Fixing the Broken News Ecosystem

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Highlights

Who killed the news? Eric Kavanagh points to fact-checking desks split off from reporters and click tracking that rewarded yellow journalism; Kira traces the rot to the day advertisers started paying for the news. They also trade notes on loaded headlines like "claws back funding," ragebait, and how informed.now reads primary sources directly for 3 of every 4 stories.

Top Quotes

"We have such an overload of what we call news, but most of it isn't news at all. It's commentary, opinion, regurgitation, perspective, storytelling, and entertainment." (Kira Shishkin)

"You hear about misinformation and disinformation, but there's also what I call 'missed information'. That's information you missed. You didn't get it because no one told you." (Eric Kavanagh)

"If the publishers' main goal is to be read, their goal isn't to tell the truth, because those two goals aren't just different, often they're opposed to each other." (Kira Shishkin)

"The true journalist's Holy Grail is the quest for the truth. It's not the truth itself. But you're trying to get to the truth, and in doing so, you create content that's meaningful and useful." (Eric Kavanagh)

Transcript

Eric Kavanagh: All right, ladies and gentlemen, hello and welcome back once again to the only coast-to-coast show that's all about the information economy. It's time for Inside Analysis. Yours truly, Eric Kavanagh, is here, and I am tickled pink to have quite an innovator and entrepreneur on the call today, a gentleman named Kira Shishkin. He's dialing in all the way from the other side of the planet. So, it's evening for me, morning for him. He runs a company called informed.now, and they're trying to fix the horribly broken news market.

For those of you who know, I've been in the news for a long, long time. I've been running the Bloor Group for 16 years, I guess. DM Radio is now in year 18. Just turned 18 years old. But my love for the media goes way, way back, and I look around today and journalism is borderline dead. In fact, I gave a talk about 2 years ago now, I guess, at the Javits Center in New York for the Data Universe conference on what I called the death of "journalism," in quotes. The basic tenet was that journalism as we understand it today is basically narrative-driven cherry-picking. It's mostly intensely biased. It's very political, and we don't know the important things.

So, one of the questions I asked the audience was, where did this inflation come from? Nobody knew. I then showed them some charts to demonstrate where all the money printing occurred from 2020 to 2021, which perfectly mimics the spike in gas prices. The money printing just shot up like this, and gas prices just shot up like that. You know where inflation comes from? Money printing. And you ask people, especially in the media or on a certain side of the political fence, where does inflation come from? They're like, "Oh, it's multiple factors."

And I remember, and I'll throw it over to you here in a second, Kira, I remember at the time, the media tagline was, "Oh, inflation is global." Which might be the most disingenuous line ever, because they're acting as if that means it's not our fault, because it is our fault, because we're the ones who printed the most money during that whole COVID thingy. Of course, inflation is global, yes, but that doesn't mean it's not our fault. So, it's this incredibly disingenuous line that has now adversely impacted every single person in the world. And I mean to tell you, everyone got screwed by this. Everyone.

Yes, some people did better than others. People on the inside who work for big banks, institutional investors, Goldman Sachs, those folks made out like absolute banshees. And people in the stock market are doing well with their 401Ks and so forth, because the stock market, it's an asset bubble. We have asset bubbles in real estate. We have asset bubbles in lots of different ways, in 401Ks, in the stock market, everywhere. Well, what do bubbles do? Of course, they burst. That is one of the biggest stories that I saw that was just completely botched by the media and still has not been accurately described or explained by the media.

Well, that's why we have Kira Shishkin on the show. His new company is called informed.now, and they focus on SMS. They text message you every day with a bunch of headlines. News without noise is how they describe it. It's, as I would say, Dragnet, for those of you who are old enough, you might remember a show called Dragnet here in the United States, and the detectives would show up at someone's door and say, "Just the facts, ma'am." That's all they wanted, the facts. They don't want spin, they don't want your bias, they don't want your opinion on the matter. They want to know what happened, and why, and how does that matter to me? That's up to me to figure out.

With that, Kira Shishkin, welcome to the show. Congrats on your company, informed.now. Tell us, what do you think about this fact that the media has just completely botched the story of where the affordability crisis came from?

Kira Shishkin: Well, Eric, thank you so much for welcoming me on the show. It means a lot to join you here. And I resonate with a lot of the story behind what you're saying, that so much of what we call news has devolved into being news commentary and into being storytelling, right? Just kind of cherry-picked storytelling that either serves one side of the political tribal ecosystem or another side of the tribal ecosystem. And it's sort of echo-chambering stories to your own demographic, your own interest group.

