NEWS STARTUPS AS AGENTS OF INNOVATION: For-profit digital news startup manifestos as metajournalistic discourse

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News Startups as Agents of InnovationMatt Carlsona & Nikki Usherb

a Communication, Saint Louis University, USAb School of Media and Public Affairs, George WashingtonUniversity, USAPublished online: 28 Aug 2015.

To cite this article: Matt Carlson & Nikki Usher (2015): News Startups as Agents of Innovation,Digital Journalism, DOI: 10.1080/21670811.2015.1076344

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NEWS STARTUPS AS AGENTS OF

INNOVATION

For-profit digital news startup manifestos as

metajournalistic discourse

Matt Carlson and Nikki Usher

For-profit digital news startups backed by large investors, venture capital, and technology

entrepreneurs have taken on an increasingly significant role in the journalism industry. This

article examines 10 startups by focusing on the manifestos these new organizations offer when

they introduce themselves to the public. These manifestos are an example of metajournalistic

discourse, or interpretive discourse about journalism, that publicly define how journalism is

changing—or is not. In identifying and touting the superiority of their technological innova-

tions, the manifestos simultaneously affirm and critique existing journalistic practices while

rethinking longstanding boundaries between journalism and technology.

KEYWORDS: digital journalism; innovation; manifestos; metajournalistic discourse; mobile

journalism; news startups

Introduction

Amid narratives of doom and gloom so often associated with the viability of

contemporary journalism, a somewhat surprising sight has been an outpouring of

investment to fund a new generation of online news organizations. These are a new

breed of news startups: not non-profits or hyperlocal news efforts, but for-profits funded

by venture capital, technology entrepreneurs, and large companies, including media

organizations. To make a play for attention, authenticity, and authority in a crowded

news market, news startups introduce themselves to the public through “manifestos”

(Dror 2015). In practical terms, these manifestos offer insight into these companies’

products as they position themselves as new entrants into journalism. They define the

mission of the company by setting both the principles the news organization aims to

embrace and the practices it will follow. But in a broader sense, these news startup

manifestos simultaneously affirm and critique journalism as process and practice.

This article examines these news startup manifestos as an example of metajour-

nalistic discourse (Carlson, forthcoming), which is a specific form of interpretive discourse

that looks at issues of journalistic performance, normative assumptions, and appropriate

practices. From this vantage point, these statements provide both an assessment about

the state of journalism and an assertion about journalistic forms for the future. These

Digital Journalism, 2015http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2015.1076344� 2015 Taylor & Francis

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manifestos take on extra meaning given the lack of an established paradigm for digital

news (Chadwick 2013; Franklin 2012; Ryfe 2012). Amidst larger media upheaval, these

sites compete to define what digital news should look like, reestablish the boundaries of

journalism, and determine strategies for legitimating news content. In these ways, the

manifestos become part of establishing journalistic authority, or the ability to create

knowledgeable utterances about events in the world (Zelizer 1992). Authority is never

assured or static, but part of an ongoing process involving both news practices and the

ways these practices are discursively legitimated (Eason 1988).

To explain and clarify the components and discursive strategies of digital news

startup manifestos, this study explores eight recent US examples and two European

startups: Circa, First Look, FiveThirtyEight, Inside, Matter, Ozy, Vox, Vocativ, Summly

(based in the United Kingdom), and Blendle (based in the Netherlands). These news

organizations have wide-ranging forms: some are aggregators, some are exclusively

developed for mobile, some condense the news, others offer longform journalism, with

some dedicated to niche coverage. What they share is significant investment to build a

for-profit company from scratch at a time when many have declared traditional journal-

ism to be facing certain death (see McChesney and Pickard 2011). As print news media

continue to shrink, venture capital provided $300 million to news organizations alone

in 2014 (Holcomb and Mitchell 2014), indicating a belief in future profits. In the United

States, Pew estimates that new online startups like Vox, Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post,

Business Insider, and others were responsible for the majority of the new jobs created

in the news industry over the past six years—almost 5000 of them (Jurkowitz 2014).1

This article provides a closer look at the media environment in which these star-

tups have formed, and provides the conceptual framework of metajournalistic discourse

and how it relates to issues of practice to better contextualize the manifestos. After

briefly introducing the method, the article offers a thematic textual analysis guided by

the metajournalistic discourse framework. The conclusion looks across these cases to

explain what these manifestos tell us about emerging forms of news and some of the

challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

Background and Context for News Startups

Though some observers of the news industry would point out that traditional

journalism in the United States has been in decline at least since the 1980s, the

acceleration of the industry’s decline in profitability—particularly in newspapers—over

the past decade has been labeled the “newspaper crisis” (see Siles and Boczkowski

2012; local television stations and network news have also experienced declines in audi-

ence share as well). This crisis in news arises from the perfect storm of economic,

technological, and social change wrought by the rise of the Web, the decline of the

traditional news business model, falling rates of political participation and increasing

rates of polarization, and a declining faith in the authority of journalists to provide

credible and meaningful journalism (Gitlin 2011). The crisis in journalism has resulted in

introspection within the news industry as well as an attempt at innovation inside tradi-

tional newsrooms. Journalists mourn their own decline as seen in their goodbye letters

(Usher 2010) and in the post-mortems of newspaper closures like The Rocky Mountain

News and Seattle Post Intelligencer (Carlson 2012).

