Media

A collection of 84 posts

Local News

Open Matter Phase I: Complete

At CUNY: the first of four class photos.To say this year started with a bang for Matter is an understatement. Just two days into the New Year, I learned that: 1. We were moving ahead with our local news innovation bootcamps with the support of Google News Initiative [https:

Media

Thank you, Matter.

It’s six o’clock on a Friday morning in June. No, I’m not blissfully catching up on rest ahead of a homework-filled weekend in Chapel Hill. Instead, I find myself coordinating coffee deliveries, finalizing space setup, and extinguishing every small fire in sight before entrepreneurs arrive. Months of

Media

8 Ways Matter Eight is Changing the Future of Media

Our eighth cohort is moving onward and upward. We anticipate great things. Matter kicked off 2018 with a new cohort of intelligent, capable entrepreneurs with big visions for the media companies they had begun to build. The teams came through our garage doors in February at different stages of development,

Journalism

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 [https://www.matter.vc/a-lot-more-experiments-open-matter]. They’re happening on opposite coasts on the same

The Drunken Walk

🎧 The Drunken Walk, S3-E7: Jill Koziol — Co-Founder, Motherly

Jill Koziol, Co-Founder and CEO of Motherly [https://www.mother.ly/] (and Matter Five [https://www.matter.vc/millennial-matter-five] alum!), joined us in San Francisco for a conversation with Matter Eight entrepreneurs. Pete Mortensen, Director of Program in San Francisco, talked with Jill about the incredible growth that Motherly has

The Drunken Walk

🎧 The Drunken Walk, S3-E6: Deepa Subramanian— Co-founder, Wherewithall

The Drunken Walk - Deepa Subramanian - 1:10:11 Deepa Subramanian started out as a physics major and switched to computer science when she realized how much she loved… radiopublic.com Deepa Subramanian [https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamdeepa/] started out as a physics major and switched to computer

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 [https://medium.com/@jenniferbrandel], CEO of Hearken and Matter Four entrepreneur, joined us in New York City where she and Roxann Stafford, our Director of Program there, sat

Journalism

Meet the teams of Open Matter Mizzou!

Open Matter [https://www.matter.vc/a-lot-more-experiments-open-matter] rolls on! Our series of four design thinking and business model innovation bootcamps kicks off in earnest [https://www.matter.vc/announcing-the-open-matter-nyc-teams] at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism on Monday, and we’re buzzing in anticipation to connect with and coach 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 [https://www.matter.vc/a-lot-more-experiments-open-matter] offered to for-profit news organizations. In partnership with Google News Lab [https://www.blog.google/topics/

Media

🎧 The Drunken Walk, S3-E1: Rebecca Kaden—Partner, Union Square Ventures

We’re back with the first episode of Season Three of The Drunken Walk! Our eighth class of media startups just started their 20–week journey through Matter in San Francisco and New York City. Rebecca Kaden joined us for the first speaker series in San Francisco to talk to

Entrepreneurship

Applying to Matter Nine? Here’s how we evaluate our accelerator investments.

Applications are open for Matter Nine [https://medium.com/@benwerd/49e00e246d20] . In conjunction with our launch we wanted to demystify the process we use to evaluate companies. At Matter we look at five critical elements when making the decision about whether to invest in a startup: team, media, stage, mission

Media

Build the media platform of tomorrow.

The way we learn about the world is transforming. The next wave of internet platforms is coming into view. Four years from now, over half of us will have an intelligent assistant in our home, [https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/08/voice-enabled-smart-speakers-to-reach-55-of-u-s-households-by-2022-says-report/] and over half of all internet searches will

Gender Equality

LedBetter joins Matter Eight!

LedBetter’s technical advisor Ipsheeta Furtado and cofounder and CEO Iris KuoIn the fall of 2005, a wise, kind editor introduced me to my now dear friend Camille Ricketts. At the time, he simply thought two young journalists might benefit from knowing each other. There was no way to know

Health

Ovee: A tale of doubt, betrayal, and disruption

Ovee began with the collection of stories. This is one woman’s story: Day 0: What’s going on down there? So much itching and burning? I’ve extensively Googled symptoms for several hours. Is it an STD? Or maybe I’m pregnant? If Google says so it must be

Social Media

Pixinote — Deeper Relationships Through Physical Messaging

What do Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, WeChat, YouTube, Tumblr and Pinterest all have in common? They don’t exist. Not in real life, anyway. Turn off the screen, and we have no evidence of any of these social empires. As a designer, I love observing how people live.

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

Radio

Why Every Word On Radio Matters

Top highlight It was before 7 AM and I was fast asleep. I know because the sunlight hadn’t made it through the blinds yet to wake me. I rested peacefully secure in the belief that when I rose that morning to head back to my advertising sales job at

Hollywood

What Scriptd Believes

The Mission At Scriptd, we know that stories have immense power. We can use stories to tell complex redemptive stories that reflect our modern world, or we can use stories to divide and reinforce stereotypes. We can use stories that portray multi-dimensional characters that represent our diverse world, or tell

Advertising

Paytime. The way millennials will pay for media.

Media content touches all aspects of our lives. It touches us so profoundly that it can literally make or ruin our day. We play music to lift us out of bed and go running. Movies make us feel as if someone else’s life and adventures were our own. Journalism

Television

kweliTV Tells Authentic Stories of the Global Black Community

When I was young, I wanted to be a storyteller. From the time I could write up until my early teens, I created short stories religiously. I enjoyed developing the storylines, the scenery, the characters and my favorite: the dialogue. I told stories from my perspective — a black kid living

Viewability

Optimera: So you’re still trying to figure out ad viewability, too?

After working at The New York Daily News for a few years as the Director of Ad Technology and Ad Operations, I realized that viewability is one of the most important metrics that the advertising industry has seen (that sure was a pun) since I joined the industry in 2010.

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 Lindsay and Shereen!

Matter’s Associate Producers, Lindsay (left) and Shereen (right) together in NYC Hello from the two newest members of the Matter team! We’re Lindsay Abrams and Shereen Adel, the Associate Producers for Media and Program Operations. That’s a long way of saying that we’re here to do

Media

Go all-in this summer. Apply to be our next Google News Lab fellow.

I never had a first day of work quite like the early morning last June when I walked into Matter’s San Francisco office, still groggy from my flight across the country. Within minutes, I was pulled into a group circle where my new coworkers took turns expressing their nervousness