But there's very, very little intent to actually inform instead of influencing, instead of soliciting, instead of trying to manipulate. So, I'm with you, in spirit, on all these things that we're seeing, the same thing. News has become more about influencing you than it is about informing you, which is kind of the whole premise behind our project: putting the power of facts back in the palm of the everyday American, so they can make up their own mind on things without being told what to think and how to feel about every single thing on TV.

Eric Kavanagh: Yeah, I think it's a brilliant mission. That's why I resonated with what you were talking about immediately. And of course, we had a great conversation on that first call when I showed you some of these things. I'll tell you what my first ever editor told me when I was at a newspaper in the year of our Lord 1990. Yes, that's in the 1900s, when a lot of people listening weren't even born yet. So, in the 1900s, my editor told me, and this is an exact quote, he said, "Says, s-a-y-s, should be like punctuation in a news story." Meaning, he says this, she says that. Here's what we verified, usually via something someone else said.

And the point is, you should not be reading "Senator Johnson believes such and such" or "Representative Schmidt fears such and such." You know why? Because you don't know what that person believes. You don't know what that person fears. All you know is what they say and what you can verify them as having done. Those are very different things. So, if you just put it in that context, well, that's true. He said this, he said that. You start using pejorative terms like "claimed," so-and-so claimed such and such, well, you're implying that they're not to be trusted.

And I'll never forget that, because it's the basic fundamentals of journalism that have now gone out the window in the interest, I suppose, of storytelling. But really, I think it's in the interest of what you said, which is manipulation. But what do you think?

Kira Shishkin: I think you're also hitting on another problem that is obviously so adjacent, which is the charged word choice that is peppered all around news. Instead of writing, and this is a famous example that I like to use, "Congress cancels funding," they'll write, "Congress claws back funding." Like, whoa. Why do you have to use words like that? I understand you're trying to communicate how you feel about it, or how you feel about it, the publication. But when you're using that word choice, especially in headlines, the everyday person that's reading this when they are distracted, when they're busy, when they are doing other things, and they're vulnerable, right? It has influence on them.

And this is such a small example of influence, right? Word choice, tone. It obviously goes a lot deeper, behind actual editorial agenda. But even at the surface level, wouldn't you have some decency to write in a way that doesn't trigger a response, that doesn't sing to your echo chamber? And I just think the mass media of the United States has really devolved, systematically devolved, into structural sensationalism, structural bias, and structural agenda that they now cannot really get out of. And we observe this industry to have so much momentum in this direction that we don't feel like it can be disrupted from within. Which is why we're taking an angle of coming in from the outside.

We bring a research perspective, much more than a journalist or a reporter perspective. We have a research approach, and we're bringing that skill set to the industry and saying, I think we need more researchers in the news space. And so, our company is proudly a news research company. What we do is try to share news in the pure form that it always should have been, which is just the facts and no noise. No editorial agenda, no bias, no verbosity, no ads and solicitations. We take all that noise out of the news. And what's left is very, very little, right? Because news is actually very brief and little. It's the news commentary that blows up the page and makes it all seem like a wall of text. And that's how we think of it.

Eric Kavanagh: Yeah, I think that's brilliant. And I'm going to throw an interesting curveball at you. I think I can delineate where everything went off the rails in the fairly recent past, because all of a sudden you had these fact-checkers. And that's a separate group of people at an organization. "Oh, we're fact-checkers for Reuters," or "we're fact-checkers for Axios." And I'm thinking, guys, the reporter's job is to get the facts and check the freaking facts, and then send it in for editorial review to be preened and then ideally published. But once you separate the fact-checking, the whole environment, the whole domain of facts, from the reporting, what do you have? Storytelling. Right? It's like you stripped out the most important thing, which is the facts, and gave it to some other department. What kind of nonsense is that?

I think that is literally when it just careened off the rails. And if you think about the evolution here, that was around the time social media was taking off, because what happened? Basically, the big media people were now the emperor with no clothes, because they used to control the narrative, and now the narrative is everywhere. I can go on LinkedIn and Facebook and YouTube and Instagram and Reddit and any of these places and get information. And so, what happened during the big COVID thing, and I have all sorts of opinions about what happened there? You had Facebook not only censoring people, but deplatforming people for asking the question of whether this thing came from a lab, whether this was an engineered virus.

Well, come on, man. Talk about Captain Obvious. Clearly, it's a possibility. I mean, you can argue whether it is or not and throw out your evidence to support your belief. But to automatically presume that there's no chance that it came from a lab was insane and ridiculous. And I think that was really when it all just went off the rails. But what do you think about that?