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Scholars and practitioners point out that newsrooms are slow to change, from

regional newsrooms (Ryfe 2012) to The New York Times (Usher 2014). Concern about

the future of news abounds. As Anderson, Bell, and Shirky write:

The effect of the current changes in the news ecosystem has already been a reduction

in the quality of news in the United States. On present evidence, we are convinced that

journalism in this country will get worse before it gets better, and, in some places … it

will get markedly worse. (Anderson, Bell, and Shirky 2012, 2)

Yet, despite the lamentations over the decline of legacy journalism, another response

to the upheaval of longstanding news organization practices has been a markedly opti-

mistic stance that the affordances of digital media will lead to the rise of new forms of

news. The examples explored below provide evidence for a desire to rethink or reinvent

the news. Certainly, many legacy news organizations have aggressively sought to adapt

to the changing news environment.

The fears and hopes connected to the disruption of traditional journalism pro-

vide the context for the new wave of for-profit news organizations we refer to as

“news startups.” Startups are defined in many ways, with some defined as simply

just a new company beginning from scratch. However, a more common definition is

a company that receives funding from an external source, such as investors or a lar-

ger company (Thiel 2014). This funding is not tied to more traditional bank loans or

other debit structures, insulating new companies from short-term profit considera-

tions to instead focus on innovation, experimentation, and growth (Ries 2011). Terms

like “permanently beta” (Neff and Stark 2004), “iterative” (Engel 2011), and “freedom

to fail” characterize the larger cultural discourse about startups. However, for star-

tups to garner initial investments, they need to clearly explain their unique contribu-

tions to an existing industry. As such, they must differentiate their products from

other offerings: first in meetings with investors where they “pitch” their product,

and second by introducing their product to the public. This introductory process

often involves an ideological statement of principles contained in a “how it works”

manifesto (Blank and Dorf 2014).

Startup manifestos are a genre in the loosest sense; they lack unified formal rules

or consistent elements (Dror 2015). In the case of news, these manifestos act as persua-

sive documents that address multiple groups, including audiences, advertisers, and

investors. They become part of the process of launching a news site. In the news indus-

try, the term startup has also been used to refer to non-profits and small organizations

bootstrapping their way, but this study narrows the focus to for-profit news startups in

response to their rise in prominence and the opportunities that come with the culture

and backing of external funding from venture capital, technology entrepreneurs, or

large companies. These for-profit startups offer hope of a new way to reinvigorate the

business model for news (Bell 2014) while also introducing new types of investors and

technologists to journalism.

Metajournalistic Discourse

The emergence of these new digital news startups offers a constitutive moment

to examine the creation and circulation of underlying assumptions about journalism. At

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heart, journalism indicates a set of practices involved in the production and circulation

of news. These practices include both procedures for gathering and presenting news,

as well as understandings of how these practices legitimate news. In the United States

and other parts of the world, the professional model of journalism took root at the

beginning of the twentieth century (Schudson 1978), to the point where professional-

ism became the enduring organizing principle for journalism (Waisbord 2013). But it

would be a mistake to assume that the practices of journalism are either innately stable

or agnostic regarding medium. Journalism should be understood as an inherently medi-

ated practice, in which the various media shape and constrain news in ways that affect

their claims to authority (Meltzer 2009; Zelizer 1992). Throughout time, the develop-

ment of new media forms has led to a continuously changing media environment

marked by hybridity (Chadwick 2013). What is needed to make sense of journalism is a

conceptual emphasis on the tension between change and stasis among actors compet-

ing to define the journalistic field (Bourdieu 2005).

Understanding journalism’s response to changing media requires examining how

various journalistic actors react to, and make sense of, this perpetual state of flux. New

technologies within the newsroom, for example, have challenged how news work is

simultaneously conducted and imagined (Powers 2012). Amidst ongoing change, the

question arises as to how innovative forms and practices come to have journalistic

authority. It would be shortsighted to accord new journalistic forms authority only

because of their proximity to existing forms. Instead, what is needed is careful analysis

of new practices as well as the discourses that surround these practices and gives them

meaning. The latter constitutes “metajournalistic discourse,” which is defined as “public

expressions evaluating news texts, the practices that produce them, or the conditions

of their reception” (Carlson, forthcoming).

Metajournalistic discourse provides a conceptual lens for analyzing the discursive

space in which various actors pronounce both implicit assertions and explicit argu-

ments about journalism. This discourse is not only central to community formation

(Zelizer 1993), but it also works across groups to establish legitimacy (Dahlgren 1992).

Metajournalistic discourse does what Berkowitz (2000) calls “double-duty”—it provides

meaning for the journalistic community while also aiming to define journalism to the

larger public. The modes of legitimacy arising through metajournalistic discourse shape

and constrain journalists’ actions as well as position the public to interact with the

news in circumscribed ways.

