This week, I had the opportunity to speak with Ari David, the Founder & Editor in Chief of Upward News. We talked about a wide range of topics focused on the media and independent creators, and per usual, I’ve edited the transcript to make it easier to read and more clear written down.
We covered:
The future of media post 2024 election
The role of independent and citizen journalists
Mainstream media’s credibility issues
The philosophy of authenticity behind Upward News
Transcript:
Aiden Buzzetti: Welcome to Daring Greatly.
I'm your host, Aiden Buzzetti, and today I interviewed Ari David, the founder and editor in chief of Upward News. We had a fantastic discussion about the future of media post-November 2024, the role of citizen journalism and independent journalism in today's landscape, and the mainstream media's credibility issues and declining profits. Thank you for listening, and don't forget to subscribe.
Ari, tell me a little bit about Upward News. What's the what's the origin story? How did you get started and where are you looking to go over the next year?
Ari David: Origin goes back about four years ago during the Black Lives Matter protests, the pandemic, the censorship. Everything on social media was absolute chaos. And I think everyone that was our age saw a lot of people that we went to college or grew up with, hosting a lot of radical left-wing propaganda. Throughout all of history, you have like communist leaflets and things like that. And during that era, it was all on social media.
And you were seeing all of these social media graphics essentially that were promoting things like communism, explaining why socialism is good, why we have to redistribute the wealth, why that's going to solve things that caused George Floyd's death, things like that. Nobody was actually combating this stuff. And it wasn't really hard because the facts were not on the side of the people making these leaflets. It was really purely ideological from these people.
So, I created an Instagram account and graphics that didn't look that good, but they were just fact-based. I really tapped into something that was happening in the moment. There were a lot of people that were polarized. When I attacked it from just a fact-based approach, it took off. The Instagram account was growing really fast. It was really just like a side project at the time, something that I thought was meaningful that had to be done.
Like any project, it kind of evolved. Once we passed that moment and the election was over, we entered the Biden era, so the types of posts changed. We weren't talking about socialism or communism anymore. We were talking about the day-to-day things that the Biden administration was doing.
I was looking at it, thinking it seems like it's becoming like a news outlet. Is this journalism? What is this?
Two years in, I quit my full-time job to start doing this full-time. I decided we needed to grow, and I thought that the fact-based reporting was resonating with a lot of young Americans on social media. So, I thought, how do we do this?
How do we make more of this? How do we turn this into something that can sustain itself? So that over the next five years, it grows even more, and over the next 10 years, we gain credibility. That’s been the journey in a nutshell.
Aiden Buzzetti: That sounds great and I think I relate to you on that because with the Bull Moose Project, we started same thing entering the Biden era, started as a social media account, and then it became something that people resonated with. I think it speaks to kind of the broader media environment; just how successful you were on Instagram just sharing the facts as opposed to the black squares and all these infographics, right?
What do you think this means for the mainstream outlets, especially the White House press corps? They've opened it up to lot of independent creators and smaller outlets. From your perspective with Upward, what does this actually mean for the landscape going on into the future?
Ari David: When I look back at the creation of Upward News, it really fits into all of this. The mainstream media is losing a lot of credibility because the stuff that they're saying is ideological. It's designed to protect their party, their people that are in power. People are losing trust in it. And naturally they're abdicating that power of journalism and that trust with the people. And people are going to individuals that are on social media, on Instagram, on X. And so Upward News was kind of just the same exact thing.
I saw that there was a need for this. I thought that I can hold ourselves to a high standard where people trust us. And so did a lot of other creators that kind of popped up during that time, especially right now.
When you have infrastructures like the New York Times and you have really talented people that go to work there, but they're very ideologically driven - it doesn't mean that they can't do reporting. It means that the reporting that they will do is going to be prolific, but it's going to be terribly biased.
I don't think that the social media creator or influencer scene that is now tapping into the news and politics is really going to be able to compete in terms of reporting. They might be able to challenge institutions like the New York Times and CNN and CBS but it still poses like a challenge. Right now, I think that the best position for accounts or people, influencers that are going to be at the White House is just challenge authority.
On X, we've seen a lot of citizen journalism. That works sometimes. If someone goes outside, they have their phone, they see something, they record it, they post it online. That's a good form of reporting, but it's not as rigorous as having some real journalists go in there and spend days digging into the stuff.
