Name: Newsspeak

Legal: Newsspeak, Inc

Location: Chicago, IL

Founded: February 2019

Website: https://newsspeak.org

Social Media: 2.1K Followers on Facebook, 36 Followers on Twitter, 654 followers on Instagram

Industry – Digital News & Media

Size: $150B globally (Source: Statista)

Introduction

Newsspeak is a news and media company that claims to present readers with unbiased and holistic viewpoints so that people can form their own well-informed opinions. The company focuses on topics that are debatable and then present both narratives for them. In order to help readers separate propaganda reporting from well-reasoned opinions, Newsspeak also publishes its analysis of bias (or lack of it) in reporting done by other media outlets. 

The Product

Through its online news portal, Newsspeak is democratizing the consumption of news by publishing news for readers of all schools of thought as well as for those not conforming to any. The platforms reports opinions and narratives of both sides about topics that are contentious, debatable, and where the potential of misreporting is huge. 

Newsspeak’s content is divided into three main topics – ‘Opinion’, ‘Bias & Accuracy’ & ‘In The News’. The website’s ‘In the News’ section is focussed on reporting facts and just that. Their ‘Opinion’ section presents detailed viewpoints on topics that are of public interest. In the ‘Bias and Accuracy’ section, Newsspeak tears down inaccurate media coverage of recent events both in the US and globally. Here, they openly call out news and media outlets that have either propagated inaccurate information or used correct information but presented it in a misleading way. They also reveal news that they believe have represented a viewpoint biased towards a particular political agenda without actually conforming to their agenda. 

Through their forthcoming and bold news portal, Newsspeak aims to contribute towards creating an informative and trustworthy media industry which they believe is vital to a truly free society. 

Origin & Founding Team

Started in February 2019, Newsspeak has a diverse team of advisors and authors. J. Edward Sawlaw, a family medicine specialist and previously a founder of a retail board games outlet, DMMD games, and Dorian Geisler – an attorney and author with an MFA in Poetry are both advisors on Newsspeak’s team. Ruschell Busch, a lawyer by profession from Michigan law School is one of the key contributing authors at the company. 

Performance & Trends

Newsspeak has raised $13k as seed funding till date. Besides their online portal, they have a reader base of >2k on Facebook.

The post Newsspeak – Unbiased digital news and analysis platform appeared first on Techweek.

The media landscape is evolving. People can now watch videos from a variety of sources and across a number of channels. According to Nielsen’s 2017 report, “…93% of streamers watched traditional TV” on an average November day in 2017. “Forty-seven percent of those streamers watched TV only, 46% were reached by a mix of traditional TV and streaming, and 7% streamed exclusively.”

The statistics point to a changing pattern among viewers and hints at a slow but sure beginning of a post-TV era. Cheddar sits at the intersection of technology, media, business and culture” and has risen out of this change.

In 2016, Jon Steinberg, the former Buzzfeed CEO, raised a $3M seed funding and founded Cheddar, calling it a “post-cable network”. Steinberg argues that cable news content “is geared at an ever increasing rate to people in their 60s” while a post-cable network means a “future where cable news networks are rebooted to reach and engage young consumers”.

At the heart of Steinberg’s new venture is his analysis that content is divided into categorizes worldwide: “on-demand dramas and comedies on services like Netflix and Amazon” or shitty videos on Facebook. But, according to him, audiences also want “ambient content” or “The stuff you watch when getting dressed, at work, cooking dinner, doing homework, etc.”

Enter, Cheddar.

Cheddar’s programming is available on Sling TV, Hulu, YouTube TV, Snapchat, fuboTV, Philo, Amazon, Twitch, Twitter and Facebook (PC: Cheddar)

Cheddar initially positioned itself as the “CNBC for Millennials” and began airing commentary and interviews from the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange (and later its own studio in New York City) and live-streamed them on their own website and Facebook. But since then, Cheddar has evolved into a sophisticated media network that might be up against all other media networks from Buzzfeed to Upworthy but is not their replica.

At a time when TV-quality video is prohibitively expensive, Cheddar managed to cut expenses by working with cloud-based video shooting and editing technology “to make near 4K clips with a one-time equipment cost of less than $200,000.” It was also reported that Steinberg described “Cheddar’s set up as being Google Docs rather than an entire Microsoft Exchange server.”