In certain moments, journalists direct their gaze inward to make themselves the

story. Such is the case with public debates over what may be termed “the future of

news” that have produced what Franklin (2012) terms a “proliferation of neologisms”

among both academics and journalists trying to make sense of emergent news prac-

tices. It is within this context that the startups examined below seek to establish them-

selves as the next generation of journalism. Any online news startup faces the initial

tasks of defining what it does, differentiating itself from legacy and other digital news

organizations, and arguing for why it deserves an audience. These tasks provide a van-

tage point for examining what we call a “manifesto” (Dror 2015). Such statements pre-

sent individualized claims about their specific sites, but do so through assessments

about the state of journalism and assertions about correct journalistic forms for the

future. Given the lack of an established paradigm for digital news and the larger media

upheaval detailed above, these sites compete to define what digital news should look

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like, reestablish the boundaries of journalism, and determine strategies for legitimating

news content. In all these ways, these manifestos contribute to the discursive establish-

ment of journalistic authority for new modes of news.

Method

To explain and clarify the discursive strategies of digital news startup manifestos,

this study explores 10 examples: Circa, First Look, FiveThirtyEight, Inside, Matter, Voca-

tiv, Ozy, Vox (all of which are based in the United States), as well as Summly (based in

the United Kingdom), and Blendle (based in the Netherlands). These news startup sites

(described in Appendix A) were selected based on their national orientation (i.e., not

local sites), the recency of their launches (between 2012 and 2014), and for receiving

attention upon their launch in industry blogs such as Nieman Journalism Lab and The

Columbia Journalism Review, and popular press outlets such as The Atlantic, Politico, The

Guardian, and The New York Times. This sample is not meant to represent online news

as a whole. While online news sites have become firmly established—in the United

States, Slate, Salon, and the Huffington Post have all existed for over 10 years—these

10 sites were chosen because they emerged during a time of significant energy and

investment in for-profit and entrepreneurially directed journalism following years of

sharp declines for print news. This time-bound sample helps expose particular consis-

tencies during this moment in journalism. For this same reason, non-profits (e.g., The

Texas Tribune or ProPublica) were excluded to instead assess how for-profit startups

positioned themselves as the news industry’s economic future.

For each organization, Web searches were conducted to locate introductory state-

ments outlining the goals and processes of each site—the genre of text we call “mani-

festos.” The selection stage was compounded by three factors. First, because no

established formal criteria distinguish what constitutes a manifesto, the authors col-

lected a corpus of texts from these sites that clearly present the news organization to a

general audience, whether in great detail or in perfunctory ways. As a result, these

manifestos vary in length from a 200-word blog post by Ozy to FiveThirtyEight’s 4000-

word essay. Second, manifestos take varying forms. First Look, Vocativ, and Vox pro-

duced videos, which have been transcribed by the authors to be included in the sam-

ple (as a result of this transcription, the visual elements of the videos are not

discussed). Third, these sites did not necessarily limit themselves to a single introduc-

tory statement. Instead of trying to determine which of a number of introductory texts

best qualified as a manifesto, the authors instead accepted multiple texts per website.

The final sample yielded 17 texts, which are listed in Appendix A. Because the origins

of the data can be found in the appendix, parenthetical references have been omitted

from the references in the findings section below except for startups with more than

one manifesto in the sample. For these texts, the date is included.

The resulting sample was examined via qualitative textual analysis using axial and

open coding techniques to identity persistent themes across the texts. This analysis

was guided by metajournalistic discourse as an analytical framework. It focuses on three

interpretive processes of metajournalistic discourse: definitions, boundaries, and legiti-

macy (Carlson, forthcoming). Definitions include the establishment of basic distinctions

regarding what the news does (Dahlgren 1992). Boundaries go further in proposing

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borders between different types of actors or practices (Carlson 2015b; Gieryn 1999).

Finally, legitimacy involves establishing the basis for authoritative journalism (Eason

1988; Zelizer 1992). In performing the analysis, the voices of the manifestos are

privileged as speaking for themselves in iterative ways (Latour 2005, 47). As a final note,

while we included both US- and European-based news startups in the sample, no sig-

nificant differences relevant to our analysis emerged, likely because all organizations

featured reflect a dominant Western journalism paradigm (Hallin and Mancini 2004).

Findings

As a form of metajournalistic discourse, news startup manifestos constitute a twin

discursive act wedding an articulated vision of the social role of journalism with a set

of proposed concrete innovations aimed at improving news. They need to be read as

interpretive and iterative in their explicit attempts to convince a wide variety of stake-

holders—audiences, employees, advertisers, investors, etc.—of the rightness of their

visions. These texts define deficiencies in existing news practices before explaining how

their site’s practices remedy these shortcomings. This mode of address in turn shapes

the relationships with these multiple audiences, often overtly. Many of the manifestos

interpellated their audiences through second-person voices. For example, Ozy explicitly

directed its message of self-improvement to its audience: “We want to show you more

of this bright, interesting, colorful world we share. And if we do that, in the end you’ll

not only see more, you’ll be more” (September 17, 2013, emphasis added). Even as the

audiences are multifaceted, the tone of direct engagement signaled the purposiveness

of these manifestos.

Another initial observation affecting how these manifestos are read is the lack of

isomorphism among online news (Lowrey 2011). The variety of sites examined here—

e.g., mobile curation and aggregation sites, digital longform general news sites, video,

niche news—is echoed in the variety of different forms these manifestos take. Some

are articulated over a series of posts published on the news organization’s site, while

others are published in other publications, as videos, or preserved in “about” pages.

The resulting visions of journalism have similarities and differences—sometimes over-

lapping and, at times, even conflicting—which we explore through thematic analysis

using metajournalistic discourse.

