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I'm Brian Morrissey. Thank you so much for joining us. This episode is brought to you by Outbrain.
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So, like many of you, I have somewhat wearied of the doom and gloom of the media business from the start of the year, even though I write about it quite a bit.
So instead, I wanna take the next several episodes to talk to people who are not just managing decline, but are building a new future for a sustainable media business.
I often talk about the shift from institutions to individuals, and that's because I think it's one of the more profound changes to the media landscape, and it's one that I don't think is a passing fad.
Different distribution channels will come and go. They'll fall out of favor. One day it's podcasts, the next it's newsletters. But a time of deep distrust in the media and information surely only gonna get worse with AI.
Humans will instinctively turn to other humans. We are social animals, so it's just how we're wired. And today I'm joined by Moshe Oinounou, who is the founder of Mo News. Moshe is a broadcast news veteran.
I got to know him during the pandemic when he was using his extra time to disentangle the news on Instagram, mostly through Instagram Stories.
In the meantime, Moshe has built four hundred and forty thousand followers to his Instagram account, where eighty-five percent of the audience is female, and they come to understand the news in an even-handed way.
And he's complemented that Instagram reach with a newsletter and a podcast and is expanding to other platforms like YouTube with his own brand of non-partisan news.
And I think what I really like about what Moshe does is he gets into the murkiness of what we know and what we don't know about topics and news topics, and I think that's really important.
I think in the past, maybe the news industry has acted as if it has all the answers and is presenting, uh, the finality when a lot of things are not black and white, but they're somewhat gray.
So we cover the decline of trust in mainstream media, the product problem that's embedded in mainstream news, betting on social-first distribution after seeing what the previous generation wrought on publishers who did...
How to scale yourself as a so-called creator, and also moving beyond an individual to create a fuller media brand while still staying sane. As always, I'd love to hear your feedback.
My email is bmorrissey@therebooting.com. And a quick reminder, be sure to sign up for the Rebooting's new membership program. You get unlimited access to all content.
Some of the pieces on the newsletter will be member-only. Thinking about adding a member-only podcast. I'd love to hear feedback on that. As well as access to exclusive virtual and in-person events and more.
I plan to keep adding to the membership program based on the feedback I get. So to find out more, go to therebooting.com. Hope you'll consider supporting the Rebooting by signing up.
And I'm definitely gonna steal some of Moshe's ideas that have drawn him six thousand paying subscribers, which we'll discuss in this conversation. Now here's my talk with Moshe.
[on-hold music] Moshe, I'm so glad we're doing this. We last did a podcast together on the short-lived but very impactful Media Jungle with Alex Vergara back in the heat of the pandemic. Yeah. This was a good time.
It was a good time. We were all living on Zoom, but we realized then, as we acknowledge now, that the media, it's rough terrain right now, and those were some of the more interesting conversations we were having.
I don't know that they've changed that much. Some of the names have changed, but we're all still trying to figure it out. Yeah, that's for real.
But at the time, I remember Alex was like, "Dude, you gotta meet this guy, Moshe. He's doing some amazing things." This is my Alex. Alex will appreciate my- It's a good impression. Yes. [chuckles] impression of Alex.
And I was like, "Wait, this guy's, like, aggregating news on Instagram? It's kinda weird." It's like, but you know what? It's the pandemic. Yeah.
So tell us about it because, you know, you were just featured in The New York Times. We... I'm glad we set this up beforehand [chuckles] this weekend, I guess it came out. But tell us about the origin of Mo News. Yeah.
So that's sorta how it started. It was height of pandemic. We were all on lockdown.
I had a lot of friends and family who had come to rely on me through the years as their resident journalist news person to ask me questions about what was going on.
It just so happened that I just finished about ten years at CBS back in the2019 was consulting, you know, lo and behold, early 2020, the biggest news story of our lifetimes comes out. I'm not in the newsroom.
I've about five hundred friends and family who are texting me all the time.
And so because I kinda saw, at the time it was still called Twitter, as a, a nasty place, I was like, "I'm going to curate what I feel is reliable information over my Instagram account."
And I liked Instagram Stories as sort of the last place in social media where you can put chronological feed together, not algorithmic, but this happened, and this happened. You click through the stories one by one.
And so I found myself in the first few weeks of COVID doing that. I had a private account at the time, and my then girlfriend, now wife, said, "You know, listen, I think people would really benefit from this.
A lot of questions and confusion." So I make the feed public. Again, sort of a quarantine exercise.
I'm watching the Fauci briefings, I'm watching the Trump briefings, and I'm summarizing and also finding, you know, interesting trend lines and stories coming out from abroad.
At the time, if you recall, we were watching what was happening in South Africa, and Italy, and in Europe, and in China.
And so started doing that on Instagram and start to see the following grow, you know, a couple thousand, tens of thousands.
That said, at the same time, I head into the spring and summer of 2020, I'm still doing it, figuring out my next thing, and I thought it was gonna be the thing before the thing, and it turns out to be the thing.
By the summer of 2020, I see celebrities are now following. I pick up two of the three Jonas Brothers, Nick and Joe Jonas start following.
I only find that out, you know, Instagram's sort of murky to figure out who's following you, and suddenly I see that I've been tagged in a post by Joe Jonas saying, "Hey, you need to follow this guy for news." Oh, nice.
And I realize, wow, there's a following here, and I've now grown beyond COVID and now curated beyond other topics in the news.
And start to figure out in the fall of 2020 into 2021, like, all right, this Instagram thing seems to be a thing. Let's keep it going, but how do we monetize it? How do we make a business out of it? Yeah. So let's get...
But your background is in broadcast news. Yeah.
