Announcement: The AP (Alex Pareene) Newsletter Is a Global Media Start-up Now
The future of news, brought to you by the present of news
After many months of newslettering, I’m thrilled to announce that The AP (Alex Pareene) Newsletter is now a new global media startup focused on delivering unbiased news in exciting new formats to an international audience of educated news consumers.
Months of conversations with business leaders, political insiders, and tech innovators show an audience hungry for new forms of news delivery and innovative modes of storytelling. Formats like words grouped in sentences, and paragraphs comprising several of those sentences arranged in such a way as to convey information clearly, are no longer the best way to deliver news. Hidebound legacy news organizations, and even digital upstarts, are too married to archaic formats like language and images. I can’t speak yet to what precise form our journalism will take, but I can promise some exciting experiments in direct-to-consumer reporting (newsletters) and ambient aural journalism (podcasts).
Something else I heard from both stakeholders and influencers was that legacy publications are parochial in focus and narrow-minded. For too long, an audience hungry for a broad range of premium world news has had to settle for the Financial Times, Bloomberg, Reuters, The Guardian, the international editions of Politico and The Wall Street Journal, and AFP. We aim to change all of that, right here from our Manhattan headquarters.
What will this startup cover? Think power. Politics. Money. Wealth. Business. Power politics. Business power. But also the big challenges. Problems, but also ideas and innovations. The people tackling the issues that define our turbulent time—and the stories behind their stories.
Now that this is a growth-focused international media startup, I can’t just do this on my own. Over the last few months I’ve been speaking with some of the industry’s biggest stars and brightest minds, and I’ve assembled a team of some of the most innovative talents the news business has to offer. The AP (Alex Pareene) Global Media Start-up leadership team includes Tom Smith, former vice president at Reuters; Axios senior editor Samuel Thompson; Thom Samuelson, former Politico head of sports; Hearst partnerships manager Paul Smith (no relation); former New York Times Chief Community Officer Josh Bentley; The Atlantic’s John Benson; The Athletic’s Ben Johnson; Condé Nast e-sports head Ken Kruger; Jeff Jarvis; NPR Chief Growth Officer Paul Reston; Barron’s B2B chief Keith Reagan; investor Joshua Kushner; FT data monger Colm Byrne; McKinsey & Company Global Publishing Direct Raju Narisetti; Leon Wieseltier; Tom Smith (no relation), currently Bloomberg’s vice president for crypto; Yahoo! platform safety chief Lewis Llewys; entrepreneur James Dolan, Jr.; and Van Jones.
We are still in the early days of speaking with investors, but we have early commitments lined up from a wealthy German man with no familiarity with the American news industry, and a private equity group with a name that somehow sounds ominous despite being a meaningless initialism.
In so many ways, the global news industry is failing its audience. It’s time for a bunch of people currently occupying the highest echelons of that industry to reinvent it from the bottom up.
i wouldn't say this is the post that made me subscribe. i would say this was the post that wouldn't let me not subscribe.
"and Van Jones." Har!