To pay journalists directly there are platforms where you can already pay directly for the article (Blendle), plenty of blogging platforms and new media startups than pay journalists at least in part by page impressions/revenues, and online tipjars.
Whether these clickbait factor or article quality depends on the journalist and audience as well as the model, but all of these approaches seem much closer to the ideal of helping journalists earn by the popularity of their output than a startup paying part of journalists' salary in tokens whose main utility according to the white paper appears to be votes to censor/censure other publications for ethics violations.
Blendle is in Beta, which means people are just now coming up with revenue models that only charge customers for the articles they want to read, and allow them to do this across different outlets.
The unique (not that this is good or useful) thing about purchasing CVL tokens is that it allows you not only to pay for the articles you want to read, but allows you to vote on how the Civil constitution is applied and thus how existing and newly formed newsrooms are shaped as well as affording you the opportunity to start your own newsroom (I think, not certain about this).
My explanation here and my explanation above doesn't in fact explain much of anything. Again, assuming blockchain/[insert buzzword] has wings, we won't really understand much of the how or why until clear use cases begin to dominate.
When Morse was trying to convince Congress to fund his endeavors, it was only after the second attempt they just gave him some money to make him go away (though, there were a couple Congressmen who really pushed for supporting him). When Morse had a telegraph line constructed in D.C. and running north (40 miles?), people still didn't understand the how when a message could be sent by telegraph faster than by a messenger sent south on the train. People still didn't grasp the why until criminals that previously had used the trains to elude police, began to get caught. Even then, it was still difficult to understand because it stood outside their conceptual framework for understanding/interpreting the world.
Not that the crypto stuff actually has wings. I'm emphatically agnostic.
Effectively, yes. However, assuming they implemented something with (and I can't believe I'm using this term) checks-and-balances, and also didn't give reader-investors too much voting power, then maybe it works out alright? I have no clue.
The only real rebuttal to your point is that journalists have effectively always been censored, to a degree, as the market so demands. Assange is perhaps the least censored, if not totally censor-free, but I'm not sure his model of censorship-free journalism is particularly scalable.
In Italy we had cooperatives running newspapers and magazines as long as I can remember, doesn't this happen elsewhere?
I _think_ the advantage of Civil might be that you get to pay directly a journalist rather than the group, but I'm not sure it's a big improvement.