I mean, my first internship was at ABC News in Washington with Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson in the summer of 2001, and ended up getting my first big gig at Fox News Channel in Washington as a researcher for Chris Wallace, and so spent, you know, almost fifteen, sixteen years in broadcast news.
Now, one thing that I got to do and that really kinda whet my appetite when it comes to digital was at CBS in 2014, they assigned me the project of figuring out a twenty-four-hour streaming channel, building streaming at a place that had never really done cable successfully.
And so started to, for the first time, figure out Roku and Apple TV, but more importantly, in sort of a ten-thousand-foot view, realized that we need to go to the places where people are consuming news as opposed to forcing them to watch every night at six thirty with the commercials.
Yeah. What way- When was this? What sort of time was- So this was 2013, 2014. Okay. Roku is still a relatively new thing. Apple TV is still new. I'm explaining the Amazon Fire Stick to people in the newsroom.
But this is, like, also when, like, now this is coming out. There was a lot of- Vice, BuzzFeed... in the air was the, "Hey, we're gonna modernize this, you know, news environment," and most of those failed. Yeah.
I had Ben Smith on the podcast talking about his book that came out last year, where he talks about basically the rise and fall in the, like, the early aughts through, like, the mid-teens, and the survivors of the past couple of years have turned out to be legacy media.
Yeah. But, like, why did you think that there is...
'Cause, I mean, Moonews is, is really social-first news, and if you take it by the words, I think if people don't actually look at it and they just take it from how it's described, or at least I would, I'm gonna say people, I said I would, I would be like, "Oof, this is DOA.
This is-" Mm. I mean, we've tried this, like, a million times, like the social fish where the fish are and all this stuff. Unclear monetization path.
You're dependent on a platform, and that platform has decided that they don't want news. I mean, maybe they like your news. It seems like Adam Mosseri like, uh, you know, likes you, so you gotta keep on his good side.
I don't know if you have him on text, but you might wanna just shoot him a note every now and again and be like, "Hey, man."
I was gonna say, Brian, depending on, on any given day, you see suddenly I was like, "Why have my views collapsed by half today?" And then suddenly they're back up. You're at the whim of the algorithm.
And you bring up a good point. When I was at CBS, you know, that was sorta peak Facebook in the, like, early teens there.
I mean, there were entire news organizations that their traffic, for the most part, was driven by Facebook clicks.
And at one point, actually, Mosseri, before he took over Instagram, was building the news feed for Zuckerberg. Yeah. And one day they just turn off the tap. They're like, "Nope. We're done here. Good luck to all of you."
[laughs] We've got other priorities. And I think, you know, I go into this knowing that on any given day, you know, Instagram will decide to go in a different direction.
So one thing that I've tried to make the focus of the last couple years is while the Instagram is top of the funnel and I'll continue to grow that, uh, ultimately I'm building a subscription audience, uh, building out a podcast audience, building out a newsletter audience, because that's where, you know, as we know, you can own your audience in a much better way and know much more about them than depending on, on Zuckerberg and the Meta gods.
Yeah. So I wanna get to the distribution, but let's start on the product itself because you have the news is broken. I've heard this, I've heard this before.
I'm actually gonna catalog, I think, on this post all the people who have said the news is broken. The news is broken. Axios, Axios at least, you know, they came about it. Like, Newsy said the news is broken.
Vice has said the news is broken. A lot of people said the news is broken. But- Add us to the mix... you've been, you've been inside. [laughs] No, it's a good, it's a good- Yeah.
But I do think that when you look at what is happening right now, I think that there are almost, like, two camps.
There are, there is a camp that says the business model of news is broken, and I think everyone would agree that the business model of newsIs broken, and we can go through all of the reasons, but, um, we don't necessarily have to.
But then there's another camp that says, "This is a product problem." And I don- A-and it's a product problem on two levels, and I'm very sympathetic to, like, sort of all of these things together.
And the product problem is, one, how it's packaged and delivered, and we'll talk about that, and just the backwardness of a lot of legacy media, and I include a lot of digital media as legacy media.
But then there's also just the absolute content of the news, like how it is being gathered, how the perception, real or imagined, of bias, the declining trust.
I mean, y- when you look at the metrics, there is more of a rejection of the product of news. Do you think that the actual substance of the news is broken, or is it just the business model?
I think it's all of the above, and I think the business model is partially broken in the other aspect of it, as in the, the chase for traffic and the chase for clicks has driven news, has broken news further.
Now, I think that, but you, uh, y-you bring up a good conversation. We know the business is broken. Institutions have not figured out how to replicate the revenue of yesteryear.
But I do think, uh, you know, one of the things that I have really gotten a better sense of doing social-first news, being, uh, in touch, being in the direct messages with very interested, very informed news consumers who are very frustrated with the news in the way they're getting it from traditional publications.
Yes, there are accusations of bias, and I think there's legitimate accusations of bias. Now, that bias is not always political. In some cases, it is.
In some cases, it's just journalists who are completely out of touch with the needs and the interests and the concerns of the average news consumer.
So it's elitist bias, and it's, you know, we see this play out in our politics as well. There's also just a complete lack of conversation.
I do feel like people demand more in terms of accountability these days from the media. They demand a conversation, and by the way, they're demanding it more in the workplace.
They're demanding it more from the companies that they buy products from. They're demanding it more from their government. And frankly, they're demanding more of it from media.
So for those of us in the media to continue to sit there and be like, "We will decide the stories that you will get. And you can tweet and whatever, but we're not really gonna...
We don't care because we have journalism degrees, and we went to Columbia, and we live in Manhattan and DC."
So I think that, you know, people are frustrated 'cause they feel like the media is slow to catch on to things happening out there.
I think, frankly, the border story is a really interesting showcase of that over the last year and a half, where the media was slow.