It requires it being a full-time job that normal citizens are just not going to put that amount of time into. But I still think it's a necessary shakeup. The mainstream media institutions should be worried about this. They should have this challenge. They should welcome the challenge because anything should make them want to feel like they should do a better job.
In terms of what we're doing, we started in that kind of influencer scene too. We were just an anonymous Instagram account when we started. What I'd like to build it out to is something that does have more credibility, that does have a lot of reporters that are working full time to get the full story. And while I think right now this whole new paradigm shift in the media where you have independent voices talking about important things is good, I think it needs to go a step further. And I'd like to see these voices grow to have more resources and be able to actually compete with bigger institutions.
Aiden Buzzetti: What are some ways to create credibility that you think are ideal for Upward, for you, but even the mainstream media outlets? It's very hard to build trust, and when you lose it, it takes even more time to recover it.
What's your path towards that goal and how these mainstream outlets who have gone through huge rounds of layoffs recently, particularly the left-wing ones, are expected to recover whatever trust and credibility they have left?
Ari David: I think all this really depends on the goal of the institution and the news outlet. When you have something like the New York Times or CNN, if their goal was trust with the audience, that would mean that every time that they made a mistake, the next day you'd see, by the way, we made a massive mistake here. Here's actually the truth. And because of the amount of lies that they go through, you would see this running all day. It would really just be a correction sheet if they cared about maintaining trust with their audience. I don't think that's the goal with them.
Their goal is to maintain some kind of power and some kind of sway over the populace in America. And because of that, they're not going to issue those corrections. They're going to hide it. And they hope that they'll be able to maintain power of some kind of trust. The more they do the latter, the less they get of the former. When I started building Upward News, I realized that the only way we're going to make this thing work is if we have readers that care about us. And the only way we would have that is if we cared about our readers.
We provided them with content that they could trust. And so our biggest priority here is we don't have any ego at all. Whenever we make a mistake, the next day we say we made a big mistake, here it is, here's the facts, here's why we got it wrong.
We're also not here to push our opinions onto our readers at all because our readers are smart. They don't want to be told how to think. They just kind of want to get the facts. We see ourselves as researchers that have been given the privilege of having time to actually dive into the stuff. We know that a lot of people don't have the time for that.
They wish that they were able to kind of get to that amount of time where they could be experts on some kind of subject matter, but it's just not realistic. We see ourselves as a conduit of that. And in general, the audience always comes first. And when you're looking at how different news outlets today are able to grow and stay profitable, especially as so many mainstream media outlets and small ones are kind of going under, a lot of that time it resorts to like paid subscriptions.
So how do we keep our readers happy? How do we give them the truth? How do we take our egos out of the picture and just making sure that the only thing that matters to us is not, hey, we look cool. We are breaking all these stories. We're doing a kick-ass job. But more so, hey, we did the research for you. Here's the facts. You can trust this because we're not in this for ourselves, but we're actually creating a product that was going to help you.
Aiden Buzzetti: This new trend, particularly along the bigger papers, that are hemorrhaging subscribers and paid supporters, they're hiring a lot more conservatives, or at least they're expected to hire more conservatives on their editorial board to run more conservative pieces.
Do you think that's a viable path forward, or is that just putting paint over a massive hole? They're not actually maybe fixing the problem that they had. They're just trying to paint over it and ignore it and hopefully things fix themselves.
Ari David: Yeah, I think it's the latter. When they saw the election results come in and all of sudden Trump has the majority vote, if you're running any business, you want your market share to be bigger. You want the number of potential customers you have to be more rather than less. And so, you clearly see, you look at the country, there's more conservatives than liberals that are voting right now.
If I'm at the LA Times and I'm running that thing and I ran for the past decade, this company solely to appeal to liberals, which there's now less of, then yeah, I'm probably going to hire a couple of conservatives to try to maybe gain some new readers, gain some new paid subscriptions.
Everyone wants to be popular. Everyone wants to kind of be going with the wave, not really against it here. I think it's kind of a vain move that they think is going to help them. I don't think it's going to help them. The reason why not is because after the election, it's really easy to hire some token conservatives to try to appeal to those people. But we haven't even started talking about midterm elections and all of the people that work at the LA Times, they're going to want Democrats to win. Maybe right now it's going to be easy for these token conservatives to be able to voice their opinions and maybe say Trump is doing a good job. Let's be fair about it, this and that.
