News Trust in the AI Era

Ramin Beheshti 0:19

Hey Jordan, great to be here. Thank you.

Ramin Beheshti 0:53

Yeah, sure Jordan. Look, thanks for having me on as well. Really appreciate the opportunity to get to talk a little bit more about what Caliber has become.

And put simply the whole premise behind, you know, when we started this as The News Movement and then now as Caliber is where the aim is to be a media brand that's pushing convention. So The News Movement set out and is reaching Gen Z with news that they can kind of consume. It's the news that reported in a way that follows the principles of journalism and the traditional media and in the way that it's reported.

The Recount focuses on actually getting younger audiences engaged in US politics, which is no mean feat given the current environment and has been the current environment pretty much from 2016 all the way through. Capsule is another one of our brands. It's much more focused on women who take culture personally. And then we built our own platform, SaySo, which is launched this year and delivers personalized news from trusted creators and actually takes a lot of the learnings from The News Movement, The Recount and Capsule and delivers it in an overall experience. And then we combine all of that on the publishing side with a publisher powered agency, which takes all the insight, all the data, all the knowledge from those brands that we have and create campaigns for organisations such as Movember, KPMG, AstraZeneca, TaskRabbit, where they are thinking about telling stories to audiences, particularly on social, and we help them execute and deliver on those stories.

Ramin Beheshti 2:53

Yeah, it still follows again the principles that I've grown up with which is it's separate from the news gathering side of the organization, i.e. TNM, The Recount and Capsule. But it takes the understanding and the learning of how do you actually tell a complicated story that brands want to tell? They want to reach audiences directly these days and social is one way of doing that. And so we've created that storytelling unit, which is called The Caliber Collective to be able to help those brands. So yes, it is a form of what I would call custom content white label content, brand journalism, but it does sit separate from the newsrooms.

Ramin Beheshti 3:53

Yeah, I think when we started this business, we realized from the outset and again, our previous kind of employers that young people weren't consuming traditional news in the same way. It had gone behind paywalls. It had become increasingly complex to understand. And I have a huge amount of respect for kind of the journalists that I've worked with throughout my career. They do phenomenal work. But I think that more of the traditional news organizations are talking to kind of certain types of audiences that you they assume, understand everything that's kind of going on. And actually what we decided was, well, we were going to take the principles of well-reported, well-researched, rigorous content, but package it up in a way that people who are time poor, who are not overly interested in every final detail that's going on in Capitol Hill or in parliament or, you know, on the other side of the world, but they want to know enough. They can be informed and engaged and how do you how do you take those principles of journalism but package it up in a different way and reach that Gen Z audience? And that's what we kind of built with The News Movement and then kind of subsequently with The Recount and then SaySo.

Ramin Beheshti 5:22

Yeah. And anecdotally, when we started this business, you know, TikTok was a thing, but it was kind of known for dance videos. And when we were taking The News Movement around and pitching it, people were like, you know, people in the news industry were like, there's no way that you can do the Ukraine. I remember Ukraine, Russia, Russia just invaded Ukraine at the time. They were like, there's no way you can do that in 60 seconds in video on TikTok. Now.

If you look at most of the kind of more highbrow news apps, they've all got short form video sections in there. So I think, you know, what we tapped into was that this is the way that people want to consume information. You can continue to bury your head in the sand over here, but it's going to cost you audience. Going to cost you the ability to kind of engage. And lo and behold, actually younger audiences aren't growing up on that diet of traditional mastheads. They are much more connecting with different types of news outlets, including creators.

Ramin Beheshti 7:43

Yeah, look, I'm also a millennial. I think I'm kind of on the border of millennial and the one above it. So I just scrape in there as an older millennial. I think the trend and it's not just Gen Z anymore. Like it's proliferated. If I look at like people trust people, they trust them to give them information, to give them reviews, to give them recommendations. And increasingly that because social destroyed almost a barrier to entry for content creation, that people trust other people telling them information. That has a world of problems by the way, right? Like you have kind of bad actors, bots, et cetera, creating content just to stir up controversy or to stir up ill feeling but the fundamental principle is that people now trust people a lot more than they do, well I'm going to trust it because it's the masthead and the masthead has always been right and actually I think trust in those kind of traditional media organisations has never been lower.

Ramin Beheshti 9:01

Yeah, just sorry, just to point out, like, I think it's really unfair, right? I genuinely, I've worked in these organizations, the amount of rigor that goes into this and the standard and the quality of the journalism is second to none. I think somewhere along the way, and I was part of this, right? Like I worked in media for 15 years, the communication of those standards, of that quality was assumed, not implicit rather than explicit. And so you even don't know the difference between a well-meaning creator telling what's going on versus the journalist who's kind of verifying three different sources that are saying exactly the same thing. They treat it exactly the same. That's partly down to the platforms fall, but I also put some of the issue on the organizations and not being able to convey the standards and the quality that exists internally in these organizations.