The mainstream media, actually, the traditional media, the larger publications, I think, were pretty slow to pick up on how that issue was resonating, to the point where you even see in the, you know, primaries in the last couple weeks, it's, you know, immigration's the number one concern for voters, and you see journalists live on television being like, "I'm shocked to hear that."
You know, New Hampshire is far from the southern border. Yeah.
These are real issues, and so I think that when we say the news is broken, the news is broken in that they're not covering the stories that people are experiencing it, the life they're experiencing.
Same thing with the economy, in inflation, that for the most part, you know, some of the people making decisions on behalf of, uh, major publications aren't as concerned with that. They live a different lifestyle.
And so I do think that the business model is broken, but I do think that the way institutional media is covering things is broken, and that is one of the many reasons you see people turning to everything from newsletters to the Joe Rogans of the world to the YouTube- Yeah...
the various YouTubers to get their information. Yeah, I think you're totally right with that.
Let's go deeper on the border issue because, I mean, it's hard to unpack this without Trump, you know, being involved because- Sure...
I think that there was a knee-jerk reaction in, in a large swath of the mainstream media that anything Trump was talking about was wrong at the end of the day.
And I think the border with the caravans and stuff, I know I personally, I was like, "I'm not in that," so I was like, "Eh, this happens, you know, time to time," and we, you know, we've always been able to take in and to, you know, large groups of immigrants.
This country is massive. When I was growing up, it was two hundred and fifty million. I was like, "Wow, that's a lot of people." And it's like, maybe it's three forty million, maybe it's three seventy million.
I don't even know if we know at this point. Yeah. But this was an issue that has proven to be very resonant.
Now, I think the hard part of unpacking this is there's a group of people who are trying to delegitimize the news industry for their own purposes. Right.
Either ideological or whether it's just working the refs, which is kind of the oldest game in, in, in town, or it's in their financial interest. They don't want oversight.
For instance, the, I think some of, a lot of the vociferous criticism that I see from power centers when-- I still can't get around billionaires talking about the elitists in Fort Greene apartments. I just, it, I can't.
I just, it's really difficult for me, Moshe, I gotta say. Yeah. No, I, I hear you. But I wanna take these people seriously, and I wanna take their... 'Cause I think that they are speaking to something.
So why was, say, the border underplayed by most of the mainstream media? Was it a bias?
Is that a bias to try to help Democrats or something of some sort, or because of an ideological belief in, quote-unquote, "open borders"?
I'm not really certain because anytime I hear about this grand conspiracy, I'm like, "Have you ever been in a newsroom?" I'm like, "There's no way this could be organized." No. We would always joke, actually.
So, you know, I used to run the CBS Evening News, and, you know, every night there's evening news, there's NBC Nightly News, and ABC World News Tonight, and they all air at six thirty Eastern Time, uh, on the East Coast.
And there were moments where literally we would all have the same five stories in a row.
At some points, you could look up, and we'd all have the same image up at the same exact second, and we don't coordinate.We don't talk to each other. We just all think similarly. Right. We all prioritize similarly.
So the average person would be like, "Oh, you guys clearly have all been on a call today saying at six thirty-seven you're all gonna cover the following story." It just so happens.
I think there you have a, a couple biases at play. When it comes to the border, I think number one, there's ide- ideological bias, right?
I think the vast majority of journalists and decision-makers in the mainstream media come from a, a liberal bias where you do generally have a knee-jerk against Trump.
You have a general feeling that we should be an open country, and you tolerate a semi-open border. There's less concern for that 'cause you are living literally thousands of miles away from McAllen, Texas.
And for the most part, until this most recent crisis, those migrant issues that you're seeing in El Paso and various places on the border don't touch thousands of miles away in a real way. Or they're a benefit, honestly.
I mean, it depresses wages for certain groups. It's not like people are, you know, new entrants to this country. They start, uh, lower on the economic ladder if they're coming across the border. Yeah.
And that provides all kinds of services that are available to people in the middle or upper middle class. Right. Do you hear talk right now of a worker shortage that we were hearing about during COVID? No.
You know, suddenly, you know, businesses are able to find... Ser- the service industry is able to find the, you know, various folks, the waiters, the, you know, the busboys, et cetera. So they see it as a benefit.
And I think that when it comes to that issue, you did see, for ideological purposes, the conservative media really out there. Yeah.
Some of the only reports I saw last year on the border were coming from Fox News, Breitbart, and then some conservative organizations that I take less seriously and are not that fact-based and are ideologically driven.
And so then I think there's a reaction within the traditional media to be like, "Oh, the conservatives are going crazy with this. Clearly, there's no real story there. This is an agenda thing for them."
So that's reinforcing inside the media orbit, like, "Well, Fox goes nuts with whatever. Like, we... Don't worry about it." Yeah.
And then suddenly you get, like, Mayor Adams, a Democrat in New York, who's calling out the Biden administration, saying, "We have a migrant problem in New York City."
And then you start to see a wake-up within the media being like, "This has already hit New York City, and you have a Democrat criticizing this?"
But even then, there was a very slow uptake when it came to that issue because the ideological bias is real on that stuff.
And I think to your point, the caravans, all the storylines of the past twenty years, the inclination on the part of a lot of reporters was like, "Oh, we've seen this movie play out before.
They cried wolf a few times, so we don't need to take this as seriously or as urgently, immediately."
[gentle music] So one of the things that I think is interesting is legacy media doesn't have much of a feedback loop, right?
Like, when you were working in broadcast news, you would put together a program, you would air it, you would look at the ratings, right? Like, I mean- Right... there were some emails that came in.
The evening news would get between six and seven million people a night, and I had almost zero feedback beyond a raw number from my audience about whether they liked it or not.
