24A Venture Concept #1, The Modern Media

My business idea is based around creating a “Modern Media”. I identified this opportunity after watching The Newsroom, which is a super silly way of getting an idea for a start-up, but that’s ok. I was thinking about Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign and his attacks on the “fake news”. In the show The Newsroom, The main characters try to make the news a better organization. They accept the flaws with the media, public perception, and political bias and try to work to create a version of the news that actually serves its purpose. I thought about this for a long time, being a frequent news reader myself. The issues were evident on a daily, but how do you fix the media? This would involve somehow removing bias from the equation… even I can’t do that. I then did a survey amongst UF students to find out the truth behind media consumption. The results made everything clear: young people want to watch the news, but they don’t understand it, or they don’t trust it because it's so entrenched in bias. The solution? Reimagine the media, but for the digital generation. My idea involves making the news accessible, understandable, and as unbiased as possible. To do this, I’ve settled on a daily email newsletter, that’s sent directly to subscribers. The letters are checked against a panel of readers and will receive a “score” based on how unbiased the readers interpreted the letter to be. The letters must receive a certain threshold of approval in order to make it into the final mailing list. In addition to this panel, the business will be run as a nonprofit, in order to remove any sort of incentive to create “clickbait”, I want to decentralize the business and make news for the common young person who consumes it.

What forces created this opportunity? I hate to say it, but the campaign against the “fake news” really has people worried about who in the media they can trust. The media has its flaws, but I still like to be optimistic enough to believe that they are not publishing blatantly false narratives. In addition to this campaign, the news maintains a certain formality that cant attracts the goldfish attention spans of our generation… sad but true. 98% of Americans don’t understand what it means for a president to be formally impeached, 80%< can’t identify Iran on a map, 43% said they wouldn’t buy Corona beer “under any circumstances” due to the Coronavirus pandemic… Being blunt here, we’re too stupid for the current version of the news, and that’s a dangerous thing. Most people would rather ignore it entirely than try and figure out what's going on.. and that’s exactly what's happening. This market is American students, ideally aged 15-24, with little formal education. At the moment, customers aren’t satisfying this need at all, they're choosing to ignore it altogether, the ones that do pay attention to have enough brain cells to see through the issues of their source too, very few people (in my target demographic) have strong loyalties to media outlets. I’m not yet sure how big this opportunity is, but I believe there's a massive demand across the US… this is a public service. I think the window of opportunity is pretty wide, things with the media are only getting worse in my opinion, and I think more consumers are starting to see that. In order to make money, We’ll have to take donations and run nonpartisan ads on the newsletter. Customers will switch to this product when they understand the way its executed, there's already a lack of contentment in the market, the issue is there’s no solid solution to it yet. (i.e there's an opposite end on the spectrum that’s just as bad) The competitors I’ve identified are Morning Brew and TheSkimm, both newsletter but specializing in niche news, their weakness is they don’t have a system to remove bias, and theyre too niche to be the catch-all news source teens want. Logistically, there are very few aspects that need to be maintained. Being entirely online means this business venture is as dynamic as possible. I think right now, the business would be organized with Volunteers. Journalism students who want a writer position to put on their resume, and will work for free because they believe in the mission of the outlet or want the title of “Student Journalist”

My most important resource is the “company culture” which allows us to create this product with a purpose.

For the next new venture, I think expanding onto youtube or Instagram would be the next step, just to make it all more accessible.

In five years, I’d like to have a sizeable audience and some brand reputation, Hopefully experiencing the compounding effects profits can have on scaling something so easily scaled.