Hi Posters,

Today we released a dedicated News Feed. This will be the place where verified news publishers will live and allow you to read diverse perspectives within a single feed. 

In the past few years, subscription paywalls have improved some publishers' financials, but at the cost of preventing the majority of people from accessing premium news. In fact, only 20% of Americans subscribe to a news publisher, leading to a world where:

The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free.

We all have our criticism of different publications or journalists, but as a whole, they are critical to our future as a democracy. My random opinion on social media, even if well-researched on TikTok, is still not the same as investigative journalism under editorial oversight, produced by reputable publishers. 

Creating high-quality news coverage is expensive and over the past 20 years, we have seen a staggering drop in newsroom employees and publishers. 

The U.S. has lost a quarter of its newspapers since 2005 and is losing two a week (almost all weekly papers) on average. In all, 2,500 American papers have disappeared since 2005.

Social media has become the preferred place to consume news, but has not delivered commensurate revenue growth for publishers, since social media clicks don’t tend to convert to subscriptions, and the tech platforms refuse to share revenue with publishers.

I believe that the combination of subscription paywalls blocking access to premium news, the consumer preference to consume news via their social media feed, and the toxicity and ability to spread fake news on social media platforms have brought our society down to the worst possible place. 

Our hope with Post is to change this dynamic.

We want Real People to access Real News the way they want to, in their feed, alongside the rest of their content. People should be able to interact and share through Civil Conversations.  With Post, news publishers will increase revenue to support investment in their newsrooms and in quality coverage.

And all of us, the news consumers, can pay a small amount, several pennies or Micropayments, to help support publishers fairly while getting access to premium news from diverse sources. We shouldn't “steal” via incognito mode, nor can anyone subscribe to every publication they want to read one article from.

If you do find that you consume a large percent of your content from one publisher, of course, you should subscribe to them. With Post, you can still get diverse opinions beyond your main subscriptions.

Thank you to our first publishers for being brave, innovative, and leading the way to a better, more equitable news landscape for consumers and publishers:

@fortunemagazine

@rollingstone

@usatoday

@sfchronicle

@reuters

@latimes

@yahoofinance

@propublica

@semafor

@conversationus

@democracydocket

@techreview

@wpreview

As of now, we have not added local publishers to the News Feed. Once we can target geographically, we hope to bring your local newspaper, based on where you live, to your news feed as well.

In the longer term, your Explore and News feeds will be personalized to your interests to help you discover the most relevant articles, creators, and publishers. For now, help us out by sharing and following accounts or articles you find interesting -- you can share to your followers and add a topic (Hashtag, such as #DebtCeiling) to give the article context and allow users interested in the topic to find it.

Thank you for all your help and support 🙏,

Noam and Team Post ❤️

P.S. Looks like we will be removing the waitlist next week…