None of these replace a journalist. They make the journalism more durable, more portable, and more legible than a single platform allows. Layer one is what you read. Layers two and three are how the work survives, gets paid for, and remembers itself.
Layer 01 · Editorial
We Them Media
We own the editorial direction. Partners support the rails. They don’t pick the stories.
The reporting happens here. Contributors shoot and write, we edit, the piece goes out under the WTM masthead. Everything else in the stack exists so this layer can do its job without depending on any one platform’s mood.
Two channels, two jobs. Paragraph hosts the canonical long-form — onchain-signed, ownership recorded to the wallet, archive permanent. Beehiiv runs the newsletter — durable email infrastructure, a list we own, deliverability we trust.
Workflow: publish on Paragraph, send on Beehiiv. The piece gets a permanent home and a direct line to readers. Neither platform is a single point of failure for the other.
Status: Operating since 2021. Network goes live Jun 1, 2026.
Layer 02 · Licensing
CTRL+X
When a piece gets republished, we know who, when, and at what rate.
Right now, when an outlet reposts a WTM piece, the only enforcement mechanism is a takedown email. CTRL+X is building rails on Solana that change that — a license attached to the piece, recorded to the chain, queryable by anyone, with terms and payments enforced at the protocol level.
What that means for a contributor: when something you shot for WTM gets used somewhere else, attribution is provable, the rate was set in advance, and the payment clears to the wallet that made the work. No bargaining over what the contributor “deserves” after the fact.
The company was founded in 2022 by Arikia Millikan — formerly the youngest editor at WIRED. We’re mapping which pieces of our publishing flow could move onto these rails first.
Status: Exploration. No contract signed. Editorial advisory role under discussion.
Layer 03 · Memory
bonfires.ai
Our reporting becomes a structured asset. If it’s worth licensing, we license it. If it isn’t, we don’t.
Reporters aren’t chatting with AI before they go out. Bonfires.ai sits behind the work, not in front of it. Once a piece is reported and published, the surrounding context — the source threads, the corrections, the follow-ups, the things we learned and didn’t use — gets captured into a queryable structure.
The bet is simple. AI labs and research firms are paying for high-context, attributable, multi-modal reporting data. Most of that data is locked inside individual reporters’ heads and Slack DMs. If WTM’s body of work makes a useful asset on Bonfires, we license access to it and the revenue flows back to the people who reported the stories. If nobody’s buying, we don’t spend cycles on it.
This is also how the next reporter on a beat doesn’t start from zero — the previous story’s context is queryable instead of buried.
Status: Exploration. Testing what gets captured and how. No commercial terms yet.