What emerges is a plurality of approaches all stemming from how the affordances

of digital technologies facilitate a move away from the traditional routines of print and

broadcast news. In one sense, these manifestos create distance from these models by

constructing ideal-types of news not previously possible given the constraints of legacy

media. In differentiating themselves, they balance a subjunctive voice outlining the

new possibilities available with digital media along with concrete proposals for how

their sites will operate. But overemphasizing their novelty would be a mistake. They

also rely on longstanding notions of journalism and journalistic authority, often reinforc-

ing existing journalistic modes and normative commitments. The sections below first

explore the duality between critiquing and reinforcing traditional journalistic modes in

relation to legitimacy before turning to the specific negotiations between journalism

and technology.

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Establishing Legitimacy Through Critiquing and Reinforcing Journalism

Newly launched news companies face not only the challenge of achieving a

sustainable funding model, they must also establish themselves as legitimate chroni-

clers of the world. The model of professional journalism, prevalent throughout much of

Western journalism (Waisbord 2013), provides an extra-organizational set of guidelines

applicable to new entrants. Journalistic legitimacy, from this perspective, works across

news organizations, connecting to macro-level conceptions of the democratic and

social role of news. In undertaking this symbolic task through their manifestos, the

institutionality of journalism provides a ready set of practices and arguments undergird-

ing legitimacy.

Yet digital news startups must balance institutional mimicry with being explicitly

innovative and forward-looking. It is not enough that they exist as entities within a

competitive news market; they need to differentiate themselves from existing news.

What emerges is a tension between the need to critique traditional news as inadequate

with the need to rely on journalism’s institutionalized legitimacy. The manifestos reveal

a balancing act between the simultaneity of being of journalism and apart from journal-

ism as practiced. What emerges is an emphasis on innovation accompanying a soft

critique of journalism that ultimately reinforces traditional journalistic modes.

The need to draw on the legitimacy of journalism as a cultural institution while

developing an argument for its improvement resulted in a set of storytelling innova-

tions, including data-centric reporting, shorter incremental accounts, longform explana-

tory work, and niche-oriented news. For example, the duality between tradition and

innovation emerged in the new data journalism-oriented startup FiveThirtyEight’s 4000-

word manifesto, “What the Fox Knows.” Nate Silver, the author of the post and the

founder of the site, acknowledged existing journalism’s value before admonishing its

lack of data-centric reporting: “The problem is not the failure to cite quantitative evi-

dence. It’s doing so in a way that can be anecdotal and ad-hoc, rather than rigorous

and empirical, and failing to ask the right questions of the data.” Yet Silver was careful

to tame his critique, “Our methods are not meant to replace ‘traditional’ or conven-

tional journalism. We have the utmost admiration for journalists who gather original

information and report original stories.” Nonetheless, he argued that FiveThirtyEight,

with its analytically and technologically skilled staff, could augment news coverage

through not just “statistical analysis, but also data visualization, computer programming

and data-literate reporting.” Such claims show support for traditional journalism for

bringing original, significant stories to the public while making clear the critique that

traditional journalism does not do enough with data. In this way, the manifesto both

affirms and critiques traditional journalism.

A persistent critique emerging in these manifestos targeted the temporal and

spatial rhythms of traditional news cycles. In offering critiques of traditional journalism,

the manifestos often zeroed in on how the temporality of legacy media constrains

news production. Print and broadcast news conform to both the temporal regularity

and spatial constraints of the news product—e.g., the news hole for the newspaper or

time slot of a broadcast. In turn, audiences have to adapt to these production rhythms.

With the advent of digital media, the shift from thinking of news products distributed

at regular intervals in finite packages to releasing news-as-it-happens fundamentally dis-

rupts news production and consumption (Usher 2014). The critique of legacy media

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temporality persists throughout the manifestos, not as a critique of news per se, but of

technological affordances privileging production schedules and space constraints over

the exigencies of story development. Although the manifestos share a common disdain

for the existing temporality of legacy news, their proposed remedies diverge to favor

either slower, longform, explanatory works, or faster, incremental news.

Advocates for faster news flows accentuated an informational approach in which

stripped-down accounts were situated within the cluttered media environment. For

example, Summly promised “pocket sized news” as more amenable to younger news

consumers:

This product has been inspired by my generation and their style of content consump-

tion; fast and to the point. It will be useful for anyone who suffers from information

overload and wants to consume news and other content in a seamless manner on

mobile devices.

Similarly, Inside touted its ability to deliver news in “real-time” which was “designed,

like our entire product, to save you time.”

Circa also emphasized brevity when noting, “It’s easy to swipe through and read

a whole story in less than a minute” (October 15, 2012). Circa’s incremental approach

driven by events was closely tied to a criticism of the conventional journalistic

approach of writing fresh stories largely composed of redundant information. When

Circa noted that “the big ‘so what’ about Circa is how we’ve changed the form of news

itself” (October 24, 2012), its argument is primarily based on story-driven production

rhythms: “We don’t start every day with news amnesia. When a story lasts for several

days or weeks—it’s still just one story. We don’t write about week-long stories in a ser-

ies of repetitious articles” (October 24, 2012). These services are built on a temporal ori-

entation that pushes aside depth to deliver on quantity and speed. Certainly, breaking

news has always been part of modern journalism as well as a target of criticism regard-

ing the sacrifice of quality for speed (Lewis and Cushion 2009). The instant distribution

of digital media accelerates these forces in ways that reorient how news is delivered,

but not what news is.