Ramin Beheshti 10:47

Yeah, look, I've been somewhat encouraged over the past couple of months about how, kind of, guess, again, these newsrooms are more open to adopting AI to help them move quicker, to move more efficiently, more effectively, but with caution. And I think if I'm honest, that's how we look at it with Caliber, right? Like we always want a human involved in the storytelling. We will never hand that over to AI. But I think there are, again, with the size of our newsrooms, both in the US and the UK, the ability to move more nimbly at adopting these practices the AI tools and the ability for Claude to review a draft rather than to create the draft right. I think we're much more nimble and able to do that and actually with SaySo we've been quite deliberate about not rebuilding an algorithm that tries to guess what the user wants based on what might have read or watched and said they want. And I think that for us was a really kind of deliberate line. I do think people crave a little bit of that human curation, but I think i think that the challenge is that you can't ignore how, and I am a technologist at heart, how incredibly powerful the technology is. And if you harness it in the right way, then I think it can be a massive accelerant for the news industry.

Ramin Beheshti 13:08

Yeah, I think first of all, we've kind of broken down our own walled garden. And I think this is also part of the challenge of traditional news. It's kind of like, well, we're only going to put on content that we've created. We've said actually people trust people. Yes, people trust TNM. Yes, people trust The Recount, but they also trust all of these other creators who we built relationships with. So first and foremost, SaySo is a place where there is a certain standard that you have to meet in order to be able to publish content. Not anybody can go on there and publish it. We do the vetting of that and we've built the relationships with those creators. That the first place is kind of if you compare it to some social media, not everybody with an account can just go out there and say what they want. The creators that we select have been doing this for some time, they're trying to do things in a way that I and the company recognise as following the principles of good journalism. The second thing is building a product for the first time in my career that doesn't rely on advertising was a bit of a game changer because if you think about the dynamics of advertising and the social media platform struggle with it, hence why the algorithm, they need to keep you on that platform for as long as possible because every additional second minute, hour is another series of advertisers, advertisements and a series of dollars that come with it. When you decouple that What you realize is that actually people don't want to spend all of their day consuming the news. They just want to get in, get a series of information so they're slightly more informed, slightly smarter than they were before they did it and get on with the rest of their day. And so we built SaySo on this principle of not overwhelming people. Don't have, it deliberately has a start and an end and that start and end is quite quick. It's called the digest. And if that's all you consume in a day, that's brilliant. And so we're trying to build that habit of coming in every day, consuming the digest, consuming it on a range of subjects, but at the core of it is kind of what's going on in the world. So everybody gets at least one piece about what's going on in the world, but then added to that are their personal kind of interests that they've selected. So it could be tech, could be sports, could be arts and culture. All of those are kind of different categories on SaySo and we've got different creators across it.

But you get your digest and you have a sense of completion and a sense of almost calm. Like when I get to the end of it, I'm like, okay, cool, right. I know enough now that I can get on with the rest of the day. I think that for us is quite a big differentiator in how we think and how we're building the platform.

Ramin Beheshti 16:10

Yeah, definitely. So first of all, I've been, you know.

It was nerve wracking. We're building essentially a two-sided marketplace where we're bringing in creators and we're trying to bring in audiences and match those two pieces together. So it was quite nerve wracking doing that at the start. I have been overwhelmed by in a positive way, with the kind of attitude, support and investment from the creators on these platforms. Sorry, from on our platform. You know, they've really kind of bought into what we're trying to do. They've helped us build it with us. And I would say actually one of the things that we've differentiated ourselves compared to some of the other platforms that are trying to do a similar thing is the way that we treat them back. So we're trying to help them grow their businesses, grow their kind of audiences, because it all benefits. It's kind of a mutually beneficial situation.

So, yeah, I've been kind of overwhelmed, like I said, in terms of how the creators have taken to the platform and adopted it. They're us bring in audience. They're helping us, like I said, improve elements and aspects of the platform. So it works better for them as well.

Ramin Beheshti 18:13

Yeah, one of the big things again with SaySo that we're focusing on is this kind of a concept of micropayments. And again, we, are, we are early into it, but the idea was that we don't want to go down this route of you get a subscription, you forget how to cancel the subscription. You don't ever use it. You get a bit irritated that you've got a subscription and you end up cancelling or end up cancelling and coming back at a lower price, which is again what a lot of the media companies are seeing at the moment. For us, it was much more about if you get the digest and you see value in the digest, we are going to kind of charge you for that. As you consume it, you pay a small amount. We're also building out other pieces which allow the more direct monetization of creators. Like you said, there's a few companies that already do that, inside the platform being able to do that. So I definitely see that as a real kind of, opportunity.

