How informed.now Delivers Real News Without the Clickbait

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Highlights

Geekazine's Jeffrey Powers wants to know who pays for informed.now and what happens to subscribers' phone numbers. Readers are the only source of revenue, Kira answers, and SMS keeps the service so minimal it can't even track open rates. A briefing, he says, is 3 parts AI, 3 parts technology, and 1 part human, while a person answers every reply a reader sends.

Top Quotes

"Once you start taking money from advertisers, sponsors, partners, or platforms, you inevitably start leaning your incentives toward serving them instead of your actual user." (Kira Shishkin)

"I don't read the news too much anymore. If I watch a video on kittens, the next thing I know I'm going to get 20 news articles about kittens. That's what really frustrates me the most about finding news, and then of course it's just a whole bunch of clickbait." (Jeffrey Powers)

"We are news researchers, not creative writers. That's the rest of the industry." (Kira Shishkin)

Transcript

Jeffrey Powers: What's up, my geeks? Jeffrey P here from Geekazine. Think magazine with a geek. Today we have Kira Shishkin, the CEO and founder of informed.now, a news concierge for the age of misinformation overload. That's a lot to say there. So Kira, how you doing?

Kira Shishkin: Hey Jeffrey, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be welcomed on your show.

Jeffrey Powers: So you have a great little website here. It's called informed.now. Correct?

Kira Shishkin: We've got a funky kind of extension of our domain, and we like to play around with a subdomain, and it's get.informed.now. And we love our website.

Jeffrey Powers: Awesome. So tell people, anybody that's never been there, what is informed.now, how it works, and what they should expect from that?

Kira Shishkin: We combine technology and talent, very much AI but also human in the loop, to rebuild trust in the news industry, which has been decimated by the industry itself over the last decade or so. So much of the trust that readers used to put into the news outlets and the publishers has been eroded by their eyeballs being sold to advertisers, clickbait and sensationalism entering every part of a news article, and now more than ever AI allowing for synthetic writing generation at high volume, low cost.

It's created a lot of noise and it's killed a lot of trust. So much so that most people these days don't even read the news anymore.

Jeffrey Powers: Yeah, I know. I don't read the news too much anymore. Reality is if I watch a video on kittens, the next thing I know I'm going to get 20 news articles about kittens. And that's what really frustrates me the most about finding news. And then of course it's just a whole bunch of clickbait. So I'm assuming that's what informed.now is doing here. Correct?

Kira Shishkin: We're rebuilding that trust layer because the incentives of the industry are so different from, and so opposed to, the incentives of the reader, to what the reader actually wants. The reader of news wants to get caught up on what's going on in the world, what's going on in her environment, and move on with her day. They've got other things to do. They don't want to read news all day.

But the news industry, and the publishers and players within it, want the opposite. They want to keep you there for as long as possible. They want to hijack your attention. They want to show you advertisements. They want to show you different sponsored content, and they just want to keep you in that echo chamber of their information ecosystem for as long as humanly possible. And those incentives are just not aligned.

So we've built the news concierge service that is informed.now to very much put the reader first. We don't show advertisements. We don't allow sponsorships. If anything, that's the biggest innovation: just putting the reader back in the first place that the reader should have always held.

Jeffrey Powers: I've kind of seen other programs similar to this. My first question is, what's the model then? How does the website sustain itself?

Kira Shishkin: It's worth calling out that we're not really a website. The website is our front door, but the way we operate our entire operation is through SMS. So we are your news concierge. You can imagine it as a friend who texts you news, but someone who you can also trust has done their research. So every morning of every weekday (we're only live during the week) you get a text that has the most significant, world-changing, and life-changing news across the entire world, not just the United States. And it takes you about 30 seconds to read. You get this executive news briefing that keeps you informed without being influenced.

Jeffrey Powers: If I wanted to read it on a desktop, I would have to have some sort of SMS mirror, for instance, my iPhone to my MacBook or something like that, to actually read it.

Kira Shishkin: I feel like if you have an Apple device, then the messages will sync to your desktop as well. But I would say we aren't a source that you would spend a lot of time reading, scrolling through pages. We are so brief in our delivery, and that's very much part of our ethos, that it would take you 30 seconds to read it on a phone. By the time you plug it into your computer or get the messages on your computer, you've already finished reading it. Our power is in our concision and in the precise language that we use in our editorial to really minimize the words and maximize the insight.

Jeffrey Powers: So I'm assuming that there's the website, and on the website I can make changes. So if I don't want to hear about US politics, I could pull that out of there. If I want to learn about kittens 24/7, I can pull that into there and then get a text message every day about kittens. Correct?

Kira Shishkin: You know, we should run a kittens exclusive subscription. But the way we filter news is based on significance. And one of the things that we've heard resoundingly from our users is that instead of creating your own echo chamber, customizing exactly the things that you want to hear, we really provide a filter for significance. That is based on the utilitarian model of how many people are affected, and to what degree.

