Journalism - Matter

Meet the teams of Open Matter Berkeley and Open Matter Georgia!

Participants in last month’s Open Matter MizzouAfter a brief interlude for a little thing called Matter Demo Days, we’re back next week with the final two installments of the first Open Matter bootcamp program. They’re happening on opposite coasts on the same days. Up first (by three

The Drunken Walk

🎧 The Drunken Walk, S3-E5: Jennifer Brandel— CEO, Hearken

For this week’s speaker series, we were lucky to welcome a longtime member of our community back to Matter. Jennifer Brandel, CEO of Hearken and Matter Four entrepreneur, joined us in New York City where she and Roxann Stafford, our Director of Program there, sat down to talk about

Journalism

Meet the teams of Open Matter Mizzou!

Open Matter rolls on! Our series of four design thinking and business model innovation bootcamps kicks off in earnest at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism on Monday, and we’re buzzing in anticipation to connect with and coach the incredible publications that are participating. Next up will be the

Journalism

Announcing the Open Matter NYC Teams

Less than two months ago, we had the tremendous privilege to announce Open Matter, a series of four design thinking and business model innovation bootcamps at leading journalism schools offered to for-profit news organizations. In partnership with Google News Lab and News Media Alliance, we’ll accept at least 20

Journalism

What Open Matter will equip you to do.

Top highlightThis spring, we’re launching Open Matter: Local News Bootcamps, in partnership with Google News Lab, News Media Alliance, and 4 Top J. schools. You can read more about the program and opportunities for local, for-profit news organizations here. The live application is here. Scenes from a past Media

Journalism

reallyread.it & the future of social media

reallyread.it is the world’s first online community built by and for people who really read articles on the internet. The single biggest problem with internet media and journalism is that most people don’t read. The average amount of time spent on an article is 2.5 seconds.

Media

Meet Matter Eight

When Matter was founded in 2012, the media industry was struggling in the face of huge changes in revenue models, technology, and audiences. The internet created a completely new playing field — one that allowed more voices to be heard, but also for a select few to make the rules. While

Journalism

Compass News: How we built an AI editor that makes millennials smarter, quicker.

Ciao!Mayank and I met at a pub in Covent Garden, the day after the Brexit vote. We chatted about how our friends had started blocking each other on Facebook because of comments on the 2015 election and Brexit. Initially, we thought this behaviour was hilarious — but the more we

Journalism

The Prodigal’s Return

Lecturing to our entrepreneurs in Matter SevenTwelve years ago, I left full-time journalism because I realized couldn’t do anything about the challenges I saw all around me. The Internet was eating everything. I could write, edit, and design a newspaper, but I couldn’t make a newspaper have healthier

Media

Meet Matter Seven

Top highlightThis year is different.When Matter. launched in 2012, we were inspired by Clay Shirky’s words on the rapidly-changing newspaper market: “now is the time for lots and lots of experiments”. Matter was created as a place to do those experiments. This year, in an increasingly divided world

Journalism

Grafiti on making smarter social media conversations

by Farhan Mustafa, Akbar Dawood, Juan Castrence, and Kyle Suess L to R: Juan Castrence; Kyle Suess; Akbar Dawood; Farhan MustafaOur journey started with a real revolution. Farhan Mustafa worked as a data journalist and producer at Al Jazeera English during the Arab Spring. He was on the ground during

Journalism

Establishing Diverse Media For Our Diverse World

Depending on one’s personal experiences, level of exposure to new ideas, and willingness to engage with challenging information, The Establishment’s mission may appear superfluous — or it may instantly register as burningly critical and centuries overdue. We, of course, fall into the latter camp. Unlike Google or Facebook, we

Surveillance

Rewire: software against fascism

“That one. Austin. Get him!” It was the Spring of 2012. Occupy Wall Street had captured the world’s attention, and months after our eviction from Zuccotti Park, daily marches were still shaking the streets of New York City’s Financial District. I’d left my job to get involved

Messaging

The Path to Purple

Top highlightOne summer afternoon in the mailroom of a U.S. Senator I started a Tumblr blog called Purple Politics. I was still in college and had achieved full political-nerd status with my friends, who would use me as their news source in lieu of reading the news themselves. I’

Media

🎧 The Drunken Walk, S1-E5: Jessica Lessin— Founder, The Information

Our guest on this episode is an incredible example of a journalist turned media entrepreneur: Jessica Lessin, former Wall Street Journal reporter, now at the helm of the in-depth business/technology subscription publication, The Information. Before she founded The Information, Jessica was convinced that a select audience would pay for

Media

🎧 The Drunken Walk, S1-E4: Melissa Bell — Publisher, Vox Media

We’re back with another incredible media entrepreneur whose story of scrappiness and tenacity shows that, with the right mindset, anything is possible. Melissa Bell is one of the co-founders of Vox.com, Vox Media’s news and opinion website, which she and Ezra Klein first started working on in

Media

“We ended up launching Vox in 9 weeks.”

“I’m so proud of Vox.com,” says Melissa Bell, welling up slightly. “They’re just so talented and they’re doing such incredible work and it’s so different from what we pictured it to be in so many different ways.” Bell helped co-found the news vertical of the

Media

“For some reason it’s kind of a ‘bad thing’ to just write kick ass articles.”

Some said it was too expensive. Others said it would never scale. But Jessica Lessin ignored the naysayers and stuck to her convictions. Almost three years ago, the former Wall Street Journal tech reporter founded The Information, an in-depth, online-only publication that combines rigorous investigative journalism with technology and business

Journalism

Listen up! Hearken’s got something to say

SO MUCH GOOD STUFF that I almost don’t know where to start. Good thing, then, that we’re going to hear all about it from chief awesome lady boss herself, Jennifer Brandel. Jenn and co-founder Corey Haines went through our program more than a year ago, as part of

Journalism

Stories as multi-dimensional as our world

Discors co-founders, Basil Enan and Akber MalikAkber and I first met in 1993. I was 12, he was 2. There was not an instant connection. After that our lives continued separately but largely in parallel. We both grew up in the Bay Area and had many of the same teachers