As soon as it comes time to thinking about midterm elections, all of these different institutions like the LA Times or the Washington Post are going to be crazy against Trump because of course they want Democrats to win. Now there's a phase happening where they have a little bit of leeway to try to be fair, maybe to try to restore some credibility that they lost during the last campaign where they really were just cheerleaders for Kamala Harris and the voters rejected it. As we get closer to like the next election cycle and as the Trump administration really gets underway, I think we'll see that those types of hires actually didn't change anything.
Aiden Buzzetti: Where is the role of Upward in this? You all send out emails or write to people's inboxes to keep them updated on what's going on. Is it once a day? Is it multiple times a day? How are you all really engaging with the facts and with all these stories coming out without being overly partisan or overly political or even sensational?
Ari David: It's a really good question. A lot of our readers really love our stuff and they respond and say, thank you so much for being unbiased. I get that the way that we write things, we try to kind of keep them neutral. We try not to use our opinions in there. We try not to push one ideological way or another. And the way that we write the stories is truly trying to be unbiased there.
The thing that's not unbiased about what we do is the stories that we do choose to cover. I think traditionally, liberal left of center news outlets are not going to be covering the same stories that we do. By default, we want to be covering stories that the mainstream media is not covering. We want to cover the stories that the mainstream media covers poorly.
We want to cover them better than the mainstream media. And so that's really where the bias happens with Upward News. And then when it comes time to actually talk about these stories and give our analysis and cover the facts, that's where we try to be unbiased. We try to be as level-headed as possible. The only opinions that we have is analysis.
When I was building Upward News in the beginning, it came out also of a need of wanting to know what was going on. You can kind of have a semblance of knowing what's going on if you're on X or Instagram all day and you're scrolling for hours. But that scroll doesn't ever stop and there's always a feeling that I’ve got to scroll a little bit more because there's some information that I haven't read yet.
That's really how they keep you on those platforms. There are news outlets that send you notification a thousand times a day every time some little story happens and you're constantly checking your phone. My goal is let's keep people informed and also let's kind of return a sense of clarity to their life where they're not constantly driven by the news cycle.
We only send out one email a day. It takes a few minutes to read. It's very quick. The stories that don't matter, you're not even going to see them. There's no gossip in there or anything like that. It's really like, are the big stories, these are the important ones, and we're going to kind of give you all the information that needs to be there. If all you need to know is the headline of the story, that's all we'll give you. We trust your time and we respect your intelligence.
Aiden Buzzetti: Do you think that the rise of citizen journalism, has a negative feedback effect? Particularly on X, because they've enabled subscriptions and more people are able to engage there without as much censorship as before.
Where maybe the more right-wing creators create this negative feedback where we're only looking for these crazy stories, maybe they don't have the time to go and research everything, and there might be some things to fix or there might be more areas to hit on an issue than we would have previously expected.
The thing that I think of is the work that a lot of people on X did in Pennsylvania with the Haitian immigrant issue and everything that kind of snowballed from that. Of course, the mainstream media outlets were very against it from the beginning. And they kind of had no idea what the facts were, right?
We actually had people go in and get the facts, which I think is needed. But there's also that same issue of sensationalism that might drive people away or present things in such a way that actually hurts the cause of those who are talking about it.
I'm curious what you think the effect of social media is, especially citizen journalism or people that are engaging on these issues in their free time, how that might affect the news cycles. Obviously it affects the mainstream media. We can control the narratives through that. But what does that mean for news itself? What does that mean for actually checking the information as we get it and making sure it's right?
Ari David:
I'd say that the more people that have access to putting information out there into the world, the better. Sll information that's put out there on social media, on X, on Instagram, that's useful information. You could look at it, you could see, can I trust this, can I not? But it's better for it to be out there than it not to be out there. When you look at this time period compared to 2020 when Mark Zuckerberg, Meta, and all of the global international NGOs colluded to censor tens of millions of Americans from talking about the pandemic or Kyle Rittenhouse or BLM, anything like that, right now is definitely better.