Kira Shishkin: I love that. I love that you bring me into the sort of "when did it happen" question, right? Because it's definitely happening now. We've already kind of boiled the frog, and we see it, like, "Wow, it's bad." It's really bad. People don't trust news. People don't read news. And when we look at a standard news page, online or in print, it doesn't really matter, it's a cesspool of agenda, bias, solicitations, and sensationalism. And then the question is, when did it happen? I agree with you that the separation of fact-checkers into their own category has done no good for an industry that was meant to inherently be fact-checkers. It's almost like it outsourced this function to a third party.

And so, what is left? You say it's storytelling. I think it's creative writing. What's left is creative writing. And we don't need creative writing in the news. If you want to write an op-ed, you want to write a lifestyle blog, recipes, games, trivia, so much of what the New York Times actually sells today is the entertainment piece. That's its own thing. But don't go calling that news. Just because that's bundled with news in a subscription together doesn't make the trivia, the recipes, or the op-eds news. That's storytelling. That's blogs. And when we do large-scale research on this, we ask people, "Why are you still subscribed to the New York Times?" They say, "Oh, I love the humor, the op-eds, and the recipes." Well, you're not subscribed to the New York Times for the news.

Let's just be clear about that, because do you trust the New York Times with news, or do you just trust them with their taste, like their lifestyle recommendations? But I have another take on your question, and I think it doesn't contradict it. I think it just adds to the thinking. I think when the stuff really hit the fan was when the advertiser became the sponsor of news. I think that was the beginning of the end. And you see that coming out of the dot-com bubble. You don't have to wait until COVID. The roots of that started taking place when the internet became this free resource for distributing information. And people could blog about things, write about news. They could be independent reporters. There was essentially the rise of what we now call Substack. Anybody could have a blog in that era, and people would actually read it, right?

And so, people said, "Well, why would I pay for news if I can get it from Eric's blog?" And they said, "Well, who's going to pay for news?" And then the advertiser comes in and says, "Don't charge Kira. He's just a reader, he doesn't want to pay. We'll pay for everything. All you have to do is leave us a little bit of real estate on your platform." And that, Eric, I think was the very beginning of the death of journalism, because it became an advertisement-driven business that inherently prioritizes advertiser interests, which are contradictory to reader interests.

Eric Kavanagh: Well, you know what? One of my best friends in the industry, and he's a really smart guy that I hope you're going to meet someday soon, Mark Madsen, actually nailed something very similar to what you just said. What he basically said is, "Look, when it really happened is when you could start tracking digital content to the point where you can see which stories have better traction than others." And specifically, keywords. So, you think back to the early days, like WebTrends and Omniture and these various sites that were for tracking your websites and seeing what's working. Because editors could now see which topics and which headlines and which words grabbed the most attention, well, guess what? All the gravity moved towards those terms, and we started just covering what got the most clicks and the most likes, which, if you get down to it, there's a term for that. It's called yellow journalism.

That's what yellow journalism is, when you're just playing for the audience, when you're just trying to keep people engaged, no matter what the facts might be, no matter what the truth might be. And I was like, "Wow, that's a really good point." As a digital marketer, you want to know these things. As an editor, you want to know these things. You want to understand what people are interested in. What's going to keep them buying the paper? What's going to keep them subscribing to our channel, or whatever the case may be? Sure. But to your point, at a certain point, the advertiser, and it kind of ebbs and flows. You can look back, and you can even look at other cultures. In Mexico, if you watch some of their shows like Sabado Gigante, they'll have the nice, scantily clad women in front of a table of Tide products, and she's showing all the Tide products, just like we used to do in the States in the '50s, when they had the product tie-ins, basically.

But now, you want to talk about product tie-ins, and our break's coming up here in a second, but look at the music industry in America. You can hear all these brands in the various songs. Now, I don't know the nature of the contracts, but I'm willing to lay odds that when Taylor Swift sings about Starbucks, "All those Starbucks lovers, they think I'm crazy," she got paid for that. Okay? They get paid when they work the brands into the songs. And so, they're always talking about tea, what is it, Tito's on ice or something like that. Different brands. These are brands. And the labels get paid, and so the musicians are encouraged to use these terms in their songs. That's another way that it just kind of weaves its way into the conversation. But, folks, don't touch that dial. You're listening to Inside Analysis. We'll be right back with Kira Shishkin. Stand by.

All right, folks. Back here on Inside Analysis, we're talking to Kira Shishkin of informed.now. Look this site up. It's good stuff, folks. informed.now. It's noiseless news. So, basically, they're stripping out all the bias, all the opinion. They have researchers who figure out what's going on, and they just give you, like I said, just the facts, ma'am. To bring us back to where we were a minute ago, like I said, it's everywhere, man. The product placements are woven into the fabric of conversations. Even in the trade press, you can't get good news anymore, and it's because the business model collapsed. And I think it's because there is this loss of trust. I mentioned where inflation came from, and nobody knows.

