The Startup Trying To Take A Bite Out Of Fake News, Civics Illiteracy

When Emily David and Nick Farrell look at “fake news” and recycled, discredited arguments they see an education problem.

Not an education problem based on lack of information, but one based on not understanding the information we’re getting. The problem may be relatively new, at least at this scale, but the solution of helping us develop media literacy isn’t. It’s what schools have been supposed to do, but have been struggling to achieve.

That has triggered private solutions such as the 2018 launch of NewsGuard, a browser extension that rates the credibility of news sources.  It’s moving to education audiences too, announcing a partnership with Turnitin, the plagiarism detection company, to expand the service to more than 34 million students in more than 15,000 secondary and higher education institutions worldwide.

But Farrell and David have a different solution, aimed at a slightly different audience – a solution driven by their own experiences. They don’t want to judge, they want to teach young people good news habits so they can be better judges themselves.

David is a former public school teacher. She says, “Civic education has been defunded for decades, leading us to what we’re seeing now, that results in a crisis in our nation and in our democracy.” And, she says, “The core of it was a lack of education, the consumer lacking key foundational concepts to understand what they were reading.”

Farrell hails from a media family and worked at Wall St Journal. He noticed that while many news organizations were “fantastic,” they didn’t “produce any content geared to a younger audience.” Which meant that for younger students and future news consumers, “there was difficulty in getting up the learning curve on any important social or political event. It means a young reader has to go in and read 10 plus articles or you do what most people do, you slog along until you kind of figure it out.”

Those dual views, the lack of quality news for young readers and the lack of investment in civics and news literacy, sparked the duo to launch their startup aimed at K-12 parents and teachers – Bites Media.

The idea is simple. Bites takes contemporary issues in the news, sourced from reliable and reputable outlets, then shrinks the information down into smaller, faster, more consumable chucks – or, bites – for younger readers. They then take that content and build comprehension lessons around it, allowing teachers to build important issue literacy around these key topics. The content and the lessons are built and delivered online, in easy, turnkey modules for teachers or parents.

Bites is in a gradual build, bootstrapped and self-funded for now. But, with a few successful pilots in their rear-view and the “public launch” last December, the roll out is ongoing and growing. They have more than 1,500 subscribers already and, Farrell says, “we’re forecasting we will be able to hit $1 million in revenue in 18 months.” With so many millions of students newly schooling at home and so many parents hungry for quality resources, the audience is certainly there.

Simple as the idea is, the impact is potentially powerful. Changing the way people consume information, building good habits early on, opens and changes minds. “Often,” David said, “opinions are formed on wrong concepts and if you back it up, a lot of times you get people that can change their views. The way we format is direct to the point, direct to fact.”

Changing minds would be big indeed. But David and Farrell won’t be content to just do that. They have a boarder vision, a bigger concept for their audience and their company.

“We are starting to position in the education markets to help education people teach news but also teach news people how to reach new readers, new consumers,” David said. “Our hope is to grow as a media company,” she said.

“We’re first a media company,” Farrell said. “The news is educational but our focus on young people, around the educational environment, is to understand the efficiencies and distribution strategies. We’re starting in ed, but seeing ourselves as a media company that can age with these consumers,” he said.

That’s a long term play, but with immediate need – both in education and in general. If David and Farrell are right – that there’s both civic and education value in teaching better news consuming habits, making media more accessible, flattening the learning curve on complex issues – they may be right that there’s business value there too.