Media broke? 24-hour News Cycle got you spinning? Call Kin at Kin’s TV & Repair! (This started as a joke.. now I’m dead serious) My Grandpa Terry once told me it’s not “The News” it’s N.E.W.S. for North, East, West & South. I took that as civic orientation and civilization calibration & forecasting. (I’m sure that’s what he meant by it 😅 haha) Look, we haven’t properly adapted as a species to properly live with social media and an all-the-time-connected life. I have a fix.

Part of the problem is that the business model of news was broken by the internet. Fewer actual journalists exist in the wild and even their resources are spread too thin to effectively do the reporting necessary to keep us informed. The internet, when I was a kid, was billed as the “information superhighway.” Yet we just “paved paradise and put up a paywall block.“

That brings us to this notion of the 72-Hour News Cycle getting us away from “Ratings Bait” and on with our lives while engaging with media in a more meaningful way just every few days.

Some say history always repeats itself, others say it doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. The key takeway is that if we don’t learn from our past, we’re doomed to repeat its mistakes. We now have the technology to filter news and everyday goings on, through the lens of the past in order to gain key insights into what’s coming next all through a conversation aided by technology that could reduce our time spent staring at screens, yet help us become better informed. By continuously learning from each previous day, all the way back through to the annals of history, every day could have compound returns on your individual potential and our collective intelligence and output.

We’re living in a groundhog’s day, 24-hour news cycle. The idea was to keep us informed but it’s led us to short term thinking and reactionary decisions. What I propose is “The 72-Hour News Cycle” in which every 3 days, we get a packaged, considered and often data driven set of observations from journalists and citizen science journalists ACROSS networks & channels, unpacked on PBS, as a rich media, interactive television digest. Call it N.E.W.S. and give people the ability to delve down deep into sources, make connections between disparate happenings and put our money where our mouth is on what happens next through prediction markets. Yup. That’s right, now with platforms like Polymarket or Kalshi, you can bet on future events, even against the weatherman if you so fancy. By imposing a special tax on prediction marketplace winnings as well as helping news outlets capture revenue through selling stories by the “token” or chunk of a sentence read rather than a month long subscription, we can start to shore up their balance sheets and fund journalism. THIS MATTERS.

We’ve been yelling at our TVs long enough—what if they talked back, and even better, introduced us to someone new? Imagine a “TalkBack” button on your Roku remote that doesn’t just fire off a rant into the void, but spins up a micro-chatroom or pen-pal thread with others who just watched the same program. Over time, these exchanges stitch together not just reviews of what we’ve watched, but a crowd-sourced memory of how everyday people experienced events as they unfolded. TV stops being a one-way broadcast and becomes a two-way bridge—a place where your couch is less an island and more a launchpad for connection, citizen diplomacy, and maybe even a little collective wisdom.

Journalism will never be the same with prediction markets and “old news.” The 4th Estate was never that accurate to begin with. Now trusted data feeds or “oracles” give journalists not just a beat but a heartbeat to markets, movements and the machinations of power when combined with an Open Government public ledger and prediction markets where people put their money where their mouth is on world events; game changer.