But briefly in May 2016, the startup put its content behind a paywall where it said that smaller clips would appear “for free on Facebook but full-length CEO interviews would be exclusive for subscribers.” The hope, however, as Steinberg said in an interview, was to get “the end consumer to pay either directly or part of a bundle.”

A bundle doesn’t mean a traditional cable connection. On the contrary, it’s an innovation following the rise of platforms like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon. Users don’t want to be restricted to the offerings of cable TV or even a Netflix alone and want to consume varied content. “Bundles” or “skinny bundles”, therefore, are services such as Sling TV that offer a select number of channels at a reasonable price. They have, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, captured 5 million households as compared to the 90 million of cable TV. As they are focused on the discerning consumer who is online, they stream online and provide the consumer with on-demand, on-the-go programming and the freedom to pay for only what they see.

Moving away from a subscription model, Cheddar evolved by tying up with multiple partners. It cut a deal with Sirius XM, a radio company, in 2016 where the latter would air Cheddar on one of its channels. It then extended its services for subscribers of Roku, Amazon video and Apple TV and announced a live streaming partnership with Twitter to broadcast “Opening Bell” markets coverage and “Closing Bell” coverage. By November 2016, Cheddar was streaming on Sling TV and had realized its initial ambition of becoming a part of a bundle. Numerous other tie-ups such as fuboTV, Twitch followed. 

Explaining their business model and the ecosystem, Steinberg writes: “Post Cable Networks thrive by wholesaling their content to bundles, the bundler thrives, and the consumer gets a great product at an affordable price.” While Cheddar’s videos are currently ad free, the company utilizes product placements or integrates the brand into the programme.

Cheddar News Anchors (PC: Cheddar)

The Post-Cable Network

As of now, Cheddar’s programming is available on Sling TV, Hulu, YouTube TV, Snapchat, fuboTV, Philo, Amazon, Twitter and Facebook. Along with the New York Stock Exchange and its street level studio, the company also broadcasts from WeWork in Los Angeles and the White House. And in addition to business news, Cheddar also has sports and Cheddar Big News, which is a general news network aimed at the young.

In 2017, the startup acquired StockStream, the popular $50,000 crowd-sourced trading platform game hosted on Twitch, along with another small acquisition of Need2Know, a newsletter.

But both Cheddar’s business and lifestyle networks are a way for the former Buzzfeed boss to move away from viral content into niche content. He has explained that people “intentionally” tune-in on these networks as opposed to the viral content that they encounter on Facebook. “Despite viral video content’s viewership achievements, it fails along trust and loyalty dimensions, making it a poor choice for brand builders,” he says. This also explains why existing cable networks with fewer viewers when compared to online viewership of millions make millions in annual revenue, while video producers pulling in billions of monthly views don’t. Cheddar, conscious of these failings, has bridged the gap between being a viral video producer short on loyalty and an inaccessible cable network, and in doing so, has recorded an $18M annual revenue.

It has also established that the time for what it calls post-cable networks is now. At the end of the day, networks like Cheddar are appreciated by viewers because they provide niche, professional content unlike two-minute, dubious viral videos that can be confused with user-generated content. This, according to Steinberg, would help post cable networks spring up and take “share from traditional cable networks in a very short period of time”, just as websites took up a large share–if not gobbled–the newspaper market.

The post Cheddar Is More Than Just CNBC For Millennials appeared first on Techweek.

Not just black or white

NewsGuard’s big idea is to rate the top 7,500 sources of news and information that are most shared by users in the United States by the time the country goes for midterm polls in November this year. The providers will be rated GREEN if the content produced is fair and fulfils basic standards of accuracy and accountability, and RED if the news site fails to meet the minimum standards.

Simply, the GREEN rating will imply that the site is trustworthy and RED would mean that the provider is deceptive and publishing to push an agenda. There’s also a YELLOW. The company’s press release said that “a site that purports to report all sides of a controversial issue will get a YELLOW… because while it is not necessarily “fake news,” it is content whose creator failed to disclose self-interest.”  

