Hi! My name is Lloyd Armbrust, Founder and CEO of OwnLocal here in Austin, TX.
Started ownlocal in 2010, when we applied to Y Combinator to “fix news”, got in, raised about .5mm, and moved to Austin TX as soon as we could.
Today OwnLocal works with 3,500 local newspapers all around the world helping them make money.
Although it’s surprisingly unpopular to say, we are a profitable and a growing startup here in Austin.
Before OwnLocal I had worked in newspapers for 15 years, and now my job puts me in front of a lot of media executives and we talk about the problems the industry is facing.
I know this business, I was there when Craigslist disrupted classifieds, when we started to lose auto revenue and real estate revenue.
Since I started OwnLocal, every year has been the worst year for the newspaper industry in the United States:
Newsrooms have declined from 56,230 to 38,790 employees in 2017
Paid circulation has decreased from 45.6mm to 34.6mm
Advertising revenues have dropped from B to .3B
And while online revenue has increased from .7B to .28B, newspaper’s total share of digital revenue has decreased from 7% to 4%
But Now there’s something even worse than the decline happening: we are losing the last thing we have left, our credibility in our communities.
Now that misinformation is spreading, fewer people are trusting news organizations, eroding the last asset that media has: their trusted brand.
The failing business model of print journalism has caused there to be fewer journalists than ever, in a time where there is more information to verify and scrutinize.
OwnLocal makes our newspaper partners about 0mm a year and I thought, since I built a business that helps with revenue, maybe I can help here.
So I started working on it with a few people and today we have the largest news dataset ever collected and we have yet to release our findings.
From a high level, what has really surprised me, is that there’s not a lot of real misinformation being produced, not in the mainstream anyway, and what is being produced doesn’t have nearly as big of an effect as how people are abusing and reusing real news to support their own agenda and bias.
I’d love to use this talk to examine not only what we’ve found but also what current research is saying about misinformation and what we can do to become a better, more informed, society.
Well, that was one take, with about 18 minutes left before the deadline, thanks for listening and I look forward to seeing you at SxSW 2019 🙂
More info on Is Real News More Dangerous than Fake News? – SxSW 2019 Submission
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