In contrast to succinct expediency, other startups shifted their temporal orienta-

tion in the opposite direction to emphasize thoroughness over speed. FiveThirtyEight

and Vox both advocated this approach in their manifestos. In touting its methodologi-

cal care, FiveThirtyEight wrote: “The sacrifice is speed—we’re rarely going to be the first

organization to break news or to comment on a story.” Matter also contrasted its

temporal orientation as time-intensive “narrative nonfiction” from frequently updated

news sites. This method again provides a soft critique of traditional news cycles for

short-circuiting in-depth coverage that doesn’t slide easily into news production

schedules. This alternative temporal orientation seeks to overcome these constraints,

with the startups promising better news as result.

The push to radically rethink news production was grounded in a conventional

commitment to an information-centered model of journalism that takes advantage of

new digital capacities. For example, Circa’s manifesto celebrated its shift from individ-

ualized stories to instead “atomize” any story into “chunks” whereby only new aspects

of the story are added in 256-word updates (as new quotes, explanatory text, pictures,

or headlines) in accordance with how the story develops. This approach was described

via the mantra: “at Circa, we atomize, not summarize” (April 1, 2014). Users following a

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story only receive updates rather than continuously rewritten stories. This complicated

approach to “atomize” depends on Circa’s content management system to operate, but

also requires the normative argument of facilitating information transfer with its audi-

ences. In advocating for atomized news, Circa both critiques and affirms conventional

journalism.

In a similar manner, Vox positioned its unique value as deriving from the affor-

dances of digital technology. This is not an inherent critique of existing modes of jour-

nalism, but rather a critique of media forms. As Vox stated, “The nature of the media,

the nature of the space constraint, was that we couldn’t put all the information you

needed. But, we don’t have that constraint on the web. We can solve this problem”

(March 17, 2014). This critique of medium constraints gives rise to a minimally harsh

appraisal of traditional news forms: “The media is excellent at reporting the news and

pretty good at adding commentary atop the news. What’s lacking is an organization

genuinely dedicated to explaining the news” (March 28, 2014).

The ability of Vox to pursue its mission of making news stories understandable

also stems from its use of digital media platforms. Vox introduced what it calls “cards,”

which “add crucial context; behind highlighted words, where they allow us to offer dee-

per explanations of key concepts; and in their stacks, where they combine into detailed

—and continuously updated—guides to ongoing news stories” (April 6, 2014). These

cards provide an alternative mode of storytelling that helps Vox, but one explicitly situ-

ated as fulfilling entrenched expectations of journalism’s social role of informing audi-

ences while also correcting medium-based shortcomings that have hampered this role.

Vox’s manifesto continued:

Our end goal isn’t telling you what just happened, or how we feel about what just

happened, it’s making sure you understand what just happened. We’re going to deliver

a lot of contextual information that traditional news stories aren’t designed to carry.

The online format allows Vox to have the digital capacity to innovate across story

forms, but the argument for this innovation is very much grounded in traditional

understandings of journalism.

Ozy presented itself in somewhat less ambitious terms than Circa and Vox’s mani-

festos, but its tagline “smarter, fresher, different” augurs that the digital platform gives

readers a better chance to get new and unique stories. Aside from its novel design,

Ozy touted its presentational format as “proof that news can be edgy and educational,

informative and inspiring all at the same time.” However, this statement was not an

alteration of journalistic content as much as an attempt to present news in a more

interesting and time-efficient way.

Other news startups defined their importance through their specific contribution

to the storytelling landscape. In the case of Vocativ, a video manifesto explained the

news organization’s contribution:

Beneath the surface, there is a bigger story … If you know how to find it. Vocativ

searches 80% of the Internet you don’t see on Google or Facebook. It’s called the deep

web. Vocativ’s exclusive technology mines the universe of data to reveal world

changing events where no one else is looking.

Thus, Vocativ both promoted its technological prowess for mining the deep web to

help its journalists find data for their stories while also endorsing core principles of

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journalism. The manifesto bragged, “Vocativ is the first to uncover, the first to report,

the first on the ground … [it] discover[s] original stories, hidden perspectives, emerging

trends, and unheard voices from around the world.” In this way, Vocativ stressed its

strengths in actual reporting practices and its emphasis on discovery and timeliness, all

of which are familiar tropes for journalism. Yet, with its assertion that it will do it better,

Vocativ chastises journalism for failing to live up to its potential.

What these manifestos indicate is that cultural legitimacy is not independent from

context. These startups exist within a larger institutional framework that carries with it

both the normative commitments of traditional journalism and the frustration that its

practices do not fulfill the lofty goals these commitments set out (Dahlgren 1992). Sites

that differentiate themselves based on different types of storytelling are nonetheless

enshrining fundamental taken-for-granted assumptions about underlying journalistic

ideals. Temporal critiques further address underlying beliefs in how journalism ought to

be, though these efforts are divided across some of traditional journalism’s internal con-

flicts: being first and fast or detailed and contextual (Fink and Schudson 2014).