I'll throw some controversial thoughts at you. In my talk, I said there's a lot of news that you just don't know. You've heard about misinformation, there's disinformation, there's what I call missed information. That's information you missed. You didn't get it because no one told it to you. Well, one of my controversial statements is that World War III is over. We lost. Are you surprised? And if you are surprised, explain to me how a war involving 46 countries with 6 theaters of combat, including the United States, DC, New York, and Pennsylvania, spanning 3 decades, killing millions, destroying billions, causing a diaspora in the tens of millions, how on earth is that not a world war? Of course, it's a world war. We don't want to characterize it like that because we lost. Because in the end, the Taliban took over Afghanistan, and the Iranians took over Iraq, and all kinds of things. What the hell are we doing? What was the purpose of all that? The stated objectives were just completely lost.

I would argue that the current president was trying to negotiate an end to the actual World War III with the Taliban when he didn't get the presidency the next time. And I think he perhaps inadvertently started World War IV, and we're in the kinetic phase of that right now. Big, big, big things are happening right now because he threw these tariffs and tough talk on China. And China said, "Okay, watch this." Boom. And then COVID hits, and the whole world shut down, and all these countries, including the United States, went in lockstep behind the Chinese Communists locking down their cultures, except for Sweden. That was the one country that was like, "No, we're not going to do that." But I think we're now in the kinetic phase, and it's like, talk about serious action. Oh my goodness. But what do you think of all that, Kira?

Kira Shishkin: I definitely have a lot of thoughts there to react to. I'd love to riff off the idea that a lot of people don't know a lot of the basic content that the news talks about, which is your point about people not really knowing what inflation is. And I love the examples, because the news should hypothetically educate you on what that is, right? They're talking about it all the time. There are articles about inflation nonstop. CNBC seems to only write about inflation, right? So, there's a lot of content about these topics. When you ask the everyday person what any of these concepts are, they don't have an answer.

And I think it goes back to what we keep surfacing. There is no overstating this: the news doesn't care about informing you anymore. I think it used to one day, maybe in your youth, but today it cares only about engaging you, triggering you, and keeping you hooked, keeping you scrolling, keeping you reading at any cost. The cost of this is definitely credibility and a deterioration of public enfranchisement and the public sense of choice, the public sense of "I know what I'm doing." The costs are enormous. I just want to highlight and underline this idea that news structurally no longer cares about informing you. It cares about selling to you. It cares about selling advertisements to you, sponsorships, various types of solicitations, but it is no longer interested in informing you.

As a result of that, we get a population that is less informed than ever at a time when it has never been more important to be informed. You call it World War IV. I don't know if I would go as far, but I would say we definitely live in very turbulent times. I think people can feel it nationally in the United States, and I think people definitely feel it internationally as well, around the world, as in, we're living through pivotal times. And in these times, we have a general population that doesn't trust news, doesn't read news, and as a result doesn't really know what's going on. I think that's a terrible outcome. We need desperately a solution to put the power of facts back in the palm of the everyday person.

Eric Kavanagh: I agree with you. I think that's right. And you're right about the advertising. From my experience, that is a factor. There are other very serious factors, one of which is just personal ego. I think that going forward, number one, your research focus is fantastic, because you're trying to really understand what is happening and then share relevant facts from that research. That, I think, is on the right path of informing people as opposed to triggering people. But there's also this function of personal ego and old hierarchies like editorial directors and managing editors and all these people. Think about it. A managing editor of the New York Times, show me a human being in the world who genuinely has the intellect, the knowledge base, the acumen, the humility, and the drive to do that job well, and I will show you no person whatsoever. It's just too much.

You look at someone like Putin and you wonder, how did this happen? What's going on with this guy? Why is he just sending all his people into a meat grinder, which is what he's been doing for 3.5 years now? I have my own personal theory on that. I don't think he liked watching someone else moving on his scam. I think his worldview is that Ukraine is mine to pillage, not yours, you bastards, and I'm going to make sure you understand that. But it's like, how do you get that far disconnected? And it's because of these untenable positions where, no, and see, the other thing I figured out, what happens when you catch someone not knowing what they're supposed to know? Well, some people have the humility to say, "Look, I just don't know that. I should know that. You're right, but I actually don't know that." In these editorial hierarchies, the higher up you go, the less chance there is of anyone admitting that.

