The Scoop
A group of experienced foreign correspondents are launching a new premium news platform designed to bundle the work of top independent journalists.
Launching tomorrow, Noosphere is a mobile-first platform for news that will charge less than $20 a month to users in exchange for unlimited access to content produced by independent journalists. Videos, audio podcasts, and articles will be displayed in Noosphere’s application, which is oriented around a single primary feed. An early demo of the platform shared with Semafor showed that the product also incorporated bits of different existing media platforms. Noosphere has an endless full-screen scroll that resembles TikTok, but also shows users text articles, audio, and photography.
CEO Jane Ferguson, a decorated former war correspondent for PBS, told Semafor that she founded Noosphere in reaction to the collapsing broadcast and digital media ecosystems that have left thousands of talented journalists out of work. Ferguson said that during a recent fellowship teaching journalism at Princeton, she realized that both the audience and the business model for journalism in broadcast was quickly shrinking, and that there were no existing platforms that would be appealing to news consumers while allowing journalists to monetize their work. She worked with a small tech team and designed the app with input from journalists, including co-founder Sebastian Walker, a longtime correspondent who was a Middle East bureau chief for Vice.
“I had essentially built an incredibly successful career in an industry that was collapsing, which is a very weird place to be, where you just collect trophies while the audiences are getting smaller and the finances are not working,” she said in an interview. “And it became apparent to me that this was actually terminal, and certainly in the television business.”
She continued: “What we really wanted to do is build the architecture for the best journalists to enter the content creator economy.”
Noosphere is starting small. Ferguson told Semafor that she raised about a million dollars from several executives, family offices, and friends who were interested in investing in more sustainable models for journalism (“nobody that would hit the headlines”). The app will go live with over a dozen journalists, with plans to add another dozen quickly within the first few months. The platform is remaining invite-only for journalists to ensure that creators on the platform are providing quality reporting. Subscriptions will start at $15 a month and eventually increase to $19.99. The revenue will be shared among the pool of participating journalists, and will be partly divided based on the eyeballs and subscribers each journalist is bringing to the platform.
The goal eventually will be to broaden the platform’s user base. Ferguson told Semafor that she has already been discussing partnering with existing outlets and news organizations who could also use the platform to monetize their work, or could quickly license videos from journalists on the platform.
“This is an opportunity for a broadcaster to access a sort of an A-team of award-winning broadcasters on camera, many of whom are already in the field,” she said.