A- and so you're sort of making these decisions in a vacuum and, you know, with the internet you had a feedback loop, but the feedback was often just about, like, clicks or page views, and there was the famous, maybe infamous board at Gawker that hooked in Chartbeat, and it had a live view of the traffic.
Mm-hmm. And, you know, I'm sure you and Ben talked about that, and I didn't listen to that one, but, like, I will, on your podcast. But, you know, that was driving things.
But I think what's interesting, and maybe you found this, is when you started doing this on, on Instagram, you got a different type of feedback. Immediate.
I was getting more feedback on a single Instagram story, like, which is the ephemeral twenty-four-hour post, than I would get on a broadcast for seven million people.
I was getting more feedback when I had fifteen thousand followers. I mean, now we're at half a million, but I know immediately, A, if it's resonating and people are sharing it, B, what questions people have about it.
And that feedback is incredible because I'm sitting here in Brooklyn, New York, you know, trying to dive into a, a subject matter, and people are saying, "Hey, like, what is the deal with, you know, the Palestinians in nineteen sixty-seven?
What is the deal with how the IDF operates and blah, blah, blah?"
You know, I'm talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an example, but that's one where we in the media take for granted that people have been following along the entire time.
And for many people, they're coming into the movie a couple hours in now, and they're like, "Wait, how did we get here?"
And I think that, you know, among the many questions that I try to answer on a daily basis is, how did we get here for a lot of people who live their lives but are interested in the news but, you know, uh, feel that whether they're watching network news or reading various stories at major publications, feel like there...
a lot is being assumed on their end. There's a lot of shorthand there, and they have a lot of questions. They also have questions on how we gather the news, how we source things. What is the deal with anonymous sources?
Who could this actually be? Yeah. We, we make a lot of assumptions, I think, in the news business that people understand everything. Most, I think if you were to survey, I would actually like...
I have to do some research on this. If you were survey people, I would bet a large percentage assume that anonymous sources are often made up. I think I've seen data on this.
I think the majority of Americans believe journalists are making up those anonymous sources, when in fact there's a whole process that we don't bother to explain to people of getting that source, getting them to talk, explaining why it is they're willing to talk from inside their organization, vetting it up the chain of command within the organization.
Can we take this piece of information seriously from this person? Can we give them anonymity, or do we need to force them to go on the record here? Mm-hmm.
Those are all things that ninety-nine percent of, uh, news consumers have no idea about.And so I think, you know, there's the feedback on stories themselves, on questions people are asking.
How much control does a president really have over gas prices? You know, there's just a lot in there that we don't bother to explain that often.
But then there's the explaining how we do our job, how seriously we take, you know, trying to bring balance and trying to bring diverse sources into a story.
By the way, some publications, some journalists are better than others.
But letting down that fourth wall, letting you into the newsroom, and that's something that I've discovered on Instagram in particular, I get a lot of interest in as somebody who's lived it and, you know, is willing to talk about how this works.
Election nights are another example. How do they make a call with one percent of the vote in? Who makes those decisions? How does a decision desk work? Why can networks do this? Is that constitutional?
Is that election interference? Mm. I mean, people are asking questions that we in the media are like, "We-- This is the way it's always been done. Don't worry about it. Just keep watching." Yeah.
So one of the things that I think is interesting with your approach, and it's, uh, very nuanced because you explain the news, right?
But, like, I believe that over the last several years, as a reaction to what became called both sidesism- Mm-hmm...
which is e- giving equal weight to mostly partisan messaging, and on the one hand, on the other hand, you know, that's the normal way of, like, writing an inverted pyramid story.
That there has been this rash of explainers and fact-checks- Mm... that haven't held up, and it just becomes, no, COVID wasn't a lab leak, you know? And it w- like, part of it was tonal. It was very haughty.
It all came from on high, like, "We've figured this out."
And this was the old role, I believe, of journalism, and that role is gone in what I call the information space because you've got all kinds of different, both biased, unbiased, amateur, professional creators, news organizations, companies.
You got all kinds of inputs going in there, and quote, unquote, "The media has to compete with all of them."
But explain your approach to bringing people a better understanding of the news and allowing for the inherent murkiness that is involved in the news in general. I mean, you're trying to basically create...
I mean, the old thing was the first draft of history. Like, yeah, man, first drafts are messy. Yes. They are messy. And that's the problem, Brian. First drafts are messy. First drafts don't have much certainty.
Yet there is this inclination that we are the news gods, and we will tell you what to be concerned about, and we will tell you what actually happened.
And you have this theory out there, and we'll tell you within three hours why that theory is BS, even though we don't know for a fact that it is BS.
And I think that this need, you bring up a good example in during COVID, where the media is doing these fact checks on theories out there without actually knowing all the facts.
And the media tends to depend on a couple official sources, and guess what we found out during COVID?
Those official sources were putting forth certainty when they were uncertain, whether it was about masks initially, when we didn't need them, about the- Mm-hmm...
vaccine itself, where there was terrible explanation about the vaccine that, you know, they aspired that the vaccine would make COVID less transmissible. Well, guess what?
It turned out COVID was just as transmissible if you had the vaccine or not. Now, it could save your life potentially if, you know, were elderly or had, uh, health issues.
It was not effectively explained, so then it reinforced the way the media explained it based on their CDC sources, reinforced to people, "Well, this vaccine is garbage if, you know, I can still get it and transmit it."
But that was never the goal of it. Obviously, they had to hope for it. So I think there was a lot of, as the media said, we're gonna try to correct misinformation, the media is adding to the misinformation.
You brought up the lab leak. There were always legitimate questions. And by the way, there are several US intelligence agencies that do believe that it came from the Wuhan lab. Right.