And so, what happens? Well, when you don't admit that you don't know something and then pretend that you do know something and act like you do, that chips away at your personal integrity, and you just get kind of mean. And you look at what's happening in Iran, what these clerics and these mullahs and the Basij Force, I think it's called. And these are terrible people. I mean, the folks that just murdered 32,000 people in the streets. That's about as bad as you can get. If you're a human being and you can just blast away and kill people in the streets, that's pretty bad, man. That's pretty bad. And that's because they have not reconciled with their own shortcomings, with their own lack of humility or knowledge or whatever. And when you have that at the tippy top of big media publications that have huge influence around the world, I think that's very dangerous. And I think that's partly why we're in this chaotic world right now. But what do you think?

Kira Shishkin: I agree. I think there are so many factors that we surfaced, and these are definitely big ones, right? We're talking about the ad dependence of the news media industry, the need to serve ads. We're talking about sensationalism, the yellow journalism that has become so structural now that unless you're sensationalizing, unless you're optimizing those keywords, you're just not going to be read. I think the ego thing you mentioned just now is really on point. On top of all this, there are humans at the helm of these organizations. We come to think of these big brands, and you think of Reuters, Bloomberg, Associated Press. These are infrastructural companies, right? They govern the information infrastructure of our times and of our world. And we realize, well, there actually is no human, or even a group of humans, that can feasibly live up to the level of absolute credibility that these companies claim.

In the end of the day, it's just humans. And humans are very fallible. They're as fallible as you and me. And when put in positions of enormous responsibility, enormous influence, they don't become any less fallible. If anything, they become more fallible. But the stakes of their ego are so much higher. And I think that's very much on point. I think that's a huge factor as well. There's one way that we're different. We're also fallible. At informed.now, we're also humans. But what I think is quite different is that we have a very strong ethical stance: we will never advertise anything. We don't accept sponsors. We don't accept advertisers. We also don't accept investors. We are a proudly self-funded, capital-independent company, not to yield any of our independence to any outside stakeholders.

This cannot be said for any other media company. Everyone else is serving somebody else. There's this old song, "You Gotta Serve Somebody." I don't even remember, was it Bob Dylan? Maybe. It was a great song, right? No matter where you are, you're going to serve somebody. And we've sort of tried to minimize that. We only serve the reader. And there are virtually no news companies left that serve the reader. They're all serving the advertiser. They're all serving the sponsor. They're serving the investor. They're serving the shareholder, whether that's public or private, doesn't matter. They're serving outside, ulterior interests that are very much different, and often orthogonal, to the interests of the reader.

And our whole gut and ethos of building informed.now is very literally just putting the reader back in the primary place. Back in the place of, "Hey, we're doing this for you and nobody else, because we only want to be paid by you and nobody else. And we want to align our interests with you and nobody else." And this is so obvious, Eric, right? This is such an obvious idea. And yet, in these current times, it's unprecedented.

Eric Kavanagh: Yeah, I think that's great. So, you charge your users, and they get a text message every morning, or they tell you what time they want to get the message. But every day, you get a message of news headlines. Can you talk about whether there is any customization over time? Or is it just one thing to everyone? Or are there plans for that? How does that work?

Kira Shishkin: We send our news briefings, is what we call them. And it is essentially a product of our news research, right? It's taking a look at primary sources, which is our secret sauce, ultimately. 80% of our coverage sources come directly from primary documents, primary sources. So, we aren't reading some secondhand regurgitation, secondhand commentary. We are talking directly to the horse's mouth. And we summarize that in extremely executive-length bullet points in a single SMS message every single morning. You can choose a time as when your morning starts. But that is the core of the informed.now experience. You can talk back to it, right? You can text us, and you're always talking to a human. You're never talking to a chatbot. You're never talking to AI. And over time, we are continuously developing new content areas and new content topics so that we can keep broadening the interest pool of people that we're able to serve and people that want to get their news this way, the denoised way.

Eric Kavanagh: News without the noise. I love that, and like I say, that's old school. That's what my editor taught me way back when, as he said that "says" should be like punctuation in a news story. We want to know what happened. And I love that you go to primary documents, to official sources, because two, three layers down, it gets a bit wishy-washy. And the other thing that I think really facilitated the collapse of trust is the anonymous sources. You just cannot find a story anymore that is not fed by some anonymous source. Every single story says "two people familiar with the situation who asked not to be named." Is there anyone with gumption anymore to say, "Yes, I say that"? Why are all these people beholden to big secrets?