However, the question of how NewsGuard will arrive at these ratings is a tricky one: The startup has explained that it will use 11 indicators to determine the rating. These include criteria such as whether the news site ‘distinguishes news from opinion’, ‘clearly labels advertising’, ‘discloses ownership’, among others. NewsGuard’s website also announces that its analysts use the innocent until proven guilty philosophy where they “start with the premise that a site should be GREEN” till their evaluation based on the aforementioned 11 criteria, “produces a RED rating”.

NewsGuard’s credibility criteria (PC: NewsGuard)

But for a site to get a GREEN rating, it must also be a participant of the Trust Project, an initiative to assess the quality and credibility of journalism. The Trust Project has top news companies such as The Economist, The Washington Post, Italy’s La Repubblica, among others as its members and it operates on eight “core indicators”. The indicators such as “diverse voices, locally sourced, citations and references” etc. are used, according to a Neiman Lab report, “to create a standardized technical language for the tags so that tech sites can incorporate them”. Organizations that meet the requirement, can become members.

The nonpartisan initiative also works with tech giants like Google and Facebook (who themselves have not proved to be trustworthy in recent times). However, a representative from Google claimed that incorporating the indicators has been important for them, (as they) “can help our algorithms better understand authoritative journalism.” It is also important to note that Google is also a funder at The Trust Project.

Report Card for The Media

There is a need for clarification on why NewsGuard mandates an organization’s participation and compliance with The Trust Project alone, as opposed to other existing initiatives, like Trust and News Initiative, News Integrity Initiative, Trusting News among others, for a GREEN rating. It also begs the question whether there should be a universally accepted criteria for fairness and accuracy in journalism.

But Founder and CEO Brill has explained that this partnership is a way to “draw and build on the work of those already engaged in the fight”. However, if more initiatives concerned with scooping out the truth in journalism surface, it would be interesting to explore if news sites, encouraged by competition, seek out more such nonpartisan and reputable accreditation.

NewsGuard’s CEO Steven Brill (PC: Charlie Rose)

NewsGuard, however, is not aiming to make judgments or pontificate on political leanings of news organizations. Instead Founder Crovitz says, “We will tell readers the Denver Post is a real newspaper and that the Denver Guardian exists only as a purveyor of fake news”. It clearly exists to help readers distinguish between a Kremlin-funded supplement and an unbiased news corporation.

The Gargantuan Task of Abolishing Fake News

Along with rating news organizations, NewsGuard’s analysts will also write, what the startup is calling, a nutrition label. “The labels will explain the history of the site, what it attempts to cover, who owns it, who edits it” and will try to make transparent other relevant factors, “such as financing, notable awards or missteps, participation in the Trust Project” among others.

Funded by an advertising and public relations company Publicis Groupe, NewsGuard has also taken advertisers on its side in this mission. The advertising community is dismayed with fake news and according to Publicis Chairman Levy, “do not want to help finance and appear alongside fake news”.  

The Sameness of Fake News

Social Media is pilloried for the deluge of fake news. While it is possible that the speed attached to news and the endless, unstoppable sharing of it presents new and undefined risks, misinformation has been ubiquitous. And if the social media has given an increased access to the proliferation of fake news; facts, too, are only a couple of searches away. The reader (or listener) has been historically required to use his/her judgment.

In 1807, Thomas Jefferson complained that “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper.” And while we struggle to whiff out agenda in every fake news item, what must one make of government propaganda that, reportedly, also ensnared Jean-Paul Sartre, who because of Chinese propaganda in western newspapers believed that Mao Zedong was a benevolent ruler and wore Mao suits to symbolize his support for China.

NewsGuard, to its credit, recognizes that ratings – although a resilient step –  may not entirely help solve the menace of fake news. Hence, it has also employed a separate

“SWAT Team” which will be on call on a 24/7 to receive and act on alerts about sites suddenly trending “to promote a fictitious, sensational story”. The aim also is to use technology and develop a plug-in that would display ratings for each news site as they are accessed.

Even with NewsGuard and other truth portals as potions, determining the validity or veracity of news can be a challenging, and each person must be her own judge. “The truth is,” Salman Rushdie wrote in a recent New Yorker essay, “that truth has always been contested”.

The post NewsGuard – The Truth Potion For Fake News appeared first on Techweek.