And yet it was dismissed so quickly that, you know- Well, also it's like also kinda common sense. This one I will absolutely hang on [chuckles] the news media- Yes... 'cause I'm like, "Okay, we had this global pandemic.
It started from this place in China, Wuhan, okay?" Yeah. And there just happens to be a virology lab right next door.
I'm like, "I don't need to be Inspector Clouseau here," but, like- But well, exactly like, uh- I would leave the door open... like, like what's theory two?
It came from a pangolin at the same exact time a couple of miles away at a wet market? Guys. Yeah. So I, you know, I think that's the issue.
And by the way, we could go into the Trump years and all of the various things that came out, some true, some untrue, about Trump the media would present as, like, certainty, and then that source turned out to not be legitimate.
And so the lesson people have gotten from the media the past decade now is that you guys tend to present everything with certainty all the time, and you're not certain.
And a lot of things you've told me have turned out not to be true in the end. So some of it turned out to be fake news.
Now, that's not to say that you intentionally go in with fake news, that it's, uh, what's Jason Blair? The, you know, some of the scandals- Oh, yeah... of, of the past. That's old.
Where, like, literally there were some reporters who, like, literally made stuff up as part of their field. That's not the deal.
But, like, you jump on things that reinforce your worldview, and then they turn out not to be true, and you're like, "No, but you still should tune in tomorrow." Yeah. And there's no accountability. There's no apology.
You know, I do think that old school role that newspapers used to have, ombudsman, you know, an editor that criticizes the newspaper, I think there's a legitimate reason to have that.
One of the things we try to do is, like, guess what, guys? It's messy. This is what we're hearing. This is what these folks are saying.
There are questions about their veracity based on what they've said recently, and just presenting it as context. Yeah. It's okay.
Brian, when I was at CBS, we brought out and digitized the archives of the day Kennedy was assassinated. And everyone's seen the clip, like the one-minute clip of Cronkite announcing that Kennedy is dead.
Now, what's fascinating is the hour and a half before that. Cronkite, in November of '63, is saying, "We're hearing from sources.
We haven't verified them at CBS, but there's a local news source that says the president is dead. We're gonna look into that."
He's taking you along for the ride 60 years ago, and people tend to think about Cronkite as America's most trusted newsman or whatever.One of the reasons he might have been trusted is 'cause he said, "We're not sure about that.
We have our young reporter there, Dan Rather, looking into it for us." Grabbed this whippersnapper, Dan Rather, on [laughs] - Yeah... on the scene.
Yeah, so you've got, like, four, I think, over 400,000 subscribers on Instagram. Audience is, is bigger with your different channels. But tell me, who, who are they? Who's your audience? Like, who, like, who are they?
They're... I assume they're not the terminally online Twitter/X crowd, but maybe. No, it's a fa- I hope not. Your DMs are gonna be nutter. And I've got a few people who are like, "You gotta do much more on X."
I'm like, "No, I'm trying to build this thing without having to focus on X." So who's my audience? It's fascinating. 85% women, 80% of them are under the age of 45, almost 90% under the age of 45.
90% of them are parents. They all wanna be informed about their world. They want it in a convenient way. They want just the facts. They want analysis, but they don't want opinion.
They don't want me to push them in a certain direction. They want their questions answered.
They have a respect, but cynicism and skepticism about the mainstream media because what we're doing is we are doing some original reporting, but we're also saying, "Hey, this is what the Washington Post has today.
This is what CNN is saying about X. This is what Fox News is saying. This is what the BBC is saying." By the way, that has replicated to a podcast newsletter as well. So it is- Right...
a female-heavy audience that wants to- 85%? Yeah. What? And you have a couple guys. Well, a couple exceptions there. Is that it? [laughs] Like, what's... I mean, that's, like, really, that's really stark to me.
I wouldn't have thought of this as, I mean, that kind of density of, of... I mean, this is like a female news organization. That, that also speaks to how women use Instagram versus men. Okay.
Women on Instagram are using it for information, using it for guidance and advice when it comes to lifestyle, when it comes to parenting, when it comes to health and nutrition, and when it comes to news and information.
And I'm seeing this across the other platforms that were mentioned, by the way, in the New York Times story last week, whether it's Sharon McMahon, who has a million followers and does government explainers for people, uh, Jessica Yellin, who's a former CNNer who has her own page.
All very female-heavy audience. We also have a lot of, mainly 'cause of my coverage of Afghanistan, which were a couple years ago, a lot of military families. Mm. We also...
And I have a lot of what you would call purple voters, Brian.
People who have voted both Republican and Democrat, who are part of this kind of unheard middle of the country and feel like they're being fed a specific agenda by other various news sources, and come to our platform for, you know, perspective, and, you know, the closest thing that you can get to non-partisan coverage and, you know, are okay being taken out of their content bubble, their comfort.
So now, obviously, I get notes from people on a daily basis being, "Oh, I trusted you, and I, I have to unfollow you." I'm like, "All right. This is not an airport. You don't have to announce your departure.
Feel free to move about the cabin." [laughs] I like that one.
But at, [laughs] at the same time, I think that there are people who understand that getting reinforced certain views every day is not getting them anywhere, and frankly, putting them in an island- Yeah...
when the world tells them something different. So are you a layer on top of the news? I mean, like, 'cause it... You know, we...
Look, we went through a period of aggregation, repackaging, and there's value that is created through that, right?
Like, and I think you see this from a business perspective, you know, the reality is you wanna operate on a layer above the, like, news gathering.
It's economically, I don't know, like, news gathering is proving itself right in, at this moment, except for a few cases like The New York Times- Mm-hmm... to be almost an economically unviable activity.
Um- It's expensive. It requires a lot of scale. Yeah. Um, it's challenging. I think I, I view us as a hybrid. I, we began as solely as aggregation- Mm-hmm...
but I think over time, you know, we're putting out a daily newsletter. We're putting out a daily podcast. I'm doing original analysis and interviews several times a week.