We'll pick this up in the next segment here in about a minute and a half, but I think what's really bizarre, and I have hard evidence of this in my email box from an ex-friend of mine who became a very powerful journalist, is that they're not sharing information anymore. They're hiding information and manipulating information. I knew that information had been shared by a Booz Allen would-be whistleblower who was trying, in retrospect, to save the world from the advances by Russia and China in hypersonic missile technology. I saw all these emails. These are all college buddies, and the person who could have done something with it not only didn't do anything with it, but just mocked, insulted, denigrated, and name-called the source again and again.

I was watching this thing for years. I'm telling you, for years, it was this weird channel that I couldn't turn off. I even told him, "Dude, stop emailing me. Unsubscribe. Go away." But it's like a listserv. So anytime anyone else on the string would respond to something, I would get it again. I'm like, "What on earth is this?" I sent them a cease and desist notice a few months ago. I swear to God, that's how bad it got. I'm like, "What are you doing? Just go away." But the point is he wouldn't even admit to not having acted on the information. Why do people hide things? Why do you keep secrets? You hide things because you think you'll get in trouble if you share it, or you have some ulterior motive. But hiding the truth, there's actually a great line in the Quran about it. It says, "Do not mix up the truth with the falsehood or hide the truth while you know." Think about that as we go to commercial break. Folks, we'll be right back. You're listening to Inside Analysis.

All right, folks, back here on Inside Analysis, talking to Kira Shishkin, dialing in from the other side of the planet. He is the founder of informed.now. I think it's a fantastic service, and Kira, I think you're slotting into the most important gap in our society right now, which is focusing on sharing information. I think I mentioned to you in our last call that the media right now, because of the business model, is not incentivized to share calming, rational information about world affairs. They are incentivized to share frightening, concerning, biased information that, to your point, triggers people and gets people riled up, so they watch more of it and stick around and keep scrolling, et cetera. So, I think you have the antidote to the absence of any meaning in our news. But what do you think about all that?

Kira Shishkin: I appreciate hearing that. We've been described by our readers as the opposite of clickbait, and I think that is the proudest description I've ever earned. It means a lot, because I think what's eating the world is clickbait. I don't know if you follow the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year project, where every year Oxford Dictionaries picks one word, not based on its popularity or its novelty. They pick one word that describes the zeitgeist of the year. An example in 2016, which is 10 years ago now, the word of the year was "post-truth," describing a world that has transcended truth-oriented thinking and is much more interested in other things like sensationalism, like triggering, like engaging people. And it's been 10 years since that word. You know what the word of the year in 2026 is?

I just think it's so smart. I think it's so clever. It's "ragebait," which is the evolution of clickbait to be emotionally triggering people into feeling rage, right? It's an experience we've all had online or reading any kind of media. And you have to think back to the sort of double click that we've been exploring: what is the incentive of the media company these days? It is to be read. It is not to inform you. It's not to do truth. It is to be read. Because if they're not read, they're irrelevant, they're out of business, they're forgotten, and their advertiser revenue generators are not going to be happy if they're not being read.

And so, if your goal is to be read, your goal is not to tell the truth, because those two are not just different, sometimes they're opposed to each other. We wake up to a world where we inherit an industry that is obsessed with being read, in the way that entertainment is, and not obsessed with telling you the truth, in the way that researchers are. I think we need more research acumen in an industry that's been overflown, overwritten, kind of drowned in creative writing, in ragebait design, and ragebait optimization.

Eric Kavanagh: Yeah, I think you're right about that. And I'll bring in one of my favorite legends, which of course is King Arthur. What did King Arthur do? He went on the quest for the Holy Grail, right? Well, obviously this is symbolic. I mean, in the corporeal world, the Holy Grail apparently is the grail that Christ used at the Last Supper. I think that's at least what it's supposed to mean. And some people have other theories that it's actually symbolic of his son, if he had a son. There are interesting theories about it. But in the conceptual world, or the epistemological, ontological worlds, the quest for the Holy Grail is the quest for the truth, right? And this gets back to the basics of journalism. He said this, she said that. If I take a picture, if I'm there, if I'm a primary source, okay, I can say, "Hey, I saw this." That's a primary source. But the key is to have the quest for the truth. You're trying to find the truth. You're not saying, "This is the truth."

And I think that's what media is trying to say: "Oh no, this is the truth." You also see it, back to my point about "says," you got all these people saying, "Oh, he's lying. Those are lies. He's lying." Well, is he? How do you know that? How do you know someone's lying? You may not know this, but Americans who watched the show Seinfeld will know this. George Costanza, one of the famous characters, says, "Remember, Jerry, it's not a lie if you believe it." So, they've kind of tricked themselves into believing what they're saying. But when you go out there and say he's lying, well, really? First of all, what happened? Let's talk about the facts as opposed to whether or not someone is being dishonest. Maybe that person is being dishonest. It's hard to say. But the facts should be what matters, and I believe the key is to be on the quest for the truth.