As for-profit entities, they have an imperative to earn profits. Yet the commercial

strategies of these sites were noticeably absent in these manifestos. Instead, they spent

an abundance of attention laying out a journalistic vision to sustain the cultural author-

ity necessary to be considered legitimate news sources. With this goal, the rhetorical

task driving these manifestos is the need to establish an argument for their sites’ dis-

tinctiveness while not distancing themselves too far from existing journalism. The star-

tups had to manage the tension between innovation and tradition through articulating

how these new forms improve journalism. In the end, they operate within an

established journalistic field with its own internal divisions and external pressures

(Bourdieu 2005). These manifestos provide a metadiscursive space to shape larger

understandings of the field in particular directions that contrast with traditional

journalistic actors.

Collapsing the Boundary Between Digital and Journalistic Innovation

The section above showed that although the startup manifestos frequently

offered soft critiques of conventional journalism—particularly with regard to issues of

form and medium constraints—they often relied on core journalistic norms and com-

mitments to legitimate the innovations that their sites presented. While these mani-

festos promise to do something more to make journalism better, they also differentiate

themselves as representing types of news organizations that have never existed before.

They explicitly address a core tension in journalism innovation by asserting that they

are both journalism and technology companies, and thus combine two cultures that

have at times been seen as at odds or incompatible with each other. Additionally, this

claim toward technological relevance locates these news startups as firmly invested in

the culture of startups and technological experimentation.

Long-running tensions exist between journalism as a cultural practice and its

technological workers, innovations, and practices. Even though the production of news

as mediated texts has always been deeply technological (Dooley 2007), newsroom divi-

sions have often separated out news workers from technology-centered counterparts

(Anderson 2013; Boczkowski 2004; Usher 2014). As legacy news organizations have

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transitioned to digital platforms, studies of news innovation have chronicled frequent

culture clashes (Usher 2013, forthcoming). Often organizations fail to integrate online

workers with their print counterparts (Robinson 2011). Meanwhile, adapting journalistic

work practices to a changing technological and economic reality faces entrenched

barriers (Ryfe 2012). It is in this context that the manifestos sought to define the jour-

nalism-technology connection in a manner that would avoid reestablishing these

boundaries in digital form.

Many of the startups overtly sought to erase boundaries between journalistic and

technological identities. Vox Vice President Trei Brundrett expressed this combination in

clear terms: “we weren’t just a media company, we were also a technology company”

(March 17, 2014). Similarly, First Look billed itself as “a marriage between a technology

company and a new kind of newsroom”—fitting, given that its founder, Pierre Omidyar,

also created eBay. Summly founder Nick D’Aloisio combined an interest in news with

the technology of “natural language processing (NLP) and machine translation”—tools

and skills rarely employed by traditional journalism outlets (Carlson 2015a)—in order to

“produce summaries for any screen size algorithmically.” Matter, which mostly engages

in longform journalism, still emphasized its combination of technology and journalism.

Its manifesto noted, “Matter doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s a publication that’s entirely

native to Medium, and built by the editors, designers, and engineers of Medium.” Here,

editors, designers, and engineers get equal billing, and the platform hosting Matter,

Medium, gets equal status as the publication itself. Vocativ, as noted above, also posi-

tioned itself as “a media and technology venture” in an effort to bridge journalism and

technology.

In collapsing the boundaries between journalism and technology, and highlight-

ing their efforts at innovation, the manifestos often identified a chief benefit of their

product as an improved user experience for news consumption. Blendle, the micropay-

ment European news aggregator, described it this way: “Blendle was built with love for

great journalism. It’s a new way for the next generation to discover and read the best

articles from newspapers and magazines. With the best user experience possible for

journalism.” Blendle provides news already considered to be quality, but in a

presentational form better suited for a Web experience.

The emphasis on using technology to improve the user experience goes further

with mobile-first apps. Nick D’Aloisio, who founded the aggregated mobile app Summly

at age 15, used the manifesto form to explain his frustration with existing news:

I was particularly interested in mobile news—it’s a really poor experience, full of lots of

waiting and frustration. Plus, at the risk of saying something obvious: the news is really

important! And I don’t feel like my generation is engaging with it as it should, in part

because most of our life is digital and existing technologies don’t necessarily do the

best job of engaging us with news content. So I was hoping to build something that

could help.

In this sense, it was not the news itself as a discursive form that did not work, but

rather the lack of a suitable platform built around emerging mobile technologies.

Circa also articulated its innovative contribution as reinventing the mobile news

space through better user experience: “Rather than trying to shoehorn existing content

into a new environment, we’ve created the first truly mobile-first news experience. Circa

brings comprehensive yet to-the-point news updates delivered in an engrossing mobile

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experience” (October 15, 2012). Similarly, Inside’s manifesto highlighted its unique

feature of being “mobile—specifically for smartphones,” and explained how users could

easily navigate content: “[you can] scroll and slide the deck to your heart’s delight with-

out ever using anything other than your thumb,” then cracked the joke, “Note: We are

not responsible for any thumb fatigue or injury you may incur.” In one sense, all these

sites sought to position themselves not so much as reinventing news, but as improving

the news consumption experience. This strategy meant erasing boundaries between

news and the technologies that create and distribute news.