Even with the fact that you have some bad actors that might be pushing information out there and skewing it for whatever ideological or political reasons. In terms of the citizen journalists themselves and that information that's coming from them, I think it comes down to motives. And so when you have like regular people that are seeing something and they put it out there online, these people are usually concerned and they have genuine concerns, that's the reason why they're posting this information out there.
When you get into the influencer world where you have these really big influencers that are posting for clout and they want to get followers, they want to get likes, and they want to be famous, and they see that this is their time to shine and all that stuff, I think that's where you get into some problems because these people are usually not motivated by the same things that a good ethical journalist would be, and I just want to emphasize the fact that even most journalists do not have those good motives.
I don't know. I don't trust all of them. You have to look at them all very critically. Today, it's very hard to trust anyone. You just have to kind of find the ones that you do and that time after time they've been correct. They've admitted when they've been wrong. They're very rigorous. They're very logical and you can trust them. And so going back to kind of Upward News.
That's what we're trying to build here. The more voices that care about being trusted and care about being honest, the better.
Aiden Buzzetti:
I was going to say that it sounds like what we were talking about just a few minutes ago, right? With social media and with all of these smaller news outlets, citizen journalists, independent journalists, it really does come down to brand. Brand trust and credibility.
That's something most of the mainstream media doesn't really have anymore. And it's also something I guess that we'll be seeing you engage in and seeing other outlets kind of get involved in. Because this is just so new and there's so many people and so much information that I guess we're still sorting through who the most trustworthy people are, who the rising stars are.
It's a fascinating perspective.
Do you think that the role of Upward, other groups, or people like you that are doing this ethical, rigorous journalism by themselves is going to keep climbing in importance and the mainstream outlets will keep declining?
Or is there potential, for better or worse, for mainstream outlets to kind of go in and try to buy people out to restore their own brand trust by bringing in people who have established themselves independently?
Ari David:
I think anyone that answers that question confidently is lying because that is a really difficult question to answer.
I'll tell you this right now with like how dominant social media is. There are so many people in this country and all over the world that have millions of followers, like a lot of people. The amount of people that follow them is more than like some states in America. And you would probably never have even heard of them or ever seen their content, right?
All of these audiences and people that wield followings are so balkanized, we don't even know that this person has been talking about this for like ten years now, and they're very popular.
Do we think that's going to increase or decrease? I don't know. Right now, it looks pretty steady.
I think that can kind of be the way that we look at media. We will probably see more independent news outlets that cover niche issues and have specific things that they do really well, better than the big ones.
But then again, a lot of these institutions like the Times and CNN, they don't want to go anywhere. They want to stay comfortably where they're at. They're going to need to fix the problems that they have. So, if you're someone like CNN and there's some very credible independent reporter out there, and you want to fix your own brand image, you go ahead and you go hire them. You bring them in somehow. There's room for there.
I don't think the monoliths will disappear. The New York Times certainly won't. I mean, it's bigger than ever. It's more powerful than ever. They have millions of paid subscribers. It's pretty insane. Outlets like that, they have a good opportunity to start swallowing up some of the smaller creators, independent news sites, things like that. So, you'll probably have both. You'll have more independent creators, and you'll also have some of them joining the big, big news.
Aiden Buzzetti: Yeah, that's a fair point. mean, it's so far in the future, and who knows what's going to happen? Maybe AI will shake everything up again. I mean, a lot of these virtual people, right? People that don't actually exist and they're going to start getting a bunch of followers is going to get crazy.
Vox, right, was very big, particularly for left-wing people and and BuzzFeed, of course, and they did a lot of engaging content online, on YouTube, and on social media.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but they ended up having to downsize a lot of that. That content ended up not performing well. I just don't quite understand. How is social media such a powerful tool for independent journalism, but some of these outlets with a lot of money and a fair amount of subscribers try to put out engaging content and it just falls flat on its face?
And before you even answer, I know that they're super biased, right? And that's probably part of the problem there. But if the future is online, if media is online, how is that going to look? Do people just need to rework the content they were doing or is there something else?
Ari David: That's a really good question. I'm also glad that you brought up Vox as the example there. If you look at a lot of the biggest stars from Vox that were creating really amazing content, a lot of them now have their own audiences. They went independent. They have videos that they put out on YouTube and they're doing great.
There are two things here that are in play.
