Maria Bustillos

Maria Bustillos is a journalist, editor and information activist. In 2017 she founded Popula, under the auspices of Civil, an experiment in using cryptocurrency for journalism, and subsequently the Brick House, an ad-free, subscription-based journalism cooperative. She was the Columbia Journalism Review’s public editor for MSNBC, and her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, The New Yorker, Eater, Coindesk, Harper’s, Aeon, Gawker, The Awl, The Paris Review, The Guardian, and elsewhere; recently her work has focused on media, blockchain, copyright, and other issues related to the intersection of digital publishing and journalism. As founder of the Brick House she spearheaded the development of Briet, a platform and marketplace to enable publishers to sell digital books outright to libraries, providing an alternative to the licensing model increasingly favored by big publishing.