My co-founder and I are both former journalists; we met years ago at ABC News. Getting this right is personal to us -- there's a definite gap in between how important we think news is with how much it seems to be worth in the market -- a big problem considering how expensive it is to do correctly.

Our aspirational goal is to be THE place for news updates, regardless of what you're into. Before we started, I asked my decidedly non-news-junkie now-wife what she does to stay up to date -- she told me CNN.com. I pushed her for why them -- was it coverage decisions? A perceived ideological bent? She said "no, it loads quickly and I can scroll quickly through the headlines." We want to that, better.

It's interesting that you bring up local vs. national. One of the things we learned pretty early on is that while people say they want local news, it's often a non-starter if it isn't presented in conjunction with national headlines. So we do both. Our corny internal motto is "around the block and around the world" -- lets cover the water main break down the street AND Gaza/Ukraine/etc -- and everything in between. It's a tall order.

We have local in many places, though its uneven across the country. You can try NYC (https://www.forth.news/nyc) to get an idea of an area with local coverage. (For obvious reasons, we don't push local reporting on users outside of the area.)

We don't usually do the reporting ourselves. Looking to places like Twitter for inspiration, we recruit journalists and newsrooms to share their reporting. We cannot possibly know their beats like they do -- and they're already out there covering it. We verify they are who they say they are, and ask them too abide by an editorial policy (https://www.forth.news/docs/editorial). We want to be as easy to scroll -- and as relevant --as social, but without the misinfo, spam, hate speech, etc.

Right now no one is getting paid. I joke (and cry) that our biggest financial backer is my AmEx. Ideally we will build up enough breadth that we can sell our own sponsorships, or actually crack the subscription business model once and for all. Then we would share with the journalists/newsrooms, a la Spotify. (Btw, if you are a newsroom leader or journalist reading this, we'd love to chat - https://journalists.forth.news)

Any thoughts/questions/etc - I'm jared (at) forth (dot) news.