The first is the freedom, right? When you're working in an organization like Vox, you have some kind of hierarchy. Ideas that you might want to put out there, they get rejected, you have to kind of go through this whole bureaucratic process. It really takes the love out of it, and I think what people are attracted to is seeing someone that's really passionate about what they're talking about.
These people that work at Vox and go independent, now they're making videos that they want to make and talking about the stuff that they want to talk about, the way they want to talk about it. People like that.
They see that there's something real there that's happening and it does well. So I think that could answer the question of why maybe Vox wasn't performing so well, even though they had massive resources.
Now the question of why Vox is also downsizing, and these independent creators are becoming more popular is because I think when you look at the business models of media right now, they make way more sense if you're a one-man show or maybe have a very small team versus hundreds of employees.
The people that left Vox are able to put out the type of content that Vox was putting out, but with like themselves and maybe a video editor and maybe someone to help research versus at Vox that was taking like a really big team. The money is the same that they could be making, but it actually pays off way more if you're a very small team.
Aiden Buzzetti: They're super bloated, basically.
Ari David: Very bloated. That bloat is kind of necessary for longevity because a lot of these independent creators actually burn out because it's really, really difficult to run these small companies when they're really small.
You either have to be like tiny where it's just yourself and someone else, or you have to be really big. When you're in the middle, it's like very, very difficult.
Even when I was starting Upward News, and it was just myself doing almost everything, I had a few other really smart writers that were helping out a few hours a week. That was way easier to operate and to manage than where it is right now where we have a small team, we have about six people, some of them full time, some of them not and you're managing all this stuff.
I'm thinking like, what if I just did everything myself again? I could do that. It would be easier until all my hair went gray in about six months and then I'd have to just stop.
The way that this content is monetized on YouTube and different platforms, is one of the big reasons why the small creators right now are flourishing, and the big behemoths are having difficulties.
That's why the New York Times is still crushing it, because they've crossed that point where they're massive. They have a massive market share. They are doing great. But someone like Vox, maybe that was in the middle, or even the Washington Post was just smaller than the New York Times, they're also having trouble.
There's this kind of factor at play here where you might have nobody in the middle, just really small creators and really, really big creators. That might be where we're going.
Aiden Buzzetti: It makes sense that authenticity, I mean, it's basically on the same level as brand trust, right? Makes sense that that would be such an important commodity for these independent journalists and individual content creators. It's fascinating because the social media algorithms run on consistent content. On TikTok, you had to post several times a day. On Instagram it's at least a couple times a week, and on X to start getting your views up to be posting at least four or five times a day.
The massive organizations have the bandwidth to just keep churning out content.
With Vox, it seemed like up until it wasn't true that they were able to do the same thing. I guess the burnout problem is real for the individual creators and the smaller companies. But it just boggles my mind that given the way that the algorithms are set up, that even a medium-sized company with a bigger team can't keep up or they misallocate.
That's why it differentiates you all because it's a once-a-day email. You're posting graphics on Instagram and you're doing other content, but functionally, the bulk of what you're doing is that summary. It's that one thing that people look to every day.
I think that's what makes you guys so unique. I check it every day.
It's nice to be able to just have one thing. One thing I can look at and get a summary of what happened, you know, the last couple of days or the day before.
Ari David:
That's exactly what we're trying to do. And we know a lot of other readers they subscribe to some conservative news outlets and they're like, okay, well now we know what's going on in conservative media.
Now I have to also subscribe to like the liberal stuff so that I know what's happening in the liberal world because both sides are going to be telling me different stories.
When we were just launching the daily newsletter, one of the things that I said is, we really want to be a resource here, where people don't feel like they have to go to another news source to see all the stories that maybe we've hidden from them because we have some kind of ideological agenda.
Aiden Buzzetti:
Yeah, and I'm glad that we were able to talk and record. It's always a pleasure to talk with you. When you guys are doing amazing stuff, I'll be the first one to share it. I'm grateful you're able to join me.
Ari David:
@AriDavidX
Aiden Buzzetti:
REDavidX. Alright, anybody listening to this, follow @AriDavidX and I assume Upward is in your bio as well. Is it Upward.News?
Ari David:
Upward.news, or IHateFakenews.com.
Aiden Buzzetti:
Visit upward.news. That's even better. Go to IHateFakeNews.com and get yourself signed up. Thank you so much for joining me.
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