Internet Media Entrepreneurs

Jim Spencer – President and Founder, newsy.com
Absolutely. Newsy is a multisource video news service, it runs across the Internet, but probably even more importantly, the biggest place that we've gotten most of our success is producing news for devices like this. This is an iPhone for the iPad. Our iPad news app is currently number 13 in the world and our iPhone news app is in the top 50 as well, which is pretty remarkable given a lot of the competition that we're up against. But what we do is we go out and we monitor the world's news sources, we synthesize and then present, from a story level, multiple sources on a single story. What does that mean? That means that people realize that there's more than one angle to how a story is being reported. So maybe CNBC looks at the global financial crisis one way, but the Financial Times might very well look at it from a very, very different perspective and so we take those perspectives, put them up against each other, show what's similar and show what's different about that coverage and then let the viewer decide what they think the real story is.

George Kennedy
I was just looking a little while ago at Newsy.com and I noticed that the tagline under every story says Multiple Sources. The Real Story.

Jim Spencer
Right.

George Kennedy
Some of the narrators say that the real story is flat. A couple though, I notice, say The Real Story. Are you implying or do you intend to imply with that tagline any critique or any shortcoming in the way other media operate?

Jim Spencer
Inherent in the approach that we're taking is that there are two or three important trends that we're following. One is since I got my Masters degree here at the Journalism School of Missouri, the favorability or the lack thereof, the press has done nothing but go down very rapidly.

George Kennedy
Sad, but true.

Jim Spencer
It is. It's true and the question is how do you build a new journalistic product based on when you see something like that happen? Well, what we do is we go out and we look at it not only from multiple sources, but we also look around the world because journalism has become much more global and stories are much more global now. And so we realize that, you know, Asia's view of the financial crisis frankly is quite different than the United States media's view of it. So it's not just the single sources, it's the global sources and ultimately all we're trying to do is inform people and then let them make their own decisions. In each case, whether it be on our apps or whether it be on our website, there are multiple links back to the primary sources that we use very short snippets of that we include in our transcripts and links back to them so that if you're interested, there's a really great opportunity for you to dig down and really research that story deeper.

George Kennedy
To me, the most interesting thing about Newsy.com is the idea itself; where did that come from?

Jim Spencer
Well actually, it came partially from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. When I was getting my Masters degree here we had— one of the projects that you could do was called a content analysis. And I remember working with a number of my professors in taking a look at how maybe the Vietnam War was covered by the Washington Post, the New York Times and a whole bunch of other newspapers during a certain period of time and I started to think about that and I started to think about the technological trends that were going on and how people are getting more of their news and information from devices like this, the role of online video and how that's grown. And I kind of took those two ideas and I kind of jammed them together and out popped Newsy, so that's where a lot of it came from.

George Kennedy
And you told me a little while ago that you have now raised a sufficient amount of capital to operate for a while. You're starting to sell advertising, so who is your audience anyway?

Jim Spencer
Our audience are primarily split right down the middle male/female. On these devices it's much more 18 to 45, on the Web it's more 25 to 54, but we're introducing advertising into our apps and then we have two other forms of revenue, one is content syndication and the other one is content licensing. So we have three different forms of revenue coming in and we're excited to make it a growing and sustainable enterprise.

George Kennedy
Well, I hope you succeed.

Jim Spencer
Thank you.

George Kennedy
Jim, thank you very much.

Jim Spencer
I appreciate it.

George Kennedy
And good luck.

Jim Spencer
Thank you.