ONA Student Newsroom
  • Data reveal differences in return to in-person schooling
    • June 26, 2021
  • How three news start-ups approached innovation in 2020
    • June 22, 2021
  • Sports journalists, from left, Matt Musil of KHOW TV, Emily Giangreco of KVUE TV, and John Affleck, the Knight Chair for Sports Journalism at Penn State University.
    Virtual group interviews are changing sports coverage
    • June 22, 2021
  • In their memory: Pandemic offers opportunities to transform digital obits
    • June 21, 2021
  • COVID-19 vaccine incentives: do they work?
    • June 21, 2021
  • Home
  • ONA23 Conference
  • Online Journalism Awards
  • Ethics Tool
  • Knowledge Base
  • ONA Insights
  • Member Log In
ONA Student Newsroom
  • COVID: Industry Issues

How three news start-ups approached innovation in 2020

  • Allison Hageman
  • June 22, 2021
  • 5 minute read
Total
1
Shares
1
0
0
0

Despite the challenges of COVID-19 and the political pressures of last year, news start-ups from New York to Pittsburgh to Silicon Valley found opportunity for change. 

Editors from the news sites Epicenter-NYC, PublicSource and Repustar said they moved through the year by embracing experimentation and collaboration. 

“We have to continue to innovate,” said Halle Stockton, managing editor of Pittsburgh-based PublicSource. “Even when it’s very hard and this is something new to us.” 

Epicenter-NYC, based in the New York City borough of Queens, was co-founded during the pandemic as a way of connecting and helping neighbors by S. Mitra Kalita. The former senior vice president of news, opinion and programming at CNN Digital said what started organically as an email newsletter has grown into a website, podcast, live streams, text messages and a Google Drive open to readers. 

During the pandemic, Epicenter-NYC helped thousands of New Yorkers sign up to get vaccinated with the help of hundreds of volunteers. The site did this by interacting directly with its audience to gather information, according to Kalita. What began as a Google Form evolved to accommodate the community’s unique needs, Kalita said, by adding additional languages, and expanding to include immigration documentation issues and information for restaurant workers. 

By working so directly with the community, “the rules of who’s a journalist and who’s in your company have also kind of been redefined by us,” Kalita said. 

Hear from S. Mitra Kalita, co-founder of Epicenter-NYC.

Epicenter-NYC is a for-profit “community journalism initiative” whose revenue is created from a mix of local advertising, donations/grants and a recently unveiled three-tier membership model, Kalita said. Appreciation for this community-oriented coverage showed in the site’s “tip jar,” which received a donation bump when they started helping with vaccines, Kalita said.

The newsroom’s vaccine work and coverage also gave them a unique ability to have an ear to the ground and hold institutions accountable, Kalita said, noting that New York City Council Member Mark Levine once mistook them from a mutual aid group. Epicenter-NYC did this, she said, by prioritizing customer service, being conscious of the way they are talking to the community, and innovating by creating usable content. 

“Our instinct was to figure out ‘who’s the core community around this? How can we help them? What do we learn along the way?’ Kalita said. “And then I would zoom out and write articles about that, but it was much more informed than if I was entering that situation for the sole purpose of extracting a piece of journalism that is in written or video form.” 

Early voting is under way, and the primary is coming up on June 22nd. This is the first time New York City will be using a rank-choice system. Our latest podcast is a primer on how to navigate ranked-choice voting with journalist @FelipeDLH.https://t.co/5uc630GWku

— Epicenter_NYC (@epicenter_nyc) June 18, 2021

PublicSource is a newsroom that embraces change, managing editor Halle Stockton said. Like many other news organizations, the pandemic pushed them to redefine what and how they would cover their community

“We don’t stick with just the same things. We’re always willing to learn, eager to learn,” Stockton said. “We’re always experimenting, and sometimes that can be really difficult because change is hard and especially when you’re talking, when there’s already so much change in your external world.” 

To start, the newsroom ramped up daily COVID-19 coverage and later moved to a COVID-19 dashboard that is updated weekly, Stockton said. Not wanting to become the “pandemic PublicSource,” she said the newsroom launched its first-ever podcast and created multimedia projects with innovative designs that focused on non-pandemic issues like political promises made after George Floyd’s murder and higher education.  

Hear from Halle Stockton, managing editor of PublicSource.

In 2020, PublicSource benefited from partnerships, Stockton said, and collaborated with journalists from Report for America, Open Campus and the American Council of Learned Societies. They also began partnering with other news outlets in the region to republish each other’s work, which Stockton said creates a richer product in the end. 