So there is a level of customization that you can exert based on the type of subscription you're in, but you cannot customize exactly the topics that you're being brought in, and that's intentional. That's more of the work of these big aggregators, Apple News and Google News, but they're a whole animal of their own.

Jeffrey Powers: Whenever I see an aggregator, if I see a news article, I sometimes see two or three versions of that news article either in a row or very close to each other. And I'm assuming with this, it's not going to happen like that. You're just going to get one bit of information about whatever, and then move on, and you won't see that again in your SMS. Correct?

Kira Shishkin: I would say we're very much news for people who have no time, right? No free time. They have no time to read. They have no time to follow different topics. They definitely don't have time for the celebrity gossip and the sports updates. That's entertainment.

Jeffrey Powers: Okay.

Kira Shishkin: And so in our editorial, which is again part machine, part human, we really focus on this: If you were to read 30 seconds of news today, what should make that 30 second cut? And we focus that on the most life-changing events around the world and in the United States, because we're live in the US and Canada.

Jeffrey Powers: Okay.

Kira Shishkin: And we do that with an opinion. We specifically target folks who want to know what's going on in their world, in their environment, and they subscribe to an editorial focus that we have, and they get their news by text in the most concise version possible.

Jeffrey Powers: We're talking with Kira Shishkin from informed.now, and it brings me to that second question that I had, and that is, what is your revenue model? Do people pay to get this service? Is there some sort of sponsorship behind it? How does that work?

Kira Shishkin: That is very much the case, to align our incentives fully with the reader. We only accept revenue from our reader. Once you start taking money from an advertiser, from a sponsor, from a foundation, from a partner, from a platform, you inevitably start leaning your incentives toward serving them. And we only want to serve the reader. So there's a subscription price. A lot of folks say it's not much for the value that we provide, but it's $9 a month. And it is a month contract. We do not do annual commitments. It's very easy to cancel. You just text back to your news and say cancel or stop, and everything stops from there pretty automatically.

Jeffrey Powers: Let's talk for a minute about data collection. If I'm going to a service, I want to be absolutely sure that my phone number is not going to get put onto some sort of list and sold out to somebody else. So what's your policy?

Kira Shishkin: I love that you asked this question, because it's actually one of our core elements of our ethos. It's part of why we didn't want to build an app. We didn't want to make this a web-based experience. Nobody wants another app on their phone. Nobody wants to be cookie tracked and click tracked throughout the web. We wanted to give people the ultimate sense of privacy, and we made a design choice that was aligned with that philosophy.

The reason we run our service through SMS is that with SMS technology, which is a dinosaur, we're not even able to collect any sort of information about your profile or your activity, even if we wanted to. That means you can be anonymous, and we can't even tell if you opened our messages. We don't even have open rates enabled through the SMS technology that exists in the US today. It's highly technologically minimalist, and we are not able to track any sort of activity. We don't really want to know your real name if you don't want to share it with us, and you can remain completely anonymous.

And of course, to the question you asked earlier around the phone numbers, there is not even a bone in our bodies that thinks of selling data or even harvesting that data in any way for resale or for pawning it off to a partner. Not even close. Our whole ethos is complete privacy. So much so that we don't even track open rates.

Jeffrey Powers: Very straightforward. You go to the website, you fill out all the forms, you pay the $9 a month, and then you set up for your SMS, and then the next day you start getting text messages of news stories that are easily readable.

Kira Shishkin: I would even say that it sounds so simple and so simplistic that you would think other people would be doing this, but we are the only company that is prioritizing concision and clarity and insight within the fewest words possible and in the most convenient delivery of that information. Nobody out there is doing this.

Jeffrey Powers: If I wanted to cancel, all I have to do is SMS cancel to you. Are there any other commands, like pause, if let's say I'm going on vacation or something like that?

Kira Shishkin: We like to boast this two-way conversation feature, and I think that is really core to our service. It's not just a one-way communication where you're on one end receiving these messages. You're getting the core and most of the value, and most of our users actually don't always talk back to us, but you can, and we fully enable and empower that conversation.

So if you want to text back and say, "Hey, I like this news item. Can I get more context about bullet point number 4?" or you have a follow-up question, or you even want to receive these texts at a different time, saying, "Hey, can I actually get these not at 6:00 a.m. but at 10:00 a.m.?", you can have that full mix of both the support conversation, like managing your account and tweaking things, as well as the actual content conversation with a research team directly. Hey, I want to learn more about this news item, can you give me more context, can you give me a follow-up? We like to think of it as you're just texting your friend who happens to be an entire research team's worth of knowledge, and a friendly voice on the other side.

Jeffrey Powers: You did say research team, and we did talk about automation a little bit. What percentage of automation would you say these text messages are?

Kira Shishkin: I think that's a really important question, and it divides into two sides. The actual news briefing itself is, I would say, maybe 3 parts AI, 3 parts technology broadly, and 1 part human. And then when you're actually texting back and having a conversation, it's always 100% human, because we don't want to put you through a bot conversation. I feel like people are not yearning for that experience. We wouldn't like that experience. So whenever you're texting back and having a conversation, it's always human.

