When Consumers of News Become Communities

Newsweek’s Subscriber Count Doubled in 2024, Community Building Credited

Newsweek, seemingly on life support just a year ago, has doubled its subscribers, surpassing the Washington Post, reports Mark Zohar, CEO of ViaFoura. Zohar says this was due to his innovations that empowered its subscribers to become a community. 

According to Brian Morrissey, writing in The Rebooting, Newsweek’s success is based on its community building overcoming the “original sin” of online news publishers when they chose to “surrender of the social interaction function to massive platforms like Facebook and Twitter/X.”

Below, screenshots illustrating Newsweek’s innovations.

Speaking of the Washington Post…

This famed newspaper — that once was central to driving President Richard Nixon from office —  has been struggling with declining readership, layoffs of hundreds of journalists, and controversies such as the recent exit of political cartoonist Ann Telnaes. Below, the community-building tactics it recently embraced. Will these be enough? Could BestWorld aid with its recovery ?


Allsides

We are currently discussing working with Allsides to test run both our human/AI hybrid forecasting and
”Bot or Not” techniques. Meanwhile, Allsides recently has begun collaborating with the Los Angeles Times to implement its bias meter system.

Allsides is a small Public Benefit Corporation. They have a proposal in the hopper at the MacArthur Foundation to enable local newspapers to implement their bias meter. They also have a crowdsourced investment campaign underway.

AskNews

“News, when quality matters. Integrate premium news data into your applications with a single line of code.” 
 AskNews is a subsidiary of Emergent Methods, LLC.  Some examples of their products below.

Right now, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti is exploring how he might integrate his media empire holdings into custom social media experiences.

““It’s clear we can’t rely on the platforms to create a positive environment for content creators like us. I’m beginning to think we need to create our own social media platform to give our audience a place on the internet that reflects their values. It would be a challenging project but I think there is a huge opening right now that someone needs to fill. Why not us?” says Peretti. However, Morrissey points out, “I suspect that horse is not just out of the barn but off the farm. Spin through BuzzFeed and it’s not exactly a vibrant time square.”

We at BestWorld are researching yet more ways for news media to build communities.

Our goal is to ensure that these communities are anchored by information that is truthful, believable, impactful, and scalable worldwide. And — if Buzzfeed’s CEO is serious, integrating our solutions with an easily tailored social media platform such as Mastodon might give us a foot in the door — or even blow the door wide open.

We know from research that by combining news with related forecasts that usually are correct, this builds credibility. In addition, we are experimenting with clearly labeled AI bots, with human oversight to detect (and sometimes make fun of!) their hallucinations. A key goal is to engage readers variously by rating each news item, by making relevant forecasts, and any other engagement tactic that may become effective. Research has shown that either making accuracy evaluations or forecasts have been shown to reduce political/social polarization and improve epistemic humility.  More on research findings supporting our goal here —>

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