So, the Holy Grail is the quest for the truth. It's not the truth. You're trying to get to the truth, and in doing so, you create content that is meaningful and useful. But if you're trying to say that you know the truth about XYZ when you weren't there, you're just a fool. But what do you think?

Kira Shishkin: I agree. Rolling back all the things we said, and all the things that I think create this puzzle of the news problem today, I think even just going back to the intention of the quest, there are very few news companies, media companies, of substantial size and relevance and distribution that are even on the quest for truth. I could probably name on one hand, and I won't do it on the call, how many companies in the world I think are even remotely on the quest for truth. But most of what I call the retail layer of news, which is essentially ABC, Fox, CNBC, networks, right? This is network media and affiliate media in the United States. They're not even on the quest for truth. They're on a quest to entertain you with news-themed content. And that's not the same thing. Their quest is different.

And so, it's just a shame that we have such an overload of news. We have such an overload of what we call news, but most of it isn't news at all. Most of it is commentary, opinion, regurgitation, perspective, storytelling, and entertainment. It's almost like it's news entertainment. It is not news in a factual, pure, ethical sense of the word. And I just think it's a problematic place. Because perhaps you and I, and our peers, know how to get to the truth. We can do the research. We can cross-reference, and we can get there. Although it's going to be a lot of work. It's going to be a few hours of research.

But the everyday person who is currently waiting tables, or driving Uber, or working a gig job as a clerk, these people don't have the time or the bandwidth to do 3 hours of research every day just to find out what the truth is. And so, they're at their most vulnerable. The everyday person has been robbed of factual information in this country and most countries, but especially in this country. And I just think it's a very risky place for us to be in for a long time. We're looking for solutions. We're looking for partners across the space. And obviously we're pioneering our own solution of how we can give the facts, the power of facts, back to the everyday American.

Eric Kavanagh: That's great. I love that. And you're promoting, as an undercurrent here, critical thinking. And that's the deal. I saw a comedian just the other day joking about this, and it was really funny, of course, because it's true. That's a classic Simpsons line. Homer says, "That's funny 'cause it's true." Basically, she said, "Guys, it was so crazy in the '90s when I was growing up, because we would do this thing, and I don't even know if I can say this anymore, but just maybe listen up. We would do this crazy thing where we would do critical thinking. We'd hear what this person said and then what that person said, then we'd make up our own mind." And to your point, there is a clear effort. In fact, the term "conspiracy theory," where did that come from? Let me tell you, people conspire all the time. There are conspiracies every hour of every day somewhere, but the fact that all of a sudden you were shamed for being a conspiracy theorist.

I'll close this segment out with a great quote from a guy named Jimmy Dore, who has a 1-hour comedy special called "COVID Lies Are Funny." He said, "I remember when people were like, 'Oh, don't do your own research.' I remember when doing your own research was called reading." People were mocked for, "Oh, you didn't do your own research, did you? You should trust the scientists or something." And it's like, can you even define science? What is science? Science is an exploration. It's a discipline which focuses on research and tries to get to the bottom of things to understand how the world works. I think a lot of people conflate science with engineering. We can build rocket ships thanks to what we learned in science, because of the engineering that was done with the metals and the material science and all these things, but it's the engineering which creates skyscrapers and big buildings and all sorts of big, powerful things like ships that cruise across the ocean and blow stuff up. But we'll be right back with our podcast bonus segment. You're listening to Inside Analysis.

All right, folks, time for the podcast bonus segment here on a fascinating show with Kira Shishkin. It's K-I-R-A. Last name is S-H-I-S-H-K-I-N, Shishkin, of informed.now. I have checked it out. I signed up for informed.now. It's great. You get this little text message in the morning. It's SMS. That's the primary means of delivery. And Kira had some great numbers on how many people check SMS, and it's high. It's like 90% will check. And if you continue to use it, you kind of lean on it. So, I think it's a great way to just get a bite-sized piece of information. I've had ideas myself about media sites. We even built a technology called Media Lens years ago that was designed to allow you to build your own sort of dynamic headlines page.

Lots of people are trying to own this space. Apple, Samsung, all kinds of companies want to be the source of information. But to your point, probably because they want to bias you, and they're just so politically motivated. They're like, "Oh, you can't possibly root for this guy, because he's terrible." That's the mindset behind a lot of this stuff. But what I'm interested in is understanding the network. You have researchers around the world. I'm guessing they all focus on different areas. What does the process look like to decide what goes into this thing every single day? Can you tip your hand a bit about the methodology?

