Reebs,
Your platform is creative and reminiscent of Quartz. You may have mentioned but are you opening up Purple as a service for journalists to use with their audience? How do they solve the chicken and egg problem as they first interact with your service?
We agree with your insights, especially with “We see a big shift in the media industry away from big brands and towards the individual.” We are tracking a similar trend with our platform, Tribeworthy.com — a crowdsourced, online news review website that generates trust ratings for each article, author and news source. The slack in the news industry business models are forcing journalists into an entrepreneurial space. You can see evidence of focus towards this style of journalism as CUNY J-School and other colleges incorporate Master’s programs for Entrepreneurial Journalism. This provides an interesting turn as journalists not only struggle to have their work cut through the noise, but also themselves as journalists.
So how does this happen? As you might argue, through your platform, duh… But let me propose an ‘idea in the cloud’: First there was search, then came trust. We’ve found and are now drowning in the sea of information we longed for. The filter is the one thing we are losing in news: trust. And as we’ve found through evidence of Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes, GoodReads and others, trust is built through the unincentivized feedback of our peers.
Through 6,000 hours of work, research, interviews, case studies, and more, we’ve found four flaws that influence the perceived trust of an article: fallacies, biases, mistakes, and lack of credibility. We then integrated those flaws into a crowdsourced review process to generate a trust percentage for that article. These ratings perpetuate onto the journalists that wrote the article, and the news source that published their work.
To give you an idea of how this works, here is an example article on the recent Charlottesville story: https://tribeworthy.com/article/528.
Hope to hear back from you and would be interested in connecting.
-Jared