When it comes to the news research, we like to think we use the right parts technology and the right parts human. We go through a really large volume of news content every day, tens of thousands of articles an hour, as we see through and understand what is happening around the world. We're scraping, we're monitoring, we're digesting that information.

But towards the end, as the model goes through the scraping, the collection, and the summarization, and as it gets to the weighing stages and decides what is most important, at the last part there is the human-in-the-loop component, where our human team does a sort of quality control and makes sure that the output of the model, which is continuously refined, is also something that we can stand behind and put our full reputational weight behind, every single text and every single character, before anything gets sent. So the right parts are technology, the grunt work, and the right parts of judgment are also having this human supervision as a core part of it, to ensure responsibility.

Jeffrey Powers: So you could actually have a conversation with somebody about one of the news articles and try and either enhance it more for next time or get more information or anything like that.

Kira Shishkin: You always have access to the research team, and we want to make that accessible. So in case you want to have a conversation with a knowledgeable friend who has done all the research on the subject, you can ask our team side questions, follow-ups, and additional context. One thing we don't do, and that's a very core part of how we operate, is provide perspective. We are pure researchers. We are not journalists and we are not creative writers. That's the rest of the industry. So with us you come for the facts. You come for the context. You come for what is commonly agreed upon fact on any given issue. But you don't come for the value judgment of this is a good thing, this is a bad thing. That type of commentary you can get everywhere else.

Jeffrey Powers: Where do you get your sources from? And do you share those sources upon request?

Kira Shishkin: We actually share them by default. Every single summary, which comes in a highly, highly concise form of basically a couple of sentences on any given bullet point or news topic, has a source at the end. Most of the time it takes you directly to a primary source, meaning it doesn't take you to another article where some commentator is going to tell you what to think or how to think about the issue. It takes you directly to the primary source of the issue. Whether that is a government announcement, a company announcement, a report from the Federal Reserve, or a report from the central bank in Europe or from the United Nations, it takes you directly to what we call the horse's mouth.

That obviously varies quite a bit, but we're proud to say that more than 2/3 of our sources on any day are primary sources. We have direct plugs into the BLS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, into the Federal Reserve, into central banks of every country, and into government and company announcements that wind up being the primary sources of most news in the first place.

Now, sometimes there isn't a primary source, in which case we go through exhaustively every article on the topic and pick our number one favorite one, the one that has the least bias and the most insight, reporting-level insight that is valuable to our reader. And it's always not paywalled, and it's always free for you to use. Sometimes when it's a Supreme Court case, we send you directly to the Supreme Court case ruling or dissent. So instead of getting that content regurgitated to you by some other journalist, you actually go straight to the horse's mouth.

Jeffrey Powers: Is anything ever paywalled? Like for instance, you must get some research information that you have to have a subscription to access.

Kira Shishkin: That's one of the more financial values of using informed.now: In a way, we unlock all the paywalls for you. We used to do this analysis of how much money in paywalls we're saving our users, and it's something like $25,000 a month, so an unspeakable amount per year. We read all this news for you, and most of the time we're able to quite easily find a free, unpaywalled version of the same information that is even often of higher purity, with less commentary and less perspective. On a rare occasion, the source content is so paywalled and so behind walls that we aren't able to access it and give you access for free. We would find a partnership way to open that research on a one-time basis, saving our users the annual commitment or annual subscription to that source. But that is such an outlier case that most of the work that we do is finding the free access, finding the unpaywalled access. And when you subscribe to informed.now, we like to say it's the last paid subscription you'll ever need when it comes to news.

Jeffrey Powers: Well, let's hope so for that. So, informed.now is the website where you can sign up and go from there. You said it's $9 a month. Are there any specials going on right now?

Kira Shishkin: Well, for any listeners of Geekazine, we're doing a special promotion that is one of our biggest discounts we've ever offered, and it takes you down almost 50%, which is as much as we could go down. For any Geekazine listeners, it would be $5 a month.

Jeffrey Powers: For a year, for a month, or for...

Kira Shishkin: Perpetual.

Jeffrey Powers: Perpetual. Oh, okay. All right. Well, there you go, man.

Kira Shishkin: That is something we're running only for the next couple of weeks. So as soon as you hear this, I would recommend jumping on.

Jeffrey Powers: How do people get to that, then?

Kira Shishkin: It's very easy. You can go through the website, which is a perfectly reasonable flow, and just mention, "Hey, I'm here from Geekazine," or you can text the word Geekazine to our toll-free number, which is another perfectly valid way of entering the flow. We run what we like to say is the biggest toll-free news number in the United States. It's 844-6-INFO, which is the same as 844-646-4636. If you text Geekazine to that number, you will be part of the promotion. It's a toll-free number, so texting us is always free.

Jeffrey Powers: Kind of reminds me of the vibes of Steve Wozniak when he started Dial-A-Joke and things like that. So this is a very different way to think about how this all works, and that's really great. So Kira, thank you very much for being on the show.

Kira Shishkin: Jeffrey, thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure, and I'm always happy to chat about this.