Alex Skatell

Yeah, so I think it actually started back in college.

I had developed an idea for a site called thenews.com, news with a U. Slogan was, we change news to add you.

And the idea was pretty simple.

I thought that...

people were going to be their own publishers, distribution was changing, and was there a space to create a platform where people could publish news on their own through their own distribution channels and help people create the value and the content they were generating.

That project did not unfortunately go anywhere.

I applied for a Knight News Foundation grant and was not successful, but kept the dream alive, made my way up to DC, kind of worked

at the uh at the senatorial committee and the governor's association learned a lot about the media landscape um saw what was happening over four and a half years ago with distribution changing and really facebook twitter your email inbox were becoming more and more the home page for your news yep no longer were people uh people weren't looking to the front page of the paper to find out what was news that was

That was yesterday's news.

They were looking to, and not even as much to the homepage of a website.

It was more your feeds, Facebook, Twitter, email.

But at that time, news companies weren't,

they weren't really active on those platforms.

So we built big distribution channels, either relying on our reporters themselves through Twitter, through Facebook, through Vine.

I think we have one of the most active Vine accounts.

We have a massive email list and now we're creating- How many people are on the email list?

uh 700 000 and are you are they kind of segmented based off topics you know they like they are we actually um every single individual gets a separate their email looks different um based on based on what they engaged with in the past wow is that code that you guys built internally

yeah so we're constantly optimizing that and i think the goal for us is could we could we utilize some of that technology on a broader scale thinking outside of our own news organization and supplying some of these tools to the media landscape at large so we've really invested in technology tools and

Thinking of these distribution channels, these are, you know, this is the new printing press.

It's how can you reach people online?