If I draw a parallel to gaming, right, I used to buy a 50 pound, $50, sorry, you can still tell even though I've been in America for 12 years struggle with the currency, you used to buy a $50 game and that was it, right? You played your game. Now games are much more kind of free to air, but you pay as you kind of consume and consume different parts of that. And so the model is already there. It's kind of how do you apply it to information consumption? And that's what we're doing with SaySo. So I see that as a big shift and a big opportunity. And then I guess I'll just touch upon the agency.

That's been from day one, a source of great pride. It wasn't something that we necessarily set out to do. And I see a lot of our competitors, if you like, who are doing social first news. They don't have that agency component, but it's allowed us to build great relationships with some fantastic brands. I think I mentioned a few of them, where we can take all the data all the science that we've applied to creating our own social content and help those brands tell their stories to audiences on social as well. And that's been hugely lucrative, right? It's grown, it will grow 100% year on year for the last two years. And it kind of continues to grow quite significantly because more and more brands are realizing that there is the opportunity to tell their story either via creators or directly to their audiences. And we help broker and create that content.

Ramin Beheshti 21:41

Yeah, we're at the foothills, right? So we are building our audience, building that engagement. We're experimenting with different ideas and models around how to monetize it. I loved your analogy in terms of kind of going back to the newsstand, buying that. And I think people have become quite addicted to subscriptions. And I think people want and crave that kind of more flexible approach. I also, my other thing about paywalls and look, I built the paywall at the Journal, I helped build the paywall at the Journal. So, but it kind of stem, it stops curiosity, right? So if you think about the concept that the moment that you're most likely to subscribe is when you're most curious. You've got a story, you've clicked on it, you're really interested in the headline and you get, you know, a hundred words in and it's like, here's the paywall.

And that's poor way to build a relationship with someone, right? So what I'm trying to say is if you use it and you get value from it, pay for it. If you don't use it, don't pay for it, right? But let me not stem you from being kind of curious. One of the ideas, and again, this is where I think AI has been incredibly powerful and helpful, is rather than kind of personalizing necessarily what's going to be in the digest. Well, you started to think about is well, Jordan, you want two different digest. You want one in the morning, you want one in the evening, you're commuting home from wherever your office is in the evening. You want different topics in the evening. You want your digest in the morning to be slightly longer. You want to be able to read in the evening versus watch in the morning. Like how do you build that type of personalization and being able to customize that, is that something that people would pay for? So it's like news on your terms rather than on the way that I want to deliver it to you.

Ramin Beheshti 24:19

I don't think it's just 2027. I think it's kind of, it's happening now. And I think it will long kind of continue is that the organizations, media organizations that are going to win are going to recognize that there is a value to human curation and people will kind of want that. They'll almost crave it because in a world of AI slop and like they don't know what to trust and you know they don't know what's authentic and what's not authentic they can't trust their eyes their ears in terms of being able to trust anything, people will want to know that they're going somewhere for that kind of human curated view, but they're going to want it on their terms. And the flip of AI is you can ask questions and get answers and you can be at this level of detail or this level of detail, sorry you can't see my hand, and different users and the content has to be able to service both and I think media organisations who are going to win are going to realise that people are going to be increasingly more demanding that they want news and information on their terms rather than the terms that the media outlet decides is going to be delivered on or when the media outlet decides it's going to be delivered on.

Ramin Beheshti 26:52

And Jordan, honestly, like that is exactly what we're trying to build. I won't be as out of here saying like, you know, we're going after Apple in that sense, but all terms means I want to watch and you want to listen. And actually it's the same content, but I'm watching and you're listening. We're building that marketplace of creators who meet a certain bar and threshold that you know that when you go there, you can get trusted information from them. So I love those two, those predictions, but I, but I think to your wider point, there is a rebundling that will happen, right? Substack is a great platform. I love the guys who built it. Beehiiv is another one. I'm huge fans of them, but it's a little bit like the wild west when you turn up because you don't know who to trust.

Like who's a reputable Substacker? Who's a, who's and you're kind of like, how do I discover new subjects, new pieces of information? But I want to know that I trust their viewpoint. And actually without part of our business, The Recount is actually doing that in vertical. So we're building out these verticals where we finding Substackers, like for example, in public health and we're bundling them all up and we're saying actually these guys are the ones who are trying to do things in a consistent way.

They've got huge audiences. How do advertisers find those audiences? Because it's all become fragmented for advertisers. And so how we help bundle that up? How can we use our social reach to amplify those Substackers? And how can we do that by vertical? So I definitely agree with the person you were speaking to yourself. There's a rebundling that's happened. And that's how kind of how I'm positioning Caliber across the board.

Ramin Beheshti 28:50

So it has been drilled into me by the team to always be on LinkedIn. Like on it, I'm posting even though I feel quite uncomfortable about certain parts of posting, which is ironic given I run a social media company. But if anyone wants to reach out to me, I'm on LinkedIn all the time and I'm much better now at LinkedIn DMs.

Ramin Beheshti 29:16

Thanks Jordan, thanks for having me on.