In sum, these startups draw on technological superiority as a way to differentiate

their offerings from traditional news. By arguing that their products integrated the best

of technology into the journalism experience, these startups implicitly critiqued existing

news forms for failing to do so. Yet they did not advocate disrupting journalism’s core

tenets or rebuilding the epistemic grounds on which news rests. Instead, they alter

journalism by improving the technology of news presentation and delivery. Of course,

shifts in news form do relate back to shifts in the legitimating strategies of news

(Barnhurst and Nerone 2001). While the arguments here did not offer a frontal assault

on journalism, the emphasis on bridging the technological/journalistic divide had the

larger symbolic function of situating these startups within the spheres of venture capi-

tal, programming, and a broader startup culture/mentality that prizes itself on techno-

logical innovation—areas not often associated with journalism. As such, by promising

to improve journalism through technical means—better underlying technology, better

user experience, and technological solutions to what is perceived as an increasingly

complicated information environment—the manifestos engaged in boundary work

(Carlson 2015b) that brought together disparate fields with different social commit-

ments. How such realignments are manifested in news is only beginning to be realized,

as the next section shows.

The Experimental Attitude of the News Startup

While the manifestos generally stayed close to the legitimizing conventions

underlying journalism, efforts to differentiate themselves as technologically sophisti-

cated led to an embrace of the core conventions of startup culture. Startups, particu-

larly those emerging out of the technology world, differentiate themselves as being

works in progress rather than institutions with tried and true traditions (Neff and Stark

2004). Unlike conventional companies, technology startups accentuate experimentation,

prototyping, and an appetite for change (Ries 2011). With online news startups, the

technological world of incompleteness, beta-testing, and soft launches runs up against

the journalistic emphasis on established routines and slow change. Newsroom ethno-

graphies similarly critique a newsroom culture that is too tied to institutional inertia for

change (Boczkowski 2004; Ryfe 2012). This tension between ongoing technological

adjustments and journalistic surety produced what we term the “experimental attitude”

among news startups.

The hallmarks of the experimental attitude are the explicit acknowledgement of

constant and responsive innovation and a reluctance to embrace stasis. As Vox suc-

cinctly stated in all capital letters: “WE’LL ALWAYS BE A WORK IN PROGRESS” (April 6,

2014). This iterative position suggests that rather than presuming a foreknowledge of

12 MATT CARLSON AND NIKKI USHER

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successful digital news, startups openly confront their uncertainty. In the same text,

Vox wrote, “there is no better way to figure out the best way to do explanatory

journalism on the web than to do explanatory journalism on the web” (April 6, 2014).

The need to experiment trumps the establishment of certainty.

First Look also adopted the experimental attitude to turn the lack of fixed

answers into a strength rather than a weakness: “Our goal is to experiment, innovate

and overcome existing obstacles—to make it easier for journalists to deliver the trans-

formative stories we all need.” Here, the lack of answers is being driven by socially ben-

eficial motivations. Candidly, First Look added: “We’ll experiment with new and old

revenue sources and create entirely ones. We don’t have all of the answers. But we’re

really good at asking questions, and learning from our mistakes” (January 27, 2014).

The experimental attitude includes an acknowledgement of potential failure. In

perhaps the vaguest—and pithiest—statement of any of the texts about the experi-

mental attitude, Matter declared: “Matter is going to try stuff,” adding, “We’ll try not to

screw up, but sometimes we will. (Sorry about that, in advance)” (June 9, 2014). The

prediction of failure arose as well from FiveThirtyEight: “We are going to screw some

things up. We hope our mistakes will be honest ones.” The experimental attitude estab-

lishes a particular kind of relationship with its audiences in which these manifestos urge

audiences to allow these news sites to experiment and potentially fail.

In laying out these claims, the manifestos offer an implicit critique of traditional

news as too slow to change or acknowledge mistakes. The experimental attitude con-

trasts with the assured monovocality of professional journalism (Barnhurst and Nerone

2001); the opaque surety of traditional news gives way to an attitude of constant

refinement with the acceptance of occasional misfires. Risk is accommodated as a virtue

of the news organization, with mistakes being justified as the cost of pursuing the

expressed commitment to providing the best news experience possible in a rapidly

changing media environment. This attitude is born out of the expectation that media

technology will continue to evolve, requiring nimble news practices able to adapt to

innovation. But it is also a departure from traditional journalistic models emphasizing

continuity, opacity, and the solidity of news forms. This attitude alters the grounds of

journalistic authority by building in risk and accentuating a normative need for trans-

parency (Singer 2015) with the belief that this openness strengthens relationships with

the audience. Such a move reconstructs the basis of journalistic authority by including

an iterative dimension. It shifts the basis for trust from the permanence of tacitly

accepted news structures to the fluidity of news forms constantly being evaluated and

improved upon in visible ways.

Conclusion

Through the discursive form of the manifesto, the digital news startups examined

in this study situate their product innovations within an interpretation of how journal-

ism works, what its weaknesses are, and how it should be improved. Manifestos allow

new entrants to the field of journalism a public space to idealize what they would like

to change about journalism, and how they might imagine—and ultimately invent—

new models and new practices. They need to be understood within the context of the

considerable attention and enthusiasm that news startups have attracted from the

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news industry, which sparks further significant discussion—metajournalistic discourse—

around the future of the journalism industry as it relates to funding models, technologi-

cal innovation, and different forms for providing news to consumers. While news star-

tups funded by technology entrepreneurs, venture capital firms, and large companies

are a relatively recent phenomenon, their presence offers a catalyst for assessing tradi-

tional journalism’s effort to respond to technological, economic, cultural, and political

changes in the digital age. In all these ways, the manifestos bear on how journalism is

imagined, and as such are important for analyzing how the journalistic field responds

to an influx of competing ideas.

