Building the future of documentary

Our Story

We believe that how we shape our collective stories determines how we shape our world. In the recent past, journalists and documentaries have played the role of shaping our world. But journalism missed the train when the internet happened, and today, journalism is trapped in old formats and locked behind paywalls. Future generations are never going to go to journalism websites. Instead their only option is social media, which is build for advertising, not for enlightenment. It’s undermining our shared humanity and destabilizing our societies and democracies. Duckling brings an alternative.

A mission-driven startup

Duckling is a commercial company because we believe having revenue from paying customers and having access to investors will give us the greatest path to impacting the world. However, we are not your everyday company. Our legal entity, Duckling Media ApS, is registered in Denmark as a social benefit corporation. This means that the money we make will stay in Duckling and serve our purpose of empowering a new generation of compassionate, curious, informed humans. Danish non-profit foundations and the state-owned Innovation Fund Denmark have founded our startup journey until now. We are independent from big tech and other interests and plan to keep it that way.

Healthy screentime

There is an increasing focus on kids' screen time because more and more teenagers become addicted to social media, with dire consequences for their well-being and health. We want to shift focus away from the amount of time and look at how our kids use the screen time. If you spend time looking at documentaries that make you insightful and civilized, it’s a different story than if you spend time looking at fake news on TikTok. It’s also about balance. We like social media, but it can’t stand alone.

On blockchain

To build the future of documentary, Duckling is rethinking five central elements of media: Creation, ownership, monetization, discovery, and verification. The technology used to do this is blockchain, which is the same technology that powers crypto currencies. In our case, it allows us to create a decentralized media network where people across the globe collaborate on interactive stories, where they own their stories, and where we monetize them together. A place where a community of thoughtful humans assisted by algorithms helps surface insightful stories and weed out the fake stuff. It allows us to set our private and collective data free, so it’s not controlled by a few opaque tech giants.

Hopeful, conscious, happy

Stories not only shape our world, they shape us. They shape you. They can make us fearful, ignorant, and egocentric – or they can make us hopeful about the future, conscious about the world, and happy with our true selves. At Duckling, we are convinced that building a media that promotes the latter is possible. If it were possible in the early days of journalism, it would also be possible in the Internet age.