The News Movement and Its Unorthodox Vision Launch in the US

Social news publisher The News Movement launched in the U.S. Wednesday, following a 10-month period where the startup honed its editorial strategy and accrued more than 80,000 followers across the major social media platforms. The publisher has attracted early attention thanks to both the pedigree of its founding members and its atypical commercial and editorial blueprint. Launched by three former Dow Jones executives and the editorial director of U.K. broadcaster the BBC, The News Movement aims to capitalize on the growing volume of news consumption that occurs on social media platforms, particularly among younger readers, said president and co-founder Ramin Beheshti. “We want to reimagine the news by focusing on horizontal storytelling,” Beheshti said. “And in doing so, we want to make it easier and more convenient to consume the news.” To do so, the publisher creates socially native reporting designed for distribution on social channels, primarily in the form of vertical video, a form popularized by TikTok and summarily adopted by Instagram through Reels and YouTube through Shorts. The publisher plans to monetize this audience by creating branded content using its in-house studio, collaborating with companies to produce their social content and generating reader revenue through digital tipping and micropayments. “Gen Z is getting their headlines on TikTok, so if The News Movement could find a way to communicate news on the platform, it could be compelling,” said Maria Bufalino, the senior vice president of investment, social, at Starcom. While ambitious, the strategy for The News Movement runs counter to many of the prevailing trends shaping the news industry. Its social-first strategy eschews the growing movement from publishers to own the connection to their audiences directly, and its plan to collect reader revenue through tips and micropayments has few successful precedents. A social focus meets young audiences where they are Young audiences increasingly consume news content on social platforms, with 68% of Gen Z turning to social media weekly to keep current, according to data from Morning Consult. To reach this audience, The News Movement has hired a team of roughly 40 reporters across the U.K. and U.S. who produce vertical video explainers and share information on graphic cards. Its videos often feature a reporter describing topical news events set against a backsplash of found footage or animated graphics with text overlaid. One TikTok video showcasing a new coin released with the image of King Charles III attracted 480,000 views. As a result of its focus on social media, the publisher primarily tracks three key performance indicators––follower count, views and engagement––rather than metrics like page views, newsletter list size or subscriptions. The publisher declined to share its revenue, either earned or projected. At launch, the publisher has 51,000 followers on TikTok, 4,200 on Instagram, 18,400 on YouTube and 6,100 on Twitter, and it also publishes on Snap. Across all platforms, it has accumulated more than 26 million video views, according to Beheshti. The publisher has taken on outside funding to finance its expansion, though it wouldn't share its investors' names. The News Movement rents, rather than owns, its audience The first digital publishers embraced social media platforms as a means of amassing audiences larger than ever before possible, and the strategy propelled the growth of businesses like BuzzFeed Inc. However, when publishers rely on social platforms to reach people, they are building businesses on the backs of third-party platforms whose decisions are beyond their control, said David Cohn, the senior director of innovation and research and development at Advance Local. To hedge against this precarity, publishers often attempt to develop relationships with readers on their owned and operated platforms, capturing email addresses through registration walls and newsletter sign-ups. “When a news organization positions itself as a master of social media platforms, they are implicitly acknowledging that they are not in control of their distribution,” Cohn said. “They will need to be able to change their editorial process and output on a dime, if need be.” The News Movement, with its insistence on creating socially native content, has fewer protections against such uncertainty. It has built out operations across a number of platforms, insulating it against over-reliance on any one channel, Beheshti said. But without a robust effort to develop its own bank of first-party data, its value remains tied to its relevance on social media. Additionally, its eschewal of digital subscriptions leaves the nascent publisher without a source of recurring revenue. Its focus on tips and micropayments, even if successful, will lack the stability and regularity that makes the subscription model so appealing. Despite these challenges, the publisher has positioned itself to thrive in the era of vertical video, specifically on TikTok, a platform that lacks a dominant, native news source. Its founders watched as publishers floundered in their attempts to ride the Facebook algorithm to financial stability, and they are confident in their ability to avoid such mistakes this time around. “We think we can create products that meet a consumer need, because that's actually what's driving us,” Beheshti said. “But we can also leverage our knowledge and experience of the social platforms to buck the trend.”

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The News Movement and Its Unorthodox Vision Launch in the US

The commercial and editorial strategies of the publisher run counter to industry trends

Mark Stenberg

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Mark Stenberg