Yet even though these news startups are new entrants, the visions expressed in

their manifestos do not disrupt underlying and long-held journalism ideals and tradi-

tional aspirations. Instead of attempting to supplant the journalistic field, they enshrine

its existing aspirations and understandings by hoping to further journalism’s goals with

new types of products that will make journalism better for the public. In this same vein,

the manifestos show an aspiration to reimaging the boundaries between journalism

and technology by using technological prowess to create more sophisticated organiza-

tions and products. Technological sophistication, better user experience, and a culture

favoring experimentation challenge narratives of journalism anemic to innovation and

change. These organizations present themselves as more nimble and proactive in join-

ing technology and journalism in both product and culture. But they also place journal-

ism with the larger startup field, which introduces certain commitments—such as the

experimental attitude—that have been outside of journalism and its strategies of legit-

imation. In short, while no normative upheaval occurs in these manifestos, they do

advocate for enlarging journalistic culture to incorporate previously unfamiliar practices

and normative commitments.

In shifting the focus from discourse to practice, it should be made clear that the

future of these startups is uncertain. Undoubtedly, some of these organizations will

close and new ones will emerge (one of our news sites, Circa, has already ceased

operations while its founders seek to sell its technology). Journalism organizations con-

tinue to experiment with economic models for digital news, and, in a larger sense, the

startup model is fraught with uncertainty. Given this perilous environment, the mani-

festos unsurprisingly centered on questions of news product and technological poten-

tial with no mention of revenue models or the expectations for growth from their

investors. What is unclear is whether the content models put forth are sustainable as

individual enterprises or generalizable forces that others might emulate. Will these star-

tups and others like them continue to draw investments? The multiplicity of formats

also raises questions about the crowded field of content producers in the digital age.

The study of news startup manifestos invites future research following a variety

of directions. First, a more comparative analysis taking a cross-national perspective

could help sharpen the connections between national news contexts, funding oppor-

tunities, and digital adoption. Notably, the majority of these news startups are located

in the United States, the powerhouse of venture capital energy, but there are also

efforts underway in other parts of the world as well. Second, content analysis of the

news texts produced by startups can help draw connections between the interpretive

work of manifestos and the concrete products that get produced. Such work would

help draw out the normative components of the manifestos and question how well

implemented these are ideas actually are. Deviations from the ideals expressed in the

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manifestos will illuminate the difficulty of moving from imagining journalism to doing

sustainable news.

Similarly, ethnographic methods can examine the inter-newsroom workings of

these startups to draw comparisons and differences from traditional newsroom cultures.

Finally, it will be important to look at the relationship between traditional news

organizations and these news startups within the journalistic field. Future research

might look at whether (and how) news startups challenge traditional news organiza-

tions, the definitional struggles that emerge over the shape of news, and, perhaps, how

traditional news organizations change in response.

All of the news startups examined above face daunting odds. The history of jour-

nalism is a history replete with past failures as changes in technologies, populations,

literacy, and political culture have all altered how the news works. The promise of the

news startup and the realities of the news industry offer a larger context for under-

standing these manifestos. These texts provide examples of metajournalistic discourse

in which the companies’ founders work to shape how their sites are understood.

Through this public act, they also embrace particular modes for understanding jour-

nalism. To contextualize their sites, these actors must construct an image of the larger

media context. This study has argued that this is not a descriptive act, but an interpre-

tive one with ramifications for the formation of shared meanings of journalism and the

emergent practices that will shape the news for years to come.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of

Missouri’s School of Journalism for their support for this project.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

NOTE

1. In Europe, where news startup feasibility is more questionable and success is

defined by some as mere survival, there are only a handful of startups receiving

the kind of financial backing of US counterparts (Bruno and Nielsen 2012).

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Appendix

AThetable

containsthetextsthat

were

analyzedforthisstudy.

AllURLs

were

verifiedto

beaccurate

asofMay

1,2015

Site

Site

description

Man

ifesto

date

URL

Blendle

New

sag

gregatorfortablets.Based

intheNetherlands

March

11,2015

https://med

ium.com/on-blendle/one-web

site-all-new

spap

ers-an

d-

mag

azines-3a5

f6c8

360d9

Circa

New

sag

gregatorwithstory

updates

formobile

(ceasedoperationsin

June2015)

July

3,2012

http://blog.cir.ca

/2012/07/03/new

s-isnt-alway

s-a-narrative

/

October

15,2012

http://blog.cir.ca

/2012/10/15/circa

-new

s-iphone-ap

p-lau

nch

/October

24,2012

http://blog.cir.ca

/2012/10/24/five-things-that-m

ake-circas-new

s-unique/

April1,2014

http://blog.cir.ca

/2014/04/01/at-circa-we-write-stories-not-

summaries-take-two/

FirstLo

ok

Longform

journalism

(bestkn

ownforTheIntercep

t)October

15,2013

https://firstlook.org/2013/10/15/nex

t-ad

venture-journalism/

January27,2014

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