As for revenue, the non-profit receives support from major donors, foundations and members. In 2021, they have retained nearly 50% of their COVID-19 membership bump, Stockton said. 

“There’s news out recently that a lot of people don’t feel that connection or that need for local news, even though they know on some level that’s important,” Stockton said. “But if they are connected to our team and … like the work they’re doing is for them, we feel that there is more of a possibility that they would want to rely on PublicSource for understanding the issues and problems that they encounter in their lives.” 

“‘It feels good’: Black-owned businesses in Pittsburgh react to Juneteenth becoming a federal holiday” via KDKA Channel 2- CBS Localhttps://t.co/PHGy26rqSZ

— PublicSource (@PublicSourcePA) June 19, 2021

Silicon Valley-based Repustar was founded by Chandran Sankaran in 2019, with a mission to create a better fact-checking platform. John Marcom, the founding editorial director, said Repustar wants to figure out a better way to distribute and insert relevant facts when issues are debated. 

The company believes it “can create a better kind of clearinghouse kind of mechanism for fact-checks and addressing confused information or misinformation,” Marcom said. “Or just information, that would be a benefit to a lot of users and to the news industry.”


The news-adjacent start-up spent the pandemic experimenting with fact-checking distribution platforms. In March, Marcom said, the start-up pivoted from what they thought would be a year of fact-checking election news to COVID-19. For three months after, Marcom said they explored users’ questions related to the virus and created hundreds of prototype fact-checks.

“There’s still a strong flow of queries coming in…” Marcom said. “Confusion about vaccines in particular, but also about there’s a continuing debate about what was the best policy solution.”

In this period, Repustar, which started with an app, moved to working on The Gigafact Project which employs freelance journalists to fact-check users’ questions and launched its fact-checking Twitter bot, @FactSparrow. They also moved from calling their fact-checks reviews to fact briefs, Marcom said. 

“The idea of making it really simple to just tag us and get something addressed is I think much more appealing than having to open another app and come up with a well-formulated question,” Marcom said. 

Listen to Repustar’s founding editorial director, John Marcom.

Currently, Repustar has not decided on a revenue model but Marcom said it has received adequate funding. However, he did not specify the source of that money.

This arrangement has fortunately given the company freedom to experiment, Marcom said. This year the news start-up hopes to grow its list of fact-checking partners, Marcom said, which includes the AP, The Nevada Independent and others. 

There are so many claims circulating on social media. Sometimes it can be hard to research all of them for yourself.

That's where I can help!

Reply "@FactSparrow" to tweets needing supporting evidence. I'll share vetted facts and sources, or request new information for you!

— FactSparrow (@FactSparrow) May 24, 2021

“Our platform … can help lots of these organizations acquire audiences and build their own kind of reputation and trust in the way that we’re working,” Marcom said. 

Total
1
Shares
Share 1
Tweet 0
Pin it 0
Allison Hageman

Previous Article
Sports journalists, from left, Matt Musil of KHOW TV, Emily Giangreco of KVUE TV, and John Affleck, the Knight Chair for Sports Journalism at Penn State University.
  • COVID: Industry Issues

Virtual group interviews are changing sports coverage

  • Skylar Williams
  • June 22, 2021
Read More
Next Article
  • Industry

Local news start-ups launching in a ‘springboard moment’

  • Allison Hageman
  • June 23, 2021
Read More

Special thanks to our Patron Sponsors
Google News Initiative logo

Content Authenticity Initiative logo

…and our Supporting Sponsors
Microsoft logo
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution logo

Top Articles
  • 1
    Ever heard of a ‘newsgame’? They aren’t as new as you might think
    • September 24, 2022
  • A table with three speakers sit in front of a room with people at round tables 2
    As journalists look to build trust, solutions journalism might help
    • September 24, 2022
  • Why news organizations are pivoting to short-form video and TikTok
    • September 24, 2022
  • screen shot of Zine produced by the ONA Newsroom in 2022 4
    To paper and back again – the #ONAZine
    • September 24, 2022
  • 5
    Women’s Leadership Accelerator cohorts back in person after two years
    • September 24, 2022
@ONANewsroom
My Tweets

Subscribe

Subscribe now to our newsletter

ONA Student Newsroom
Daily conference coverage from ONA's student newsroom

Input your search keywords and press Enter.

 

Loading Comments...
 

You must be logged in to post a comment.