An easier solution
Hey all, infi this side from rep3. 
I like to contribute to DAOs in my free time, and am currently working on profiling some interesting DAOs and understanding how they function. I chanced upon JournoDAO by sheer luck and was compelled to reply when I saw this thread.
The Challenge
One of the biggest challenges DAOs face today is incentivising and engaging their members. Yet the most common solution to them (i.e. doing so through a token) is clearly sub-optimal.
We see that OP’s intention is to reward acts of journalism and incentivise people to (1) obviously improve the frequency and quality of reporting, yes, but also (2) engage the JournoDAO community and attract others that would be interested.
The idea of having a $JOURNO token for the above purposes though is not the best solution and opens a can of worms.
Tokens are… sub-optimal
First, one must figure out the tokenomics of said token. This is frankly a huge time sink (since this is more or less a permanent decision).
Then, figuring out how to prevent sybil-resistance and prevent concentration of these tokens with a few early users (as mentioned by @Clinamenic ) adds few more variables to mix.
Finally, finding a way so that these tokens benefit not only the community but also JournoDAO (as mentioned by @ericcmack ) requires a conversation around burning/staking mechanisms, which is tough to navigate for tokens with non-financial use-cases (such as rewarding or recognising good journalism).
Before I go ahead, I want to make it clear that in no way do I intend to find faults and generally be a cynic. The POC by @kaxline here is indeed impressive, however I have a better solution in mind!
Membership and Contribution Badges
Imagine for a moment that anyone and everyone who does good journalism is a member of JournoDAO. In this case, membership would range from level 1 to say, level 5. The average level 1 member will look like a citizen journalist who unknowingly put out a great piece. The average level 5 member will look like a core contributor of JournoDAO who has been an active journalist both inside and outside of the DAO. Now imagine that we give an upgradable NFT to all members. Each member can now “move up” or “move down” a level any time.
Now also imagine that we recognise each instance of good journalism (or any other activity that furthers JournoDAO) as another NFT that is permanently linked to the membership badge. Let’s call this the child or the contribution NFT.
In this way, as members keep being active, they keep accumulating these contribution NFTs and build their reputation or street cred as a good journalist or as a member of JournoDAO. We now just need to agree on a simple schema to decide how members level up or down (for example, number of contributions after which a contributor moves up, or the time period of absense after which a contributor moves down) and voila! We now have a robust recognition and incentivisation system.
Think about it, it checks all the boxes.
Checking All the Boxes
First and foremost, acknowledging memberships and contributions through collectible yet non-transferrable NFTs is superior to just collecting tokens (whose value is unclear at best or complex to understand at worst).
Second, since these are essentially ERC-721 tokens, you could have governance based on these tokens. In other words, you shall be able to use any token-gated tool using them as a basis for gating. This omits the need to have separate governance tokens.
You could, for example, use voting platforms and simply specify rules like “level 3 members and above can vote”, or add governance multipliers to members that have been around longer / with more contributions. The possibilities are endless.
Third, as mentioned by @kaxline , this would readily gamify the whole contributor experience inside JournoDAO, since levelling up would give them access to more perks (these could be decided at the discretion of the community).
You could also have a separate membership level entirely dedicated to those that are funding JournoDAO’s work but not necessarily participating in the DAO or doing journalism. The key idea here is to use membership and contribution badges for member recognition and contribution management instead of using tokens.
Lastly, but also most importantly, doing so would reduce the load on the JournoDAO core team / ops team to figure out tokenomics, figure out deflationary or burning/staking mechanisms, thinking about Sybil resistance, maintaining a leaderboard, educating members and the general public about these tokens and so much more unnecessary work.
And from the other side’s perspective receiving an NFT for some work is easier to just “get” than receiving $JOURNO tokens and figuring out everything that comes with them.
Conclusion and tl;dr
Rewarding acts of journalism is a great thing to do. However, figuring out how to make a leaderboard, launch a token, etc. is unnecessary. You can simply fulfil the objective by using tools like rep3 that were made with these specific challenges in mind. 