Kira Shishkin: Our methodology is a commitment to a process. This process is half human, half technological, and overall we take full responsibility for the content, right? Unlike an RSS feed, or unlike any kind of news app where they're essentially aggregating content without taking responsibility for it, very much unlike that, we take full responsibility for the content that comes out of our ecosystem. If you get a text from informed.now, you know that informed.now is putting its full reputation on every word and every character in that text, because we don't need another AI-generated news segment. We don't need another slop where you don't know if you can trust it, you have to double-check it, you have to triple-check it. I want to say up front that we take full responsibility for the content. That's really important. We take responsibility for the research that we have done to ascertain the facts and to present them to you in a way that we think is most worthwhile for your attention.

We write in the length of a headline, but we give you the meat and the synopsis of the entire story. Not just of a single article, but of all the articles that we discovered and believe to be credible about a certain issue. When we have primary sources, which in our case is 3 out of 4 times, sometimes even more than that, we lean heavily on them. We directly read the Supreme Court case. We read the whole thing, all 6,000 pages of it. If there's a bill of Congress, we read the bill. If there's an announcement from a government, whether that's the White House or Iran or Ukraine or Russia, we read the announcement. If there are public companies, large NGOs, the United Nations, the World Health Organization publishing information, instead of reading it from a secondhand, thirdhand creator or writer, we engage with the primary source directly. So, that's a little bit of the foundational commitments that we have that I wanted to surface up front.

To answer your question, the way we curate information is based on significance. We are a significance-based news source, and it's event-driven as well. You won't learn from us things that are localized, very small, trivial, or have very limited impact. You won't learn from us celebrity gossip or sports content. There are better places to go for that than us. With us, we essentially have this experiment, which is kind of the whole experiment of informed.now: if you could only read news for 30 seconds a day, as much as you can consume news, what should make that cut? What's going to make that curation? We think it should be the most significant news out there. How do we define significance? As being world-changing. And how do we define world-changing? We ask ourselves 2 questions. How much does this change the lives of how many people? It's a double-sided question.

And so, we're looking at a scale of hundreds of thousands to millions of people being affected. Again, we don't focus on localized accidents. We're not the best place for that. We look at world-changing, large-scale phenomena. And changing the lives comes down to changes in freedom, optionality, safety, security, health care, technological access, things that we would describe as inevitable changes to the human condition. And so, we're never comprehensive. We're not a source to go to to read all the news in the world. In fact, I don't think such a source exists or should exist. We are a place where, if you only have 30 seconds in your day to get caught up and get informed, this is the place you go to get the most insight per second, the most value for your buck in terms of getting informed without all the peripheral noise.

Eric Kavanagh: Yeah, I think that's great. I think you have a fantastic mission. Like I said, I think you have an antidote to the morass that is modern media in America. I'm very hopeful about it. I think you're really onto something. And so, I'm going to purchase the service for myself, and I'll even promote it to my friends in our network, because I think you've gotten back to the basics. You've gone back to first principles, which is what news is supposed to be focused on. And somewhere along the line, I think you're right, it was a long time ago. It's not just recently. And politics has a huge role to play here. But I'm like you. I want to help people stay informed, to have the facts, because if you don't have all the relevant facts in a situation, it's very difficult to make the right decision.

This is the kind of thing that business people want. I want to know what's happening, who's paying how much for which service, what does it do, what's my competition, what do I enjoy doing? That's my advice to folks, the Venn diagram. What do you enjoy doing? What can you make money at doing? And basically, what are you good at doing? Wherever that Venn diagram comes together, that's what you should be focused on. And I think people will be happy if they are informed. They'll at least know what's going on. Because if you look at unrest around the world, unrest always and forever stems from lack of trust. Always. Anytime there's unrest in a country, it's because the people do not trust the government. They don't believe in the government, and so they rise up. That's when you get rebellions and revolutions and wars and all kinds of things.

These wars, good grief, how the heck did this thing get so bad? It's really bad right now. That's why I say we're in the middle of World War IV. Things are changing dramatically and rapidly. What's going on in Venezuela right now? I want to know what's going on in Venezuela right now. How do I do that? I go on X maybe and see little snippets. But anyway, look this gentleman up online, Kira Shishkin. It's informed.now. Is that right?

Kira Shishkin: That's right, Eric. Yeah, informed.now.

Eric Kavanagh: You'll be hearing more from this gentleman in the future. We'll talk to you next time, folks. You've been listening to Inside Analysis.