And so we have a whole subscriber feed where I answer people's questions on a daily basis and, you know, I'll call various sources and experts to try to answer their questions. So I think it's sort of both.
We're a layer above, but we're also engaged in our own- Yeah... original reporting. So let's walk through the product set, if you will. Right. So you started on Instagram. I open up the Mo News.
I go through a bunch of Instagram stories. There's an image contextualization. It, it's very within the Instagram community. Mm-hmm. And I get caught up pretty quickly, right?
And that was sort of the heart of the product, right? Right. That was, that's what we did first was it was the, you know, breathlessness of those first couple months of COVID- Mm-hmm...
what's happening, and stuff was getting outdated so quickly. So stories felt like the best place to begin to just give you coverage of, like, what is happening today, watch the news with us.
And then, um, there was an ill-fated turn for Bulletin. RIP. So I think you should, because I think it speaks to where we're at as an industry. Yeah.
Bulletin, for those who do not remember, during the weirdo Sub Stack frenzy when everyone was rushing to start up their own email plays. Newsletters were, for a brief period of time, the solution to the media issues.
Yeah. Yeah. And Facebook spun up its own. It was called Bulletin. I believe Moshe was- I-... in, in the launch press release. Yes. I was one of the, uh... I think there were almost 200 of us- Okay...
Brian- Yeah, you were like who?... launching newsletters, and you had, like, Mitch Albom. You had Malala Yousafzai. You had... Me. It was a fascinating combination. Yeah, so. You, Malala [laughs]. Me.
In fact, actually, I had to come up with a- Tuesdays with Morrie. Yeah, you had Mitch Albom. And so that came at the exact moment where, okay, I'm building an au- an audience on Instagram stories. I'm doing posts there.
But really lesson from Facebook, I gotta start to figure out who my audience is, 'cause one day, if this goes away, I'm left with nothing. Yeah.
So the benevolent, you know, dictator Mark Zuckerberg is like, "I'm creating a, a newsletter platform." They invite a group of us to launch our newsletters on it.
They launch, and in less than a year they folded, and spent a whole lot of money on it.Now what it did allow me to do is like, I, you know, got to launch a newsletter and build a logo and start to build a brand.
Before the bulletin newsletter, I was just at Mo. It was my personal Instagram. Yeah. I was like, "All right, I gotta build a brand here." And so we built Mo News.
We launched that, and that becomes part of the newsletter. And so it establishes ourselves.
But I think a lot of us knew going in, Facebook tends to have these projects, some of them last weeks, some of them last months, some last years. Very few of them survive for the long term.
And so effectively, you know, used that to launch a newsletter, then took it to, um, a different platform, Beehiiv, and which, you know, I think it doing some interesting things there.
And so did the newsletter and at the same time launched a podcast a couple days a week. Saw a good audience there for a conversation about the news where we break down about a dozen story...
You know, basically, it's Instagram in audio form, where it's like, all right, what's the big story today? Here's what people are asking us about. Here are the answers we do know. Here's what we don't know.
And so I launched that with a friend, Jill Wagner, who's the co-host of the podcast. We do that five days a week. And so effectively Instagram first, then the newsletter, and the podcast.
And then as we build bandwidth, the next two platforms are effectively YouTube and TikTok, of which I haven't really been able to focus on a daily basis, but I'm hoping to grow those out as well. Yeah.
And as we think about platforms, Brian, it's like you look at where the audience is and where there's the most monetization opportunity. And also the jobs that they do 'cause I feel like they're different jobs.
It's something that maybe you can help me work through this 'cause I'm gonna do a post on this tomorrow, and I'm behind.
John Kelly from Puck, he would joke with me about the Brian Morrissey cinematic universe, and I think he was making fun of me, but like, then I was like, oh, that kinda like makes sense in, in building a cinematic universe in some ways because do you consider yourself a creator?
Are you a news creator? I don't love influencer. Creator, news creator feels most right. I think they tried to coin the term newsfluencer, which is- [laughs] Fluencer... difficult off the tongue.
But I think news creator, I mean, I myself consider myself a journalist, platform agnostic- I know... regardless of the platform I'm on.
But suddenly you do stuff on social, and you have to have the term creator or influencer. But I guess I'm creating content. I don't find it as offensive to be called a creator. I just don't know that it- Okay...
fully encapsulates what I do, which is first and foremost reports and analyze. And I mean, your team is bigger than you, but it's around you. I mean, it's Mo News. It's Mo.
How you're gonna build it as a business 'cause you, you got traction on Instagram, right? But- Yeah... the monetization, do you just like stick an ad in between the stories?
So we have two ways to monetize, and we're building out both. There's partnerships, ads, right? And we've done a bit of that.
It's very interesting, Brian, because in network news, I could run commercials, and people take for granted, like, "Okay, those are commercials." Like they have to make money. Yeah.
And then on Instagram, I'll like run an ad or promote something, and they're like, "How could you? I thought you were an ethical journalist." [laughs] I'm like, "How would you like me to make a living here?"
Meanwhile, they're scrolling through ad after ad on Instagram. Yeah.
But then like suddenly I'm trying to make a buck or a couple hundred bucks [laughs] off of something, and I'm like, listen, I actually say no to more ads than I say yes to. For example, I cover politics.
Like, you take political ads all the time in traditional media. If I was to say, "Okay, now we're gonna take a station break for a Nikki Haley ad or a Donald Trump ad," people would lose their minds.
I'd lose thousands of followers. People kind of view the platform in a much more intimate way. They have a connection with you. So suddenly if you take certain ads- Yeah... you know, it'd be a problem.
