that there will no longer be a clear boundary between the creation and consumption of content for future generations and are designing their apps accordingly, Duckling has a completely different goal.

"The primary goal of social media platforms today is to sell products," says Calvin. "We're interested in helping people create empathetic stories. When you install the Duckling app and start posting and sharing content, you'll initially have a very similar experience to apps like Instagram. But what you feel when you browse for content will be very different. Because our community strives to tell more authentic and human stories - and our algorithm therefore also favors different content."

Non-linear content consumption

The reason for Duckling's objective follows naturally from how new ways of distributing media have also changed the consumption of content. "The biggest difference from previous generations is that the consumption and creation of media now happens almost simultaneously," says Calvin. "You watch a video on TikTok and then create your own version, and it goes on and on. Another difference is that media consumption is becoming more and more non-linear. Consuming media today is like moving through a stream of millions of smaller stories, all taking their own path through this ecosystem. Unlike in the past, where the newspaper was the same for everyone."

A major change that is also reflected in the relationship between author and medium: "We are currently rethinking five central characteristics of media: creation, ownership, monetization, discovery and moderation. The emergence of blockchain technologies, NFTs and the Web3 infrastructure was the answer we were waiting for with our vision for Duckling. Blockchain allows us to build a decentralized media network where people from all over the world collaborate on interactive stories, where they own their own work and we monetize it together. Duckling is a place where people use algorithms to give insightful stories more attention and weed out the fake stories."

How the app is to be financed

To finance itself, Duckling relies on a freemium model: users can either access the app's functions by paying regular subscriptions or use the app for free by completing story challenges and content moderation. "We are very inspired by the world of gaming, where tokens are used to unlock premium features and you have the choice to purchase tokens for payment or unlock them through actions," says Bjarke Calvin. "Our second revenue stream is advertising, but with a slightly different focus than on other social media platforms. For example, if Adidas wants to know how teenagers talk about sneakers, they can make an offer to our community. If the community accepts the offer, Adidas gets access to exclusive stories - and our community gets a share of the revenue."

The next steps for Duckling

For the future, the Duckling team is aiming to make the app even more immersive with mixed and augmented reality elements: "We would like to become the platform where you can discover the stories that are happening around you," says Bjarke Calvin. "This could be a school, or the beach where you went paddle boarding, a hang-out spot for after school or just a place you walk past. With geo-location and AR, you would be able to experience the stories that other users have left at a location. Like a kind of PokémonGo for storytelling."

The Duckling team is currently in the process of introducing the app to Danish high schools over the next few months. "It's really important that the first content created on our app is good. Because it will set the tone for our communities," says Calvin. "We're using a simplified version of our app for this. The next step is then to develop a full version of the app, but before we get that far, we need to raise more funding."

Media Lift and the Hamburg location

The Media Lift incubator is central to Duckling's next steps: "As a team, my co-founder Kamilla and I have a strong background in journalism and documentary storytelling," says Calvin. "So I think that as a media company, we also have something special to contribute to our batch. In turn, we have been able to learn a lot from the other startups with a tech focus. In general, Media Lift is an extremely useful resource to think strategically about your business idea, which you don't always have the opportunity to do in the early stages of founding when time and money are tight."

In addition to the partnership with Danish high schools, the Duckling team is also in the process of expanding partnerships in the Hamburg location, which offers many unique advantages for Bjarke Calvin: "I've spent a lot of time in the startup and media scene in the US and have worked with investors from Silicon Valley and New York in the past," says Calvin. "I think we can learn a lot from them. But at the same time, they can also learn a lot from us. In general, I think the media landscape and our democracies would be in a very different state if Europe had a bigger position in the media startup world: There is a lot of money here and a long tradition of strong democracies and open dialog. Our work in Hamburg has reinforced this belief in me - there are great opportunities here to join forces with other major cities in Northern Europe to form the next big media ecosystem. The geographical proximity and cultural intersections already suggest this."