NewsLabs Launchs NewsTilt
Press Release
NewsLabs
April 13, 2010
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- NewsLabs announced today that it has launched NewsTilt, a service for journalists to build an
online brand by engaging their readers. Each journalist on the NewsTilt site interacts directly with readers, answers
their questions, and consults with them on story ideas. Through these interactions, journalists aim to build a strong
reader-focussed online brand for themselves.
Newstilt, which rose from Paul Graham's successful Silicon Valley startup incubator, Y Combinator, will house a diverse
collection of established journalists from around the world who will write and report directly for their various
communities of online readers.
This operating philosophy is modeled after successful news sites, such as the Huffington Post and TechCrunch, which have
built great readership communities around individual journalists' brands.
"In the future, news will be all about the journalist and their community," said NewsLabs founder, Paul Biggar. "The
journalist is the brand, and their community tells them directly what to write, and whether they liked it."
By handling distribution, advertising, and myriad technical issues, NewsTilt will free-up its stable of professional
journalists to focus specifically on their craft, and interact with readers just as bloggers have in the past.
Both Biggar and Nathan Chong, who built the NewsTilt operating platform from scratch, have extensive technical
backgrounds, with a MSc and PhD between them. Their backgrounds, and the company's streamlined staffing, will give
NewsTilt a significant advantage over larger media outlets that are often too slow to respond to their readers' needs in
the ever-changing online news environment.
For now, says Chong, the simpler the better. "Only the essentials to begin with -- community and content," he said.
"Everything else gets built in collaboration with the journalists and their communities so it can be most responsive to
their needs."
NewsTilt will feature a collection of veteran journalists, whose work has appeared in the The New York Times, Newsweek,
The Guardian and scores of other newspapers, magazines, broadcast news outlets, and websites from around the world.
The news platform's three-person founding editorial group has nearly 100 years of journalism and publishing experience,
and is headed by Jon Margolis, former chief National Political Correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, and author of the
book, The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964.
NewsTilt brings journalists and readers together on newstilt.com from April 13.
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About NewsLabs: Founded in October 2009, NewsLabs aims to save journalism by building community around news. NewsLabs is
founded by Paul Biggar and Nathan Chong, both computer scientists. Biggar previously completed a PhD in Trinity College
Dublin, while Chong takes a break from ARM after an MSc in Imperial College London. NewsLabs is advised by Paul Graham
and Y Combinator, early predictors of the shift in the balance of power around news.
More information: NewsTilt: http://newstilt.com/ Call for Journalists: http://newstilt.com/cfj/ and http://newstilt.com/cfj-faq/ About NewsLabs: http://www.newslabs.com/about/ Previous press: http://newslabs.com/press/