So I say no to a lot of ads. So we have ads. Podcasting is a much more traditional realm, right? Like I have Boll & Branch sheets, and Factor meals- Yeah...
and Athletic Greens AG1 and- I, I listened to you talk about a meal box this morning. Yeah, exactly. And so I have ads there. Newsletter obviously ads.
The other focus we've had, just under a year ago, we launched Mo News Premium, a subscription service. We're almost at 6,000 subscribers who are paying monthly, annual, or lifetime members.
That's where they have access to a second podcast where I do interviews, early access, behind-the-scenes podcast that we do, as well as a second private Instagram account. And there I'll do weekend news coverage.
So if you want coverage starting Friday night through Monday morning, we do that over on a second Instagram feed. So if you're a Mo News addict, you sign up. Then that's also where I do deep dives.
Like, here's 40 slides explaining the Palestinian movement. Here are 40 slides explaining how oil gets to your gas tank around the world and why the US has to both buy oil even though we produce our own oil.
So we'll do deep dives, and then I'll take questions. They're like, "Tell me more about why Nikki Haley's in the race. Tell me more about why- Mm-hmm... what the deal is on the border. Tell me more."
And some of it, you know, is pretty straightforward, and some of it requires some research or some interviews. And so we'll do that. So wait, how do you do that?
Do you do that like as an Instagram Live, or do you do that, um, just- In, in individual stories. All right- In individual stories... you're like, "You take the question." I take the question box. I put it above my head.
"Okay, one of you is asking XYZ. Let me break it down for you in the next couple slides." Yeah. So we'll do it as reels. We'll do it as stories.
So there, uh, you know, what I've really tried to do is like, all right, how do I build both a subscription audience as well as a, as well as a advertising audience- Yeah... and build both those revenue streams?
[gentle music] Okay.
So let, let's talk about the subscriptions because I'm interested in this because my general gut feeling, and also it's sort of backed up by some data, is like people generally don't wanna pay for more content. Yeah.
Like, I think one of the big mistakes of, of people doing subscription programs is pinning it on more content. Whereas people generally are like, "Whoa. You're sending me an email like every day.
This is a threat, not a promise." Have you done any sort of research with the 6,000 people who converted?
'Cause I would guess like a large portion of them wanna, like, get a lot of value out of Mo News, and they wanna support it. Yeah. They really believe that.And then number two is that interactivity piece.
Being able to, like, ask you questions is probably, you know... Yeah, there's scale problems, but it is probably a big benefit. Yeah.
I, the first group that came in, started when we launched last April, were just like, "I love what you're doing. I wanna support you."
And I don't even come to this page that much, but you provide me enough value through a daily podcast, daily newsletter, the Instagram feed. Like, I don't have bandwidth to take in everything that you're giving me.
But, you know, you get through that first group of people, which are the hardcore, like, "We wanna support you." The next group wants some value. Yeah, yeah. Becomes transactional.
I'm starting to get those emails with my own membership. It's like, "Wait, what am I getting here?" I was like, "Oh, come on." [laughs] Well, yeah.
Like, like, like somebody's like, "Oh, you didn't put out an extra podcast last week." I was like, "I know. I was traveling. Don't worry. I'll get you an extra one this week."
[laughs] But, you know, there are people who are like, "You know, every dollar makes a difference, and I do need something for my extra money."
Now, that is where some of them, you know, I've had to really experiment here differentiating because my daily podcast is, you know, a breakdown of the headlines.
Whereas, okay, I'll give you some exclusive interviews about the news. Like, that's value to some people who like it in the audio space.
And the Instagram thing, I think some people very much find the main feed very text-heavy. It requires a lot of work and reading. Over on the premium feed, I do it all for you. I...
You just have to open up the stories, and it's me talking through the various stories. So I'm trying to give you a different value proposition there as opposed to just extra. I'm giving you something different.
Something we've actually experimented with recently is something we're calling Less Is Mo, where I'm giving you- You're in deep. You're just going deeper. I'm going deep, man. Just go with as many puns as possible.
So, you know, over on the main feed, I broke 15 stories over 40 slides. That's a lot of homework for you to do to read your news.
Over on the premium feed, in three minutes, I'm telling you, "Okay, you don't have to go to all that stuff." In three minutes, I'll tell you the things you really need to care about. I love that.
This happened, this happened, this happened. Yeah. I think that is the future, is you promise people less. I might actually do this. I might be like, "You know what?
If you subscribe, you get, like, a 600-word version of the newsletter." [laughs] But honestly, you couldn't read every newsletter this week. I'm gonna tell you, like, what really mattered- Yeah...
and, like, the craziest email I got from a, a reader. Yeah. That's a great idea. One of my favorite of the news app when everyone was trying to reinvent news with an app, I really liked Yahoo News Digest.
They bought a company called Summly that was started by, like, some 20-year-old kid in, in the UK. Mm-hmm. And what I loved about it was it was finishable.
It only had 10 stories, and then at the end it was like, "You're caught up. That's it. Go about your life. Go live." And I think that there's a need for that to some degree, 'cause there's just so much out there.
And I think one of the difficulties with a lot of this collapse and the job loss, and it's terrible, and, you know, we all have friends who have unfortunately been the bad end of that- Yeah...
is I kinda feel like I have too much news content in my life. And I feel very informed and, and a lot of that is because it's not just the news organizations. I, I listen to, like, bits of a Sam Harris podcast.
I listen to your podcast, and you read Twitter, and you just have access to so many different perspectives around the news that I think it's a difficult problem to solve.
Oh, we're getting more information in a few minutes than people used to get in a month.
And so when I read the comments in the churn of people who unsubscribe from the premium feed, some of them say, like, "Listen, Moshe," like, "I love what you're doing. I just need a break for my own mental health." Yeah.
Like, "It's just too much for me." Or some people said, like, "Actually, I'll come back to you after November. I can't take another election."
And so that is a major problem for folks, and that's where I think there is a value in curation and aggregation, to your point, of like- Yeah...
"Here, like, there's a couple things you need to know today, and otherwise go live your life. Go outside, take a walk."
Because we're now in the midst of another election cycle, and partially for their own business model, the media's gonna make you feel like you need to be there all the time because something is happening and breaking all the time, and that is wear and tear on your mental health.
And so I think that there is value in smart aggregation and curation, and a lot of these organizations are putting out hundreds of stories and videos a day. Yeah.
So you gotta find your sources that you trust 'cause otherwise you get sucked in, and the outcome isn't good for you. Yeah.
So to wrap it up, I wanna talk a little bit about, like, how you think about growing this, right? Do you feel like you have product market fit? Meaning my content fits the platform? Product audience fit.
You know, 'cause, like, I feel like, look, you go through a period with any of these, you know, publications, new brands, whatever, you know, what you're doing and I'm doing, and you're just...
You're trying a bunch of different things, and there's spark there. But then you get to a point where, you know, the Silicon Valley people say product market fit. You're like, "Okay, there's value that's being created.
I have an audience. They're be-becoming loyal or they're loyalists." In your case, you've got 6,000 people paying. I'm a little behind that, but, like, if anyone wants to get me closer to Moshe, I'd really appreciate it.
Brian, we'll put out clips on the Instagram feed. And you get to that point, and then you've got good problems. These are good problems to have. Yeah. But they're still problems, right?
You have to figure out how you're going to expand it or if you're not going to expand it. It becomes even more difficult because it's Mo News with Moshe- Mm-hmm...
and it's Mo or Less, and et cetera, and you're talking about doing this on weekends. How do you scale yourself? Yeah. That's where I'm at right now.
Like, we brought in a partnerships person to build that out, and sometimes you know this, you get too close to the product. This started as a COVID exercise. We're now four years removed from that.
And people's habits change. People's needs change, and you need to be able to hit the reset button, and that's...
You know, my hope is that we're small enough where I can say, "Okay, we may have been doing this for the last couple years. There's not a purpose to doing that anymore.
What is a smarter way to spend that hour every day as opposed to doing XYZ?"One of the things I am hoping to do is bringing a couple more folks who can go on camera and do explainers.
I know you don't like the term explainers, but, you know, who can- No, I know, but you know what I mean. There's a- Yeah... difference between, like- Both explainers and fact check...
you know, explaining what's going on without- Yeah... being like, "This is how you should think," which sometimes I felt like it was, "This is what you should think," dressed up as explaining something. I totally agree.
And so I think, you know, one of the goals this year is to scale smartly. I'm bootstrapping this thing. I haven't taken any outside funding and, you know, we're hoping to, to do that for the foreseeable future.
And so to expand this beyond just me, people who, you know, approach the news in a similar way, and so that's what we're trying to do on the content side.
We'll try to grow partnerships in a smart way and continue to seek feedback from our subscription audience and grow that- Yeah... in a, in a smart way. So I look at Huffington Post. Are you Ariana? Yeah.
I mean- Hey, you said it. Matt Drudge, Ariana Huffington, picker media person who put their name- Malala... who put their name in the, in the publication but was able to grow beyond that. Okay. Right?
And so I'd like to be able to, you know, bring a couple reporters aboard. This was the case with Barry Weiss and Free Press, I think. There's some interesting examples. Tricky, though. Yeah.
It's very tricky because anyone who operates these things knows one of the hardest parts of these businesses is the fact that it's so dependent on one person, and it becomes- Yeah... a real grind.
I mean, look, it's not like going into the mines. Like, don't [laughs] get me wrong. But at the same time, it's very taxing if it's all dependent on you for- Correct...
the audience engagement because then you don't take breaks, you don't take vacations, and then people start talking about burnout and all the rest of that.
They certainly experience that, and I think that is where I'm at. And, you know, I wanna figure out that dilemma because I think ultimately it is very difficult to go seven days a week, 12 hours a day perpetually. Yeah.
And the audience comes to expect that you're ever present in their lives, and I think that's frankly a dilemma not just in my space.
Anyone in the influencer, creator, social media realm is, you go to people's feeds that you follow, and you expect to see them every day. You expect them to- Yeah... tell you something new every day.
And even if I don't post for a few hours, I'll get notes being like, "Hey, is everything okay?" Like- Oh, God... and I was like, "I was at dinner."
Well, I mean, both the podcast and newsletter in some ways I think are a way to step out of that, at least from the outside, I look at that. I mean, you do the podcast.
It's usually with Jill, but there's another person in there. Obviously, you're on there, but you're starting to introduce others to the audience. Correct. The newsletter is written usually by three of you, I believe.
And by the way, on the Instagram feed, we've started to work in, we have a producer, Emily. She'll do some videos. Jill will do some videos.
So we start to work in other people, and, you know, we'll get positive feedback.
And so I think, you know, that's one of the things that we're, we're continuing to do in sort of year four of the Mo News Project is continue to build out the larger reporting team. Cool. Thanks so much, Mush.
This is almost as good as the Media Jungle episode. Well, you know why. It's just me and you. I think we cut out the weak link. Let's do this again at Alex's bachelor pad. You hear that, Alex?
I hope you got to the end of the podcast, my friend. We're coming to your South Beach bachelor pad. All right. Thanks, Mush. Later. [upbeat music] Thanks for listening.
Thank you to Jay Sparks for producing the Rebooting show. If you have a podcast that you're considering making, you should check out Podhelp us and what Jay can do